Session 2: Aesthstic Interculturalism

Session 2: Aesthetic Interculturalism
Chair: Eleonore Wildburger

Intercultural Visuality: Image and Memory
Sandra Song & Minh Nguyen
Senior Policy Analyst, Heritage Canada, & MFA Candidate, Department of Art Practice, University of California at Berkeley

The paper will examine the theoretical significance of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multi-media artwork to current discussions on re-inscribing alternative histories of national unity within an U.S. context. With the rise of alternative stories to the U.S. national project that stem from the Civil Rights Movement, various ethno-cultural groups have problematized the notion of a cohesive and unitary U.S. national identity through various representational strategies and sites of contestation within the field of visual arts and independent cinema. Taking one particular example of this struggle in representing a different history to the U.S. national project, we will examine the critical importance of Cha’s multi-media artwork and text, Dictée, to reclaiming while simultaneously problematizing any cohesive identity within and outside of a nation-state engaged in identity politics.
The paper will outline the critical position of diasporic Asian American women caught between a politics of loyalty and betrayal to nation and community that gravitate towards linguistic and cultural erasure from the master narratives of U.S. history. These women are often caught in the tenuous position of crossing multiple borderlands akin to real, imaginary, and symbolic migrations while simultaneously caught between the interstitial limits of a (white) feminist sisterhood, who take up their struggle against the manifest forms of patriarchy, and a racially/ethnically marked community of Asian American men, who battle the myriad forms of racism and racialization in a (white) dominant society. Given this unique position of racial, ethnic, and gender ‘othering’ or alterity, diasporic Asian American women are placed in a tenuous position to choose their site-specific cultural and social battles that are often multi-layered and too complex to negotiate within the existing fabric of pluralist liberalism. They challenge the very grain and rhetoric of embracing difference within a unified national project.
As a decisive theoretical manoeuvre, the second part of the project takes up the site of cultural production and its attending politics of representation to challenge and recover alternative ways to narrating history through cultural memory, and in the specific site of visual representation. In the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, we will argue that she takes up this challenge by pushing to the forefront her symbolic connections to a Korean past that entwine with the real struggles of immigration and cultural assimilation to the United States. Her work suggests that our relationship to language and memory both unite and fracture any ‘essentializing’ narrative of identity both within and outside the borders of a unified and monolingual nation-state. Thus, the fundamental goal of the paper is to examine Cha’s visual aesthetics of decolonization, displacement, and disidentification, and how her multi-faceted artwork centres around questions of language and subjectivity and their connection to memory and its fracturing impact on them.
The paper will conclude with a sustained discussion on the ambivalence of cultural representation, and how questions of identity always involve difference and alterity. In the case of intercultural visual production, the aim of the project is to problematize the simultaneous inside/ outside position of diasporic Asian American women, both as alter and native to the U.S. nation-state and racial/ethnic community within the nation-state, and to illustrate its multiple and different layers.

Living Souvenirs: Intercultural Memory, Longing and Nostalgia
Diane Powell
School of Media and Communication, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

In the past one hundred years Australia has been transformed from being a country determined to remain an “outpost of the British race” in the South Seas, to become one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world. Since the 1970s all ethnic groups have been encouraged to maintain their cultural traditions. Difference is tolerated and indulged perhaps as a means of ordering interculturalism.
In the decades following World War 2, the biggest group of non-English speaking immigrants were Italian. Today Italo-Australians remain a significant cultural group in Australia: Italian was the ancestry group most commonly claimed in the 2001 census (after Australian, English and Irish); and of the 160 languages spoken in Australia, Italian remains the most common non-English language spoken at home.
A significant number of today’s Italo-Australians maintain a strong cultural bond with their heritage. Many of the later generations of Italian immigrants seem to identify more as Italian than as Australian, even when they no longer speak the language fluently and have had little contact with Italy.
They seem to be longing for a past that may provide an anchor for the present and trajectory for the future. Second and third Italo-Australians cleave to traces of the real memories of their parents with a nostalgia that is painful and tragic. At times it can also be frivolous and clichéd. It relies on residues of memories, objects, half-remembered songs, stories and games, traditions that resonate in people’s lives with a poignancy that speaks of loss.
In this paper I consider this clinging to fragments of the past as an attempt by later generation Italians to give expression to intercultural experience, and as a practice that risks turning some Italo-Australians into living souvenirs.