Abstract
It is a rare experience entering the first page of an academic book and leaving its last page with the feeling that you were reading a novel. Iain Chambers’ volume, in fact, is a journey suspended between the multiple fault-lines that separate, therefore connect, the innumerable tensions, unexpected vertigos and whispering silences that shape and deform the living tissue of critical thinking, cultural sociology and postcolonial theory. A journey where the narrating self dissolves into the territories it explores, the terrains it touches, the ground it steps on, and the sea it swims in, but it gently resurfaces with a precious fistful of sand from the deep waters where the epistemological mantras of modernity conceal their inadequacy. Iain Chambers shows the impossibility of making the world transparent, fully understandable and unilaterally controllable, that is, the morbid dream Western reason has cultivated during the last five centuries. The water the reader is called to travel across is not merely a metaphorical substance; rather it is the concrete, historically determined, geographically existing, yet politically and poetically meaningful, Mediterranean Sea. The same floating geohistorical location where war, migration, refugees’ exodus, draw the contemporary map of social change, resistance and displacement, in the global world. The challenge the reader confronts is the shifting meaning of cultures across the Mediterranean, where the epistemologies of the South become an unstable site of negotiation, rather than a strategic locus of enunciation where the limits of Northern sociologies are exposed. In the process, the border between North and South disappears, thereby disclosing new trajectories to move postcolonial theories ahead or, better, elsewhere.
Today, postcolonial theory often tends to crystallize into tactical positioning within the theoretical landscape of the critique to Eurocentrism, claiming its own onto-historical presence as something alien to the hegemony of modernity, therefore replicating some of the rigidities it supposedly should question. Iain Chambers’ book, conversely, aims at producing those postcolonial interruptions within postcolonialism itself, which alone are able to push the limits of the awareness that postcolonial theory is itself located within the legacy of the Western tradition it contests. The privileged way out from this impasse, Iain Chambers suggests, is to register the narrative, epistemological, esthetical and political significance of global migrations. Nonetheless, this sociological posture is reluctant to hypostatizing ‘migration’ as an all-encompassing catchword, a single process endowed with a coherent inner logic. Migration stands for migrating bodies and living histories of violence and humiliation, liberation, conflict, encounter, or even indifference and impossible reciprocal understanding, across the sea, across the many seas. Myriad modernities, which fragment, exceed, ridicule the image of the world that Europe depicts. Modernities that exist regardless of any historical and social recognition. Modernities that are unauthorized to the extent that they, immediately after being on the move, enjoy no given belonging or citizenship but for this reason are able to consistently trace the only sustainable forms of citizenship and belonging that design new radical forms of individual and collective equality, within the only real and existing world: the planet. But, if the North, in this book, is not a monolithic monster, or the South is not a self-sufficient generative grammar for alternative points of view, or the West is not an exhausted archive, or the East is not the radial global future, migrations are not conflated with indigeneity, on the one hand, or with nomadism, on the other hand.
Iain Chambers makes intelligible the political and theoretical knots where North, South, East, West, indigeneity and nomadism, collide but do not necessarily germinate. And this is the frontier from which we should move on, as it becomes clear that connoting the spaces of emergence for alternative practices is not enough: theoretical self-complacency is a paralyzing trap for thought; one that only artistic interventions can free to unleash visionary but real horizons of change. This is why the book learns from how artistic practices reconfigure the world. It calls for a collective effort to transform conceptual as well as narrative resonances into living disharmonies, deformities, connections and disconnections that consciously reject whatever reductio ad unum into a single field of knowledge where the entire journey would end up as if it were the teleological move of a theoretical Bildungsroman. On the contrary, what it leaves us with are myriad possible escapes from the hierarchies that capitalist modernity establishes among humans: possible trajectories along which we should not be afraid to linger in some place, to take a rest, to stay for a while thereby contributing to reshape the site where we linger. Places we contribute to inform and reform either by means of adding and building, or by means of erasing and subtracting, even though for the ephemeral duration of few moments before turning back for an instant, taking the last picture, then migrate: moving again and keep on moving.