Whose Modernity? Whose Home? The Desert Art of Kathleen Petyarre

TO CONSIDER THE ARTICULATION OF IDENTITIES, CAUGHT BETWEEN THE INSISTENCE of power and the fragmentary prose and potential of the world, is, most obviously, to respond to the performative instance, the "now," in which historical conditions and their accompanying cultural, political, and economic possibilities are brought together in temporal configurations on the body, through the tongue, across the psyche. This, as a minimum, suggests that there are no such things as fixed or everlasting identities. Perhaps we need to ponder on such processes as they spiral back and burrow through the assumed stability of our own understandings of the "self." Our point of departure, our "selves," become suspect, the subject an object for another discourse, for an "other." It is here, of course, and most obviously, that the one-time "objects" of aesthetic, anthropological, social, and cultural attention today react as historical subjects, subjecting us to their interrogative presence.

There opens up the vista, for some unnerving, of the previously subaltern, marginal, and peripheral interrogating and reconfiguring of the languages, technologies, and techniques of the hegemonic center, and the assumed primacy of its languages and understandings. Here, what is probably most disquieting, uncanny in the deepest reach of that expression, is witnessing how such languages and associated powers come to be relocated, rewritten, and rearticulated, so that they now speak of other worlds within the tissues and textures of our own. They speak through us—through me, as it were—of other ways of being in time and place: in "my" city, a hundred other cities now emerge. The apparent opposites of "our" modernity (although a sense of ownership is here clearly slipping away), explicated in the divisions between the cosmopolitan and the "primitive," the "archaic" and the avant-garde, are rendered stunningly proximate. Such a con-temporary state provokes poles of mutual interrogation within modernity itself.

This is a present-day modernity that includes the more than 50 percent of the world's population that have never made a phone call in their lives, just as it also includes an invitation to consider Paris as a Muslim city and New York as a displaced Caribbean one. To consider modernity in the "outraged light" (Adrienne Rich) of those whose labor and cultural subjugation have been central to its making is to consider "progress" from the shadows, the hunger, humiliation, and ultimately slavery and genocide that have stalked its uncoiling across the globe over the last five centuries. But to hear this tale, I would also have to reconsider the project of the seemingly simple, but impossible task of harnessing the non-Western world to a linear and homogeneous sense of development and "progress." At this point, it might rather be a case of punctuating and interrupting that narrative and associated powers with a more complex, untidy, heterogeneous, and altogether more critical configuration. This is where the "civilizing" trip up the Congo turns out to be a journey into the growing darkness of the world, where I am ultimately brought face-to-face with the horror: the horror that resides in the heartlands of occidental modernity, in the very making and realization of my "self."

If my own identity is in debt to this heritage, to an underlying racist, colonial, and imperial formation, invariably presented in the neatly ascetic and white-washed hues of modernity, then considerations of constructions of the self—both the self that is affirmed and the self that is negated—open onto an altogether wider and more disturbing horizon of questions. The power to speak and represent a self, to seemingly construct an identity within the available languages of the world, is neither simply given nor automatically guaranteed. Not everyone is able to consider the question. While some have the means to choose with what and how to identify, others—the natives, the aboriginals, the masses, the working...