Session 8: Interculturalism and the Americas

Session 8: Interculturalism & the Americas
Chair: Helder DeSchutter

Epistemological Displacements in the Media and Literatures of the Americas
Patrick Imbert
University of Ottawa, Canada

The myth of attachment to the land as the hermeneutic fountainhead of territoriality and as the source of identity and signification is undergoing a shift in the context of global postmodernism. No longer validating the orthodoxy’s pursuit of the ‘single, deep meaning’ of a text, the literary discourse as well as the discourse of advertising in the Americas currently work to transform their audience into producers of multiple legitimate readings. However, literary critics and professors often tend to refer to a canon linked to modernity and to avoid considering multiple meanings and their realization in discourses, which similar processes deserve to be emphasized if one wants to establish a new critical thinking based on transversal thinking. This does not mean that discourses are identical. In the case of the discourse of the advertising industry, the resulting displacements are not identical to those created by literary postmodernism. Advertisers continue to be driven by the promotion of their service/product as the sole solution to a perceived problem, whereas literary texts continue to multiply possible problems, and/or possible resolutions. These new dynamics tend to steer populations towards intercultural dynamics and adaptation to different cultural contexts within global postmodernism/ postcolonialism. They foster new means to create difference and self images far from the fear of homogeneity disseminated by thinkers still referring to a strong link between territoriality and identity.

Black African Acculturation and White European Paranoia in Eighteenth-Century Colonial New York City: A Historical and Theoretical Reconsideration of Homi Bhabha’s Concepts of Mimicry, Hybridity, and Ambivalence
Thelma Foote

This paper reflects on a critical and vexing issue in the study of intercultural subject formation – namely, the question of the extent to which asymmetrical relations of power can be subverted through acts of mimicry in which cultural hybridity converts binary power relations of domination and subordination into ambivalent relations of attraction and repulsion, thus rendering the formation of the colonial subject undecideable and calling into question the absolute authority of colonizer over colonized.
To that end, this paper presents a historical case study drawn from New York City’s colonial past: the maelstrom of paranoia that in 1741/42 gripped the white European enslaver when the process of acculturation began to transform enslaved black Africans into mimic colonial subjects who disturbed the enslaver’s confidence in his power to determine the world. At that moment paranoid white European enslavers imagined that a rash of mysterious fires and an unsolved crime wave were not random events but part of a secret slave conspiracy to overthrow and enslave them. This paper also considers Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, finding that Bhabha’s theory of colonial discourse applies to the colonialist discourse of slave conspiracy in eighteenth-century New York City but not without revisions. As Homi Bhabha’s theory would have it, the enslaved black African’s cultural hybridity closed the cultural distance between enslaver and enslaved and disturbed the enslaver’s confidence in his absolute power over the enslaved. But the historical case study of eighteenth-century colonial New York City also shows that it was the element of difference in the mimic black subaltern rather than his sameness , as Homi Bhabha’s theory argues, which undermined the enslaver’s absolute power and produced a paranoid white European enslaver. This paper therefore argues that in eighteenth-century colonial New York City the process of black African acculturation to the dominant white European cultural norms engendered a relation of ambivalence between master and slave that produced a lethal paranoia in the enslaver, which hardly empowered the enslaved but instead exposed the enslaved to the enslaver’s overweening suspicion, surveillance, and judgment. Finally, this paper argues that in New York City in 1741/42 paranoid white European enslavers sentenced powerless enslaved blacks to death not because the enslaved black’s sameness frightened them, as Homi Bhabha would have it, but because the slave’s difference-in-sameness demonstrated that the process of acculturation was paradoxically producing dangerous others within their midst.