The essay by Iain Chambers, professor of Cultural Studies and Media and Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Mediterranean at the Orientale University of Naples, Migratory landscapes. Culture and identity in the postcolonial era, 2018 reissue by Meltemi publisher of the original edition Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Routledge 1994 it is, in its own way, provocative. But in a good way. It is necessary, now more than ever, to free oneself from stereotypes and clichés, to look at the world and, above all, its inhabitants in a different, new way and to learn to be part of otherness. An inside view. Criticism. He specifies. Objective.
Observe, study, evaluate the migratory phenomenon from within, as something that belongs to the world, to ours, to everyone's and not just as a "problem" that concerns the other and his world.
Iain Chambers underlines how migrants are literally products of the order of our legislating on the world and reduced to an exclusively economic factor or linked to a political crisis. On the other hand, for a better understanding of modernity, it requires that migration be questioned as a much deeper and broader overall presence. "Thinking with migration", going beyond the surface to the "deepest inequalities of the denied economic, political and cultural justice that structures and directs our world". Racism, for example, is not a simple individual or group pathology, but "a power structure that continues to generate hierarchy in the world".
Even today, we are witnessing a cultural closure which culminates in the "socio-political hysteria" generated by the question of immigration, accompanied by the rigid defense of an identity and of an "I" which "encloses itself in the illusory security of a place ». Faced with the imaginary threat of the foreigner and the so-called "external" world, "which by now is not "external", this "closure" seems to "ignore the movements, often turbulent and upsetting, of the complex historical and cultural processes of today's world". Chambers, with the analysis of the phenomenon conducted in Migratory landscapes, proves to be very willing to promote a radically different, new and at times "disturbing" relationship with his own historical-cultural formation.
By asserting their right to move, migrate, flee, move, migrants not only break the mold and oppose respect for the place assigned to them by history, but also signal the "precarious contemporary mode of planetary life". It is the way in which the multiple souths of the planet present themselves within modernity. And precisely this new way of promoting themselves "violates and weakens the categories applied to them by the hegemonic north".
Chambers' text, almost a quarter of a century after its first publication, is still extraordinarily current and extremely indicative of the author's ability to analyze, who was able to describe the world of the time as well as the direction, sometimes too wrong, towards where he was going. And to which he then actually went.
The birth of modernity does not lie unilaterally in the history of European expansion and in the methods of "remaking the world in its image and likeness", but also and to the same extent "in the crude repression of ethnic, religious and cultural otherness, in the brutality of black African diaspora, in Atlantic racist slavery, in ethnic pogroms and in the imperial plunder of the globe". when theimaginary of the West, in the words of Edward Said, it is no longer physically elsewhere, "on the edge of a map, on the margins of history, culture, knowledge and aesthetics", but migrates from the periphery to "elect its domicile in the contemporary metropolis", then our history changes, it is forced to do so. In recognizing the other, of radical otherness, Chambers reminds the reader, "we recognize that we are no longer at the center of the world". Meeting others is always accompanied by uncertainty and fear. In crossing and going beyond a philosophical role of confirmation of the existing order, the migrant escapes the abstract boundaries predefined for him and her. It is not a question of a mere social or political conflict over the right to move and migrate, but also of "an epistemological question".
What was once placed outside, beyond the borders of our world, is there "confined and explained by colonial management, 'scientific' racism and the emerging discipline of anthropology", can now no longer be kept at a critical distance . The separation and isolation of others as mere political, cultural and philosophical 'objects of interest' now collapses and pierces the center 'with their insistence as historical subjects'. We are approaching the dismantling of the binarisms on which the political, cultural and critical discourses of the West have "relied to manage their hegemony on the planet": centre-periphery, Europe-the rest of the world, black-white, progress-underdevelopment . Humanitarianism and the scaffolding of humanism and associated rights and obligations must now "negotiate a path to policy that involves far more than simply applying a model provided by government and existing laws." The nationalization of political and cultural matters continues to confirm a "global order exercised through national authority, state power and the maintenance of borders".
Rather than as a "nineteenth-century fláneur", it would be more significant to consider the migrant as "the epitome of modern metropolitan culture". The journey implies a possible return, while migration involves a movement in which neither the starting points nor the arrival points are immutable or certain, and requires that one "reside in a language, in stories, in identities constantly subject to mutation ». The migrant does not return and even if he can "return", it will never be simply this. The change that has taken place is irreversible. The person will never be the same as before and the same is true for the environment. Both the one of departure and the one of arrival.
In the vast and multiple worlds of the modern city "we too become nomads and migrate within a system too vast to be ours". One is introduced into a «hybrid state, into a composite culture in which the «simple dualism of the First and Third Worlds falls apart», allowing what Homi Bhabha calls “differential commonality” and Félix Guattari defines as a “process of heterogenesis” to emerge. The modern metropolitan figure is the migrant, active formulator of metropolitan aesthetics and lifestyle, who reinvents languages and "takes over the streets of the master".
What Westerners feel compelled to do and which frightens them is "discussing and undoing the single and homogeneous point of view", the sense of perspective and distance that was born in the Renaissance and triumphed in colonialism, imperialism and the rational version of modernity. The "illusions of identity" organized around the "privileged voice and stable subjectivity of the external observer" are broken and swept away with a movement that "no longer allows the obvious establishment of a self-identity between thought and reality". This leads to the "liberation of different voices", to an encounter with an "other" part, to an "unfolding of the self which denies the possibility of reducing the different to the identical".
Accustomed to thinking of issues of migration, immigration, racism and diversity as problems of others, we are now, however, called to think of them as "products of our history, our culture, our language, our power, our desires and neuroses". . If multiculturalism represents the liberal response that recognizes the cultures and identities of others to remain at the center and «leaves these other cultures in a subordinate position», Iain Chambers contemplates something that goes far beyond «multiculturalism and its logic of assimilation» because "the westernization of the world does not mean that the West has become the world". The investigative gaze must be oblique in order to capture all the expressions it offers, to better understand "the other" but also oneself.
