MIGRANCY, CULTURE, IDENTITY

In Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers unravels how our sense of

place and identity is realised as we move through myriad languages,
worlds and histories. The author explores the uncharted impact of cultural
diversity on today’s world, from the ‘realistic’ eye of social commentary
to the ‘scientific’ approach of the cultural anthropologist or the critical
distance of the historian; from the computer screen to the Walkman and
‘World Music’.
Migrancy, Culture, Identity takes us on a journey into the disturbance
and dislocation of history, culture and identity that faces all of us, to
explore how migration, marginality and homelessness have disrupted the
West’s faith in linear progress and rational thinking, undermining our
knowledge and cultural identity.
‘Iain Chambers is the fabulist of contemporary cultural studies. These
essays tell stories of different worlds that already define our own; moving
lightly through border-zones of culture dense with new ideas, they stop to
chat with strangers on the way; and they share with us the wise joy in
dialogue as a way of working towards a common horizon.’
Meaghan Morris
‘This thoughtful, stylish and poetic book extends contemporary concerns
with hybridity and alterity. Above all, it offers social and cultural theory a
new sense of power and movement.’
Paul Gilroy, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London
Iain Chambers teaches at the Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples,
and is the author of Border Dialogues: Journeys in Post-modernity and
Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience.
 COMEDIA
Series Editor: David Morley
MIGRANCY,
CULTURE,
IDENTITY

Iain Chambers

A Comedia book
published by Routledge
London and New York
 First published 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.

 1994 Iain Chambers

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Chambers, Iain.
Migrancy, culture, identity/Iain Chambers.
p. cm.
‘Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada’ – T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Emigration and immigration – Social aspects. 2. Cultural relations. 3. Identity
(Psychology) I. Title.
JV6225.C43 1993
304.8–dc20 93–7863
CIP

ISBN 0–415–08801–1 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–08802–X (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-18209-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-18212-X (Glassbook Format)
From the provincial edge of an atlas, from the hem of a frayed
empire, a man stops. Not for another anthem trembling over the
water – he has learned three of them –

but for that faint sidereal drone interrupted by the air gusting over
black water, or so that he can hear the surf in the pores of wet sand
wince and pucker.
Derek Walcott, Omeros
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix
1 AN IMPOSSIBLE HOMECOMING 1
2 MIGRANT LANDSCAPES 9
3 THE AURAL WALK 49
4 DESIRING MACHINES 54
5 THE BROKEN WORLD: WHOSE CENTRE, WHOSE
PERIPHERY? 67
6 CITIES WITHOUT MAPS 92
7 THE WOUND AND THE SHADOW 115
Bibliography 142
Index 151

vii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Much of this book was written in different parts of the northern

hemisphere. In moving across frontiers and living between worlds there
are many I wish to thank for their kindness, hospitality, encouragement
and conversation.
Firstly, there are Antoine Hennion and Christine Chapuis for their
Parisian hospitality, generous friendship and support (and Arthur for his
bed). Then there is Homi Bhabha for his careful reading and commentary
on chapter 2, and his witticisms while walking beside Venetian canals.
Nelson Moe and Karen Van Dyck introduced me to the evening
seminar world of Columbia, and I am grateful for their friendship and
reading chapter 4. Larry Shore, very much a migrant himself, and Sarah
Regan generously extended food and company to me in New York. I am
also indebted to the graduate students of the ‘Communications and the
City’ class at Hunter College, City University of New York, who
welcomed me in the spring of 1990 and then stimulated, and sometimes
contested, the arguments presented in chapter 6. I also wish to express
gratitude to Mick Taussig for offering a transit hospitality in the
intellectual dispersal of that city. Andreas Huyssen, Stuart Ewing, Peter
Hitchcock and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi all provided me with
spaces to speak there.
Even Ruud and Kristin Elster offered exquisite hospitality in Norway.
I have known Dick Hebdige and Jessica Pickard for many a year and I
want to thank them for that, for their example, and for a Riojatinted
summer evening spent somewhere between Stoke Newington and Los
Angeles discussing ‘home’ and ‘homelessness’. On that theme I owe a
special debt of gratitude to Stuart and Catherine Hall for friendship,
ix
 M I GR A N C Y, C U LT UR E , I DE NT I T Y

inspiration and a supportive household in London. Also, while in London,

I want to thank Angela McRobbie for her writing, conversation and
enthusiasm, and Paul Gilroy and Vron Ware for being friends and for the
intellectual stimulus of their work.
Many of the arguments in this book were initially developed in lessons
and discussion with students at the Istituto Universitario Orientale,
Naples. It was, above all, in this place that I was encouraged to take
forward a series of questions and transform them into the present book.
Finally, I want to thank Dave Morley for travelling with this material
from the beginning, and Lidia Curti for accompanying me on this journey
as well as on all the others.
Some of this writing was presented elsewhere before being collected and
substantially expanded into the present volume. In Los Angeles I want to
thank the editorial collective of Strategies and Emergences, together with
Teshome H. Gabriel and Hamid Naficy, for their encouragement and
enthusiasm. I also want to thank the editors of New Formations (London)
and Textus (Genoa) for initially offering me the space to try out various
ideas, as well as Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson
and Lisa Tickner for publishing an earlier version of chapter 6 in their
Mapping the Futures (London & New York, Routledge, 1993). I also wish
to thank Professor Augusto Crocco for kindly giving me permission to
reproduce two photographs of the Cappella Sansevero in Naples.
These writings are dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Marion
Chambers (née Innes), e alla memoria di Silvio Curti e Iolanda Curti (née
Scandurra), and to Robin Rusher.

x
 1

AN IMPOSSIBLE
HOMECOMING

If we rethink culture . . . in terms of travel, then the organic,

naturalizing bias of the term culture – seen as a rooted body that
grows, lives, dies, etc. – is questioned. Constructed and disputed
historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction,
come more sharply into view.
James Clifford1

Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world.

Martin Heidegger2

One day I recognised that what was more important for me than
anything else was how I defined myself to the degree that I was a
stranger . . . I then realised that, in his vulnerability, the stranger
could only count on the hospitality that others could offer him. Just
as words benefit from the hospitality the white page offers them or
the bird from the unconditional space of the sky.
Edmond Jabès3
On southern Californian highways, around Tijuana close to the Mexican
border, are road signs usually associated with the encounter of nature
and culture: symbols of leaping deer or prowling bears that warn us to
look out for them crossing the road. This time the icon is diverse, it refers
to cross-cultural traffic. The graphic indicates people on foot. Desperate
to escape the destiny of poverty, they cut or crawl through the border
wire and, dodging the speeding automobiles, scamper across the
concrete in a dash to flee from the past and in-state themselves in the
promise of the North.

1
 M I GR A N C Y, C U LT UR E , I DE NT I T Y

This desperate scene of hope, migration and attempted relocation is a

fragment, invariably caught in a press photo, on the news, in a television
documentary, in immigration statistics, that nevertheless illuminates
much of the landscape we inhabit. When the ‘Third World’ is no longer
maintained at a distance ‘out there’ but begins to appear ‘in here’, when
the encounter between diverse cultures, histories, religions and languages
no longer occurs along the peripheries, in the ‘contact zones’ as Mary
Louise Pratt calls them, but emerges at the centre of our daily lives, in the
cities and cultures of the so-called ‘advanced’, or ‘First’, world, then we
can perhaps begin to talk of a significant interruption in the preceding
sense of our own lives, cultures, languages and futures.4
This is not to say that London and Lagos are nowadays simply
geographically separate urban centres held in the common syntax of the
global metropolitan media. They may share certain goods, habits, styles
and languages, but for each thing in common there is also a corresponding
local twist, inflection, idiolect. They are not merely physically distinct,
but also remain sharply differentiated in economic, historical and cultural
terms. Nevertheless, such differences are not always and inevitably
instances of division and barriers. They can also act as hinges that serve
both to close and to open doors in an increasing global traffic.
Migration, together with the enunciation of cultural borders and
crossings, is also deeply inscribed in the itineraries of much contemporary
reasoning. For migrancy and exile; as Edward Said points out, involves a
‘discontinuous state of being’, a form of picking a quarrel with where you
come from. It has thereby been transformed ‘into a potent, even enriching,
motif of modern culture’.5 For:

The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are
always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within
the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons, and are often
defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break
barriers of thought and experience.6
Such a journey acquires the form of a restless interrogation, undoing its
very terms of reference as the point of departure is lost along the way. If
exile presumes an initial home and the eventual promise of a return, the
questions met with en route consistently breach the boundaries of such an
itinerary. The possibilities of continuing to identify with such premises
weaken and fall away. This memory of primary loss, persistently inscribed

2
 A N I M PO S S IB L E H OM E C OM I N G

in the uncertain becoming of the outward journey, has made of exile a

suggestive symbol of our times. Indeed, a significant tendency in present-
day critical thought, confronted with the shrinkage of the European
rationale that once claimed to speak for all and everything, is to adopt
metaphors of movement, migration, maps, travel and sometimes a
seemingly facile tourism. However, such metaphors are not restricted to
the genealogy of a particular critical paradigm, or confined to the plane of
a theoretical turn. Although we might cynically choose to read in recent
intellectual peregrinations simply the latest twist in the continuing
narrative of patriarchal, occidental intellectual power as it seeks to
domesticate the rest and extend its hold over the once excluded and silent,
there is clearly also something else occurring here. In the accelerating
processes of globalisation we are also increasingly confronted with an
extensive cultural and historical diversity that proves impermeable to the
explanations we habitually employ. It is this complex and persistent
challenge to the world we are accustomed to inhabit that forcibly suggests
that we are not merely witness to the latest unwinding in the lax liberal
spring of mental eclecticism.
For recent apertures in critical thought instigated by certain internal
displacements in the hearth of the West (feminism, deconstructionism,
psychoanalysis, post-metaphysical thought) have been increasingly
augmented by the persistent question of a presence that no longer lies
elsewhere: the return of the repressed, the subordinate and the forgotten in
‘Third World’ musics, literatures, poverties and populations as they come
to occupy the economies, cities, institutions, media and leisure time of the
First World.
Such a highly charged punctuation of the cosmopolitan script, destined
finally to be recognised as a part of our history and be televised in future
riots of the metropolitan dispossessed, compels us to recognise the need
for a mode of thinking that is neither fixed nor stable, but is one that is open
to the prospect of a continual return to events, to their re-elaboration and
revision. This retelling, re-citing and re-siting of what passes for historical
and cultural knowledge depend upon the recalling and re-membering of
earlier fragments and traces that flare up and flash in our present ‘moment
of danger’ as they come to live on in new constellations.7 These are
fragments that remain as fragments: splinters of light that illuminate our
journey while simultaneously casting questioning shadows along the
path. The belief in the transparency of truth and the power of origins to
define the finality of our passage is dispersed by this perpetual movement

3
 M I GR A N C Y, C U LT UR E , I DE NT I T Y

of transmutation and transformation. History is harvested and collected,

to be assembled, made to speak, re-membered, re-read and rewritten, and
language comes alive in transit, in interpretation.
To talk of this inheritance, to refer to history, as to refer to translation or
memory, is always to speak of the incomplete, the never fully
decipherable. It is to betray any hope of transparency. For to translate is
always to transform. It always involves a necessary travesty of any
metaphysics of authenticity or origins. We find ourselves employing a
language that is always shadowed by loss, an elsewhere, a ghost: the
unconscious, an ‘other’ text, an ‘other’ voice, an ‘other’ world; a language
that is ‘powerfully affected by the foreign tongue’.8
For the nomadic experience of language, wandering without a fixed
home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world, bearing our sense of being
and difference, is no longer the expression of a unique tradition or history,
even if it pretends to carry a single name. Thought wanders. It migrates,
requires translation. Here reason runs the risk of opening out on to the
world, of finding itself in a passage without a reassuring foundation or
finality: a passage open to the changing skies of existence and terrestrial
illumination. No longer protected by the gods or their secular resurrection
in the vestments of an imperious rationalism or positivist projection,
thought runs the danger of becoming responsible for itself and the
safekeeping of being, its only protection lying, as Rilke and Heidegger
remind us, in the very absence of protection.9
This inevitably implies another sense of ‘home’, of being in the world.
It means to conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of
inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed
structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose
questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that
constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging. There is no one place,
language or tradition that can claim this role. For although the journey
from the centre into the periphery, seeking the unexpected, the bizarre and
the wonder of it all, may still dominate this literature – this book, for
example – such stories ultimately represent a weak echo in the volume of
travel, migration and dislocation that so many people coming from
elsewhere have faced and continue to experience. So, I finally come to
experience the violence of alterity, of other worlds, languages and
identities, and there finally discover my dwelling to be sustained across
encounters, dialogues and clashes with other histories, other places, other
people. For the return of the ‘native’ not only signals the dramatic

4
 A N I M PO S S IB L E H OM E C OM I N G

necessity ‘to abrogate the boundaries between Western and non-Western

history’, but also returns to the centre the violence that initially marked the
encounters out in the periphery that laid the foundations of my world.10
So this is not necessarily even an account of travel. For to travel implies
movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival,
the knowledge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a
potential homecoming. Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement
in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable
or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that
are constantly subject to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a
homecoming – completing the story, domesticating the detour – becomes
an impossibility. History gives way to histories, as the West gives way to
the world.
It means to live in another country in which:

it becomes more than ever urgent to develop a framework of

thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical
processes. We need to disarm the genealogical rhetoric of blood,
property and frontiers and to substitute for it a lateral account of
social relations, one that stresses the contingency of all definitions
of self and the other, and the necessity always to tread lightly.11
Does all this mean I have nothing to say, that every gesture that begins in
the West is inherently imperialist, merely the latest move in the extension
of my power regarding the others? It is perhaps here that the political and
ethical implications of the arguments advanced in this book can be most
clearly grasped as an attempt to fracture the vicious circle between
speakers and the spoken for. For, in breaking into my own body of speech,
opening up the gaps and listening to the silences in my own inheritance, I
perhaps learn to tread lightly along the limits of where I am speaking from.
I begin to comprehend that where there are limits there also exist other
voices, bodies, worlds, on the other side, beyond my particular
boundaries. In the pursuit of my desires across such frontiers I am
paradoxically forced to face my confines, together with that excess that
seeks to sustain the dialogues across them. Transported some way into this
border country, I look into a potentially further space: the possibility of
another place, another world, another future.
The accumulated diasporas of modernity, set in train by ‘modernisation’,
the growing global economy, and the induced, often brutally enforced,

5
 M I GR A N C Y, C U LT UR E , I DE NT I T Y

migrations of individuals and whole populations from ‘peripheries’

towards Euro-American metropolises and ‘Third World’ cities, are of a
magnitude and intensity that dramatically dwarf any direct comparison
with the secondary and largely metaphorical journeys of intellectual
thought. Analogy is risky. There is always the obvious allure of the
romantic domestication and intellectual homecoming that the poetic
figures of travel and exile promise. Still, it is a risk to be run. For the
modern migrations of thought and people are phenomena that are deeply
implicated in each other’s trajectories and futures.
To be forced to cross the Atlantic as a slave in chains, to cross the
Mediterranean or the Rio Grande illegally, heading hopefully North, or
even to sweat in slow queues before officialdom, clutching passports and
work permits, is to acquire the habit of living between worlds, caught on
a frontier that runs through your tongue, religion, music, dress,
appearance and life. To come from elsewhere, from ‘there’ and not ‘here’,
and hence to be simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the situation at hand,
is to live at the intersections of histories and memories, experiencing both
their preliminary dispersal and their subsequent translation into new, more
extensive, arrangements along emerging routes. It is simultaneously to
encounter the languages of powerlessness and the potential intimations of
heterotopic futures. This drama, rarely freely chosen, is also the drama of
the stranger. Cut off from the homelands of tradition, experiencing a
constantly challenged identity, the stranger is perpetually required to
make herself at home in an interminable discussion between a scattered
historical inheritance and a heterogeneous present.
As such the stranger is an emblem – she or he is a figure that draws our
attention to the urgencies of our time: a presence that questions our
present. For the stranger threatens the ‘binary classification deployed in
the construction of order’, and introduces us to the uncanny displacement
of ambiguity.12 That stranger, as the ghost that shadows every discourse,
is the disturbing interrogation, the estrangement, that potentially exists
within us all. It is a presence that persists, that cannot be effaced, that draws
me out of myself towards another. It is the insistence of the other face that
charges my obligation to that ‘strangeness that cannot be suppressed,
which means that it is my obligation that cannot be effaced’.13 As ‘the
symptom that renders our “selves” problematic, perhaps impossible, the
stranger commences with the emergence of the awareness of my
difference and concludes when we all recognise ourselves as strangers’.14
This decentring of the classical ‘individual’ leads also to the weakening

6
 A N I M PO S S IB L E H OM E C OM I N G

and dispersal of the rationalist episteme, of the Western cogito, that once
anchored and warranted the subject as the privileged fulcrum of
knowledge, truth and being.15
In such a rendezvous critical thought is forced to abandon any pretence
to a fixed site, as though it offered stable foundations upon which the sense
of our lives could blithely be erected. It is not solid in its surroundings,
immutable in its co-ordinates. It is not a permanent mansion but is rather
a provocation: a platform, a raft, from which we scan the horizon for signs
while afloat in the agitated currents of the world. Continually constructed
from the flotsam and fragments blown in from the storms called
‘progress’, critical thought rewrites the tables of memory as we attempt to
transform our histories, languages and recollections from a point of arrival
into a point of departure.16

NOTES

1 James Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson

and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, London & New York, Routledge,
1992, p. 101.
2 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Martin Heidegger, Basic
Writings, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p. 219.
3 Edmond Jabès, Le Livre de l’Hospitalité, Paris, Gallimard, 1991.
4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation,
London & New York, Routledge, 1992.
5 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever,
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (eds), Out There, Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990, pp. 357–63.
6 Ibid., p. 365.
7 To echo Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations, London, Collins/Fontana, 1973, and Jacques
Derrida, ‘Living On, Border Lines’, in Harold Bloom et al. (eds),
Deconstruction and Criticism, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. On
the lightning-flash of being and the danger of its oblivion, also see Martin
Heidegger, ‘The Turning’, in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper & Row, 1977. For an acute
comparison of Benjamin and Derrida around the question of ‘history’ and
‘translation’, see Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation. History, Post-
Structuralism and the Colonial Context, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London,
University of California Press, 1992.
8 Rudolf Pannwitz quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London, Collins/ Fontana, 1973, p. 81.

7
 M I GR A N C Y, C U LT UR E , I DE NT I T Y

9 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Turning’, in Martin Heidegger, The Question

Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper & Row, 1977.
10 The quote is from Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History,
Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, University of California Press, 1982, p. x.
11 Paul Carter, Living in a New Country. History, Travelling and Language,
London, Faber & Faber, 1992, pp. 7–8.
12 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Modernity and Ambivalence’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.),
Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London,
Newbury Park & New Delhi, Sage, 1990, pp. 150–1.
13 Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality: an Interview with Emmanuel
Lévinas’, in R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (eds), The Provocation of Lévinas.
Rethinking the Other, London & New York, Routledge, 1988. Also see the
final chapter entitled ‘The Elementary Structure of Alterity’, in Peter Mason,
Deconstructing America. Representations of the Other, London & New York,
Routledge, 1990.
14 Julia Kristeva, Stranieri a se stessi, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1990, p. 9; Étrangers à
nous-même, Paris, Fayard, 1988.
15 The archaeology of this event – ‘Man is an invention of recent date. And one
perhaps nearing its end.’ – is brilliantly expounded in Michel Foucault’s The
Order of Things, London & New York, Routledge, 1991.
16 The ‘table of my memory’ (Hamlet), the tables, tablets, laws, that are
continually put together, inscribed, written up and written upon, ‘and also a
table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world’:
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London & New York, Routledge, 1991,
p. xvii. The rest of the sentence rewrites Benjamin’s famous observation on
‘progress’ and the angel of history from ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,
in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London, Collins/Fontana, 1973.

8
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