By Wendy Felese
As I was watching television last evening with one of my children, a commercial came on that piqued my interest. Combining an urban rap beat with creative animated graphics, the script was suggestive of new beginnings, with an air of excitement and possibility. The voice of the rapper was male - energetic and signifying youth, hope, change, and a brighter future. “The earth is sustainable…equality is attainable.” As the message reached its end, three words played out on the screen. Are you in?"
Yes, I thought. Yes, I get it…I’m in! The commercial turned out to be for Starbucks. Clearly, if you “get it” you drink their coffee. I don’t. If there is one caveat of postmodernism (and I recognize the irony), it might be something like - there is no neutral view from no-where. Citing this fact, feminist Lila Abu-Lughod, in conversation with colleague and fellow anthropologist Kirin Narayan, coined the term halfie to describe her unique social position as a scholar. As an anthropologist, her own identity pivots on her multi-ethnic background (Palestinian/American) and her gender. These are fecund vantage points upon which to offer her subjective analyses. She describes advantages and disadvantages associated with these multiple identities, but as an ethnographer, it is imperative that she socially locate herself. In other words, how she sees is as pertinent as what she describes. That allows Abu-Lughod a unique flexibility in her approach – a way of thwarting static categorizations and entrenched methodologies, and yet it renders her vulnerable to a bewildering array of critiques from multiple audiences.
President Obama communicates from a similar social location. As the first weeks of the new administration unfold, we may see far less of this embodiment of paradox. But in the months leading up to the election, this artful self-articulation was astounding to behold. Take for example, the three small but hermeneutically saturated words, carefully enunciated as a way of linking ideas together to form a global trope. Yes, we can. Obama’s unique ethnicity (Andrew Young calls him Afro-Asian-Latin European), as it became fused with this phrase, formed an ontological metonomy that captivated imaginations among discrete communities on many different levels. How this materialized is worth examining. Abu-Lughod continues to remain devoted to relentless reflexivity as part of her methodology. At the time she first emerged on the academic scene, she was among a cadre of social scientists rejecting the idea of absolute objectivity, allowing for the intrusion of self as a vital element of her observations.
Can the subaltern speak? Abu-Lughod might offer a conditional yes to this paradigmatic question, but of course, it always depends on to whom and how the speaking manifests itself. Her use of the term "halfie" was offered as a way of describing individuals whose natural and cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parenthood. Today, the metaphor is not only discordant, but in the global arena, it is practically obsolete. Its utility as a tactic, however, continues to magnify multivalent social interactions within disparate cultural settings. Examining how this tactic manifests in a worldly context is provocative. In her 1991 publication Writing Against Culture (a response to the canonical and iconic collection of cultural anthropology by James Clifford and George E. Marcus), she rejects the false dichotomy between self/other, reminding readers that we must constantly attend to the positionality of the anthropological self…and our own representations and constructions of our subjects.
Again, her own social location(s) meant that her work was always aimed at multiple audiences – feminists, anthropologists, and non-Western scholars, among others. President Obama’s use of this strategy establishes fluidity in his own creations of meaning; he masterfully negotiates in semiotic fields of evolving interpretations. His messages, globally transmitted through sophisticated media sources, are often in collusion with the production of symbolic no-places where local, national, and transnational identities are formed, negotiated and renegotiated. For example, his ability to connect with multiple audiences is profoundly revealed in his ideological fondness for the country’s sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln. While muting the troubling historical fact that Lincoln was a devoted segregationalist, one not particularly disturbed by the economic system of slavery (clearly articulated many times - e.g. …if I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it), Obama selectively promotes the image of the Great Emancipator, thus linking his own journey to an iconic but imagined figure – a journey all-at-once both visionary and cosmogonic.
The obfuscating move is powerfully effective. A mythic link to a past characterized by the bitter swill of the Civil War and segregation successfully ignites a revivalist movement, and a revisiting of an imagined point in history when the communal we faced two divergent roads. In recapturing this isolated but utopian moment, Obama completes the eternal return, leading us down a nobler path, remapping our collective trajectory, and negotiating towards the common good. Abu-Lughod elaborates on this method of relying on notions of authenticity and the return to positive values not represented by the dominant other. But who is the Other in this vision? Our impulse, of course, is to point to the previous administration – it’s a convenient but dubious move. Obama’s own words suggest solidarity with all Americans, regardless of party or platform, especially when he compels America in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship…to brave once more the icy currents. Arjun Appadurai’s contemporary anthropological theory demonstrates how binary categories are often negotiated and reconstructed in the disjunctive global era.
We /they cognitive structures, historically entrenched through strategic mapping of territories both geographical and institutional, have been complicated. By using his term scapes, he examines the hyper-real and its mimetic tendencies as among the ironies of global politics. Borrowing from Fredric Jameson’s nostalgia for the present, Appadurai describes the synaesthesia associated with, but clearly transforming, master narratives of colonial nation-states, resulting in the political project of managing micro-identities. The central paradox we are faced with today is that primordia (whether of language or skin color or neighborhood or kinship) have become globalized. An efficient method of harnessing this disjunction is to construct a soteriological image of a mythic past, an “illo tempore,” all the while suggesting that this past may be not only collectively recaptured, but that it is indeed, "paradise lost".
Here is where we engage the Other, an avatar of our own “fallen” state. We are being encouraged, though this semiotic transmission, to form a new and holistic humanism. Leela Gandhi suggests that this process can result in a mystifying amnesia that promotes a seductive image of wholeness, but enshrouds discrete, but no less iniquitous genealogies of marginalization. Andrew Young, quoted in the January 26, 2009 edition of Time magazine, sums it up: "Barack Obama defies categorization. The fact that his father and grandfather on one side were black doesn’t make him any more of a black President than his grandfather on the other side being white would make him a white President. We claim him, and we are proud of him, but the fact is that he has not had the experiences of deprivation, humiliation and racism that I had to grow up with….he has the labels without the scars."
Navigating in these icy currents without a fixed point of destination, a stated mission, and the certainty of returning to our native shores, requires an ontological leap – whether or not we are ready and willing to make it together remains to be seen. I’m on board for now, but with an eye on the uncertain landscapes ahead, I’m not unwilling to jump.
Wendy Felese is a doctoral candidate in the joint program of the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology. She can be contacted at Wendy.Felese@du.edu.
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