What this means is that in rethinking the power relationships, tactics, and strategies within and surrounding Hakani, Bhabha’s text opens up a new space and a new kind of critical articulation. In conceiving that a group can determine differential structures by the extent to which the group is organized in favor of an action versus organized against an action as a way to accept and regulate the differential structures of the moment of intervention, it becomes obvious how constructions of a culture could become blind to the very power structures located within its mechanisms of cultural hegemony.
In other words, we can try to take control of social and cultural action and meanings through intention, but we can never take control over the eventual meanings and range of possible outcomes. Politics, then, as Bhabha puts it, is thoroughly hybrid and cannot be fought on separatist terms, nor without communities of interest. Thus, no one can separate the space of the political from the sphere of culture, nor keep the two spheres and the field of economy apart from one another.
In drawing upon the notion that different political positions are negotiated – for example, I am a conservative and not a liberal cannot be completely true --, Bhabha is restating that positions are not simply progressive or reactionary, but subject to the conditions from which they arise and are negotiated as part of discourse. In the case of Hakani, this suggests that the positions of authority may themselves have been part of a process of ambivalent identification and constituted as an effective tool, in a political sense and in a cultural sense, in the exercise of power for strategic maneuvering and negotiation for the dominant discourse.
According to Bhabha, since all spaces and systems are constructed “in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation” (Bhabha 55), if one wants to address the revision and reconstruction of the political factors affecting people in the present, one must rethink of cultural analysis as a theoretically innovative and politically crucial form of assessment. We must, Bhabha argues, undo such thinking with its simplistic binary oppositions -- First World and Third World nations, colonizer and colonized, men and women, black and white, straight and gay -- thinking “beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and focusing on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences” (Bhabha 2).
For Bhabha, Hakani would be in a political position that isn’t simply identifiable as progressive or intransigent, bourgeois or revolutionary; rather, the film is caught up in political actions fixed within the history of the moment and in the history of the making of Hakani. Bhabha clarifies, “This is a sign that history is happening - within the pages of theory, within the systems and structures we construct to figure the passage of the historical” (Bhabha 37).
Hakani, similar to one of the examples utilized by Bhabha in his book (that of a correspondent of the Church Missionary Society), demonstrates how these cultural processes sit within extremely ambiguous fields of identification. Hakani’s ambiguity lies in the fact that it addresses a real concern, that of infanticide, yet, in the process of addressing the concern to save the children, it constructs a reality wherein the children will be in a much more vulnerable and dangerous position.
Hakani’s filmmaker is promoting a law that would change how we look at indigenous children. The law would require that we study traditional indigenous practices to uncover their potential danger to Indigenous children, and in doing so, it explicitly exhorts us to take on the tutelage of Indigenous peoples which has historically been detrimental to the well being of Indigenous children.
Additionally, public discourse about the "unspeakable" crime of infanticide, in fact, becomes part of the greater cacophony of talk about it. Speaking about the problem, though, is not a pure act; depending on how we speak about the problem, the issue can be compounded. For example, in the case of Hakani, the indigenous children are being used as a tool for a higher purpose, spoken for and about under the possibly false assumption that no one is speaking for them. Hakani’s filmmaker thereby takes ownership of the children and requests that the viewers do the same.
Moreover, the filmmaker’s ulterior motives, such as the popularity, financial gain, and settling of scores with the Brazilian government,
forces us to question the outcome of such a law. In this case, the children themselves have become instruments of hegemonic and Orientalist discourse possibly even being used to destroy their own families, communities, and cultures. This strategy has been used in the past. A missionary in writing “to London described the method of English education at Father John's mission in Tranquebar: the principal method of teaching them the English language would be by giving them English phrases and sentences, with a translation for them to commit to memory. These sentences might be so arranged as to teach them whatever sentiments the instructor should choose. They would become, in short, attached to the Mission; and though first put into the school from worldly motives alone, should any of them be converted, accustomed as they are to the language, manners and climate of the country, they might soon be prepared for a great usefulness in the cause of religion.... In this way the Heathens themselves might be made the instruments of pulling down their own religion, and of erecting in its ruins the standards of the Cross -- MR, May 1817, p. 187 (Bhabha 151).
This example clearly implicates binary divisions, yet, at the same time, concentrates on the 'in between' reality. This concentration on ambiguities and ambivalences evokes the use of contradiction. It is from this position of in-betweenness that Bhabha suggests the most interrogative forms of culture are produced, situated as they are at the disjunctions, cleavages, and fissures of class, race, gender, nation, and location. For Bhabha, “these 'in-between' spaces provide the landscape for elaborating strategies of selfhood that instigate “new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself “(Bhabha 2), yet, as we have seen, they can also be sites of domination.
In obscuring the power within these situations that are outside “normal” political activities, we fail to see how these practices could be in service of the status quo, falling short of “draw[ing] attention to the specific value of a politics of cultural production” (Bhabha 29). In the case of Hakani, the film is used as the surface of cinematic signification, the grounds of political intervention, giving depth to the language of dominant discourse and extending the domain of 'politics' in a direction that is dominated by the forces of economic and social control.
Hakani presents a problem of resignification: it strips the children out of infanticidal practices and inserts them into a new context, inadvertently reifying what it attacks -- the destruction of the child. As a paradox, it censors infanticide while at the same time endangers the child in other ways. Hakani’s filmmaker compels us to repeat what he himself seeks to constrain invariably reproducing and restaging the violent acts that he seeks to shut down. The use of legislation as a tool of force would transform the way we deal with indigenous children and enable the rise of multiple and contradictory responses, risking the creation of a new form of participation in the very problem it attacks.
What this means is that “forces of social authority … may emerge in displaced, even decentred strategies of signification” (Bhabha 208) because forms of mobilization and recruitment are often more successful and triumphant when they are created through the creation of an oppositional cultural force. In the case of Hakani, the interstitial space is a space where mobilization can form to reproduce dominance, leadership, persuasion, and maintenance of the status quo.
Bhabha states that the world is intricately linked with the historical fact that certain cohesive groups express and have expressed their dominance over other groups. This implicates Hakani, bringing into question the central issues of coloniality in the film; power and knowledge. The film is a revival of the notions of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny although these notions have been made unrecognizable by the dominating cultural paradigms through their constant revisions and constant assertions, producing a naturalness that masks its underlying tones. Manifest destiny is a belief in the superiority of Christians, the need for Christian expansion, and the Christian mission in the world and its divine destiny "to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man" (Wikipedia 1). And, exceptionalism is the notion that God has selected America as an example for the rest of the world to follow, that America differs from other nations in extraordinary ways, and that it should contribute to the human spirit by shaping, influencing, and creating peaceful societies with new ideals and with characteristics similar to its own.
Hakani sits within an ambiguous field, by becoming a site where practices of selection serve the purpose of the exploitation of the indigenous peoples and where power is constructed by differentiation and classification – Western versus non-Western, indigenous versus civilized, savage versus enlightened, sacred versus profane. It is a confrontation between chaos and order, a situation where the answer rests on fetishizing order, forming a desire to impose civility and Christian discipline upon the world by the exercise of Constitutional revision.
This conflict can be reformulated as identity construction within a mongrel space, forming hegemonic discourse but at the same time, posing questions of solidarity and community. A place where various fields are in subtle play--traditional, secular, religious, cultural, gender, sexual, Western, post-colonial and ethnic -- imagined as ever-shifting and morphing, the subject becomes a polymorphous agglomeration of affiliations in constant motion along this web; a web that flows according to political empowerment.
We need to explore the “interstices - the space of overlaps and displacement of difference - the 'in between,’ [stressing the] 'borderline work of culture and demanding encounters with "newness" that are not part of the continuum of past and present'” (Bhabha 10). We need to conceive a new spatial hermeneutics, infusing a simultaneity of multiple critical readings, perceiving and holding an irresolvable, borderline, and interstitial culture. We might more profitably focus on the faultlines themselves, on border situations and thresholds as the sites where critique is needed, shifting from a political preoccupation to a preoccupation with hegemonic practices.
According to Bhabha, “it is in the emergence of the interstices - the overlap and displacement of domains of difference - that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (Bhabha 2). This is especially true in the case of Hakani because indigenous visual representation in the film forms a Christian logic -- of who’s in and who’s out – and carries the characteristics of a mongrel discourse, part heresy and part sacred. Mongrel because the technical language of film has been infused with hegemonic and Orientalist discourse while purporting to carry messages of redemption and human rights. Mongrel also because the filmmaker’s relationship is that of collusion, through collaborations and alignments, with secular organizations and individuals to usurp power for the filmmaker’s own Christian organization that has funded the film.
This practical engagement with knowledge, critique, and freedom is situated in a complex and dynamic apparatus that changes, overlaps, mixes, varies, crosses, and migrates all the time. These liminal spaces or interstitial spaces are the habitation of politics and theory. Interstitial spaces are subversive places because we use hegemonic products or processes and give them a different meaning. It is in engaging with the other that I need politics, it is in encounters with the other that I need theory. Interstitial spaces are subversive places because we use hegemonic products or processes and give them subaltern meanings.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. The location of culture. Routledge, 2004.
Vaz, Antenor. "Missao: O Veneno Lento E Letal Dos Suruwaha." (2008). Web. http://http://www.scribd.com/doc/6527992/Missao-O-Veneno-Lento-e-Letal-Dos-Suruwaha2008 or http://www.midiaindependente.org/pt/blue/2008/07/425031.shtml
