travellers’ tales NARRATIVES OF HOME AND DISPLACEMENT Edited by George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnamchapter 4 SS Territories of desire: eine == of an African childhood Onsiderations Dedicated to a woman wh Wo! Ose was not really ‘Julia’ name Griselda Pollock Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves. (Chinua Achebe)! It is not difficult to transpose from physics to politics [the rule that] it is impossible for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time. (Johannes Fabian)” THE VOYAGE OUT, AND BACK Four hundred years after Columbus’s notorious voyages in 1492 : a as called ‘Americas’, one hundred years after Captain Cook sailet oe ‘South Seas’ in 1792, that is so say, one century ago, in 1892. 8 RTT travelled from Tahiti to Paris with a stopover " Capen i the So globe-trotting on colonial ships. The painting bad nef 1), Its European Pacific, but it had been painted for Europe eee through colonial producer, Paul Gauguin, was an artistic tourist oad sychically. i Space in order to traverse time — both historicaly ae oust has been identified as one of the key strucee evi sta with modernity, The anthropologist ae fet of iH ‘savage mind’ for the fundamental structut ic tales was travelling to South America to record the my jodern society, ial a d that moc’ mic, names ‘the disappearing tribes’. He ae te 4 by rapid nee Dean complex, and its structures were 100 ae omparabl a6 analyse and psychological change to Yield 1 5. possible psciousness MacCannell has, however, claimed that © ormodenn os to the modernity. Tourism provides just Suc a type precisely amet to suseest and he argues ‘that tourist attractions #F cannell B : ate es”. Telictnse . ate, nf nrmitive peor’chapter4 AS Territories of desire: reconsiderations of an African childhood rave Dedicated to a woman w hose n was not really ‘Julia’ laine Griselda Pollock Travellers with closed minds can tell us litt le except abi themselves. pete (Chinua Achebe)! It is not difficult to transpose from Physics to politics [the rule that] it is impossible for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time. (Johannes Fabian)? THE VOYAGE OUT, AND BACK Four hundred years after Columbus's notor ; 2 called ‘Americas’, one hundred years after Captain Cook sailed to the ‘South Seas’ in 1792, that is so say, one century ago, in 1892, a ee travelled from Tahiti to Paris with a stopover in Co sath slobe-trotting on colonial ships. The painting had oe) Tts European Pacific, but it had been painted for Europe (Figur through colonial Producer, Paul Gauguin, was an artistic tourist travel Te cally: Tourism Space in order to traverse time - both historically and Psy cciated has been identified as one of the key structures of COnSION’” ned the with modernity. The anthropologis ‘savage mind’ for the fundamental rious voyages in 1492 to the so- de Lévi-Strauss b i Suctes of bua non ic tales of W travelling to South America to record the an oder society Was names ‘the disappearing tribes’. He argue’ by rapid economics Complex, and its structures were too ee parable an and psychological change 10 yield 10 CO se ts ces MacCannell has, however, claimed thal ology of mode : ous to the Modernity. Tourism provides just such 210" i 0 and he argues ‘that tourist attractions, c religious symbolism of primitive peOP!°S -64 Griselda Pollock Figure 4.1 Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau, 1892 (oil on canvas, 75 x 92 cm Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo. that ‘the deep structure of modernity is a totalizing idea, a modern menta- lity that sets modern society in opposition both to its own past and to those Societies of the past and present that are treated as pre-modern oF underdeveloped,” Tourism requires a territory on which this temporal ellipsis can oo “reates a spatial encounter in what is always a fantastic landscape ea lated with imaginary figures whose difference must be construed and tet ar ited in order that the sense of loss, lack and discontinuity characte#" of metropolitan modernity can be simultaneously experienced an ea Pended by a momentary vision of a mythic place apparently outside eat elore-now’ place, a garden before the fall — into modernity. Ths cmraatetefore, becomes a classic example of fetishism, a TeP* emperitrice of knowing loss and disavowing it by substitution. ck of on€ of art reats that travelled and marked the voyage out an eh Manus Tes paradigmatic tourists was given a ttle in Pie ought Geiser Pa a ‘gure 4.1). This translates as merely: a othe SPI of the Dee oe been interpreted as Gauguin trying to er the nak" €s'. A black-faced spectre stands watch ovTerritories of desire 65 body of a young Tahitian woman lying on her stoma towards the spectator and her hand rigid on the pillo Paul Gauguin. The model was Gauguin’s 13-year-old didsay wife. Her name was Teha' ‘amana, Bringer of S was sent first to Gauguin’s Danish wife. Yes, I did say wife. Mette Gaugui was the mother of his five children from whom he had lived apart ‘in 7 1887. He had come to Tahiti to earn enough money to finance the pombe resumption of their marriage. He had married Teha’amana within the rituals of patriarchal exchange governing the island’s current kinship systems and marriage customs. Two wives, two systems, two places, two female figures in the painting whose viewing apex is one man — the apex of atriangle between two wives, two systems, two places. Two women, therefore, mark a geographical but also cultural distance which is traversed by the masculine, European artist — a point for ethno- graphic transactions between cultures and genders. The trope of displace- ment and attempted reconnection via a triangulated structure of one man and two women, each coloured as white or dark, is the tropical journey as sexual quest for which Cleo MeNelly has identified a genealogy from the beginnings of Europe’s colonial invasions — the Renaissance — to one of the most compelling of contemporary anthropological texts which is at once autobiographical, and frankly autocritical. The text is Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss, published in 1953.° She states that an analysis of the tropical journey as myth reveals one of its key problems: ‘the objectifica- tion of the other, the native, the woman that lies at the very heart of structuralist thought’. Note the conjunctions: woman, native, other. They are the title of a series of texts produced by the Vietnamese film-maker and critic now resident in the US, Trinh T. Minh-ha which aim precisely to challenge and re-explore these overdetermined synonyms.® Which is the signifier, which is the signified — or are they all part of a pure signifiance a sliding down the chain of deferred meanings? Or do they all signify that Which utters and is uttered by this historically precise chain, the power o! Privileged men of the West who are represented by indirect signification, by constituting themselves as speaking or enunciating subject in Dani ‘© spoken or enunciated woman, native, other? I want [0 suggest thet Womaninativelother is the sign of a fantastic journey enacted on ® Cd ™ap whose cartographer is the violence of imperialism. wane oe leged and Western — are, however, not absent from either 1% Tt journey, For where there was Teha'amana, there was AS ea daughter Aline ~ to whom Gauguin addressed his letters # pots att this painting and its subject, contrasting the things els of her 28 in Tahiti and not in Copenhagen. wre claiming this signifying cluster wor” ich can be identified in Western literature sinc’ ” McNelly connects contemporary anthropologist Lévi-St ch, her hezd turned Ww. The painting is by Tahitian wife. Yes, I strength. The Painting omaninativelother a8 @ ope e the Renaissance, Cleo uss to his cultural66. Griselda Pollock 6 Griselda Polo’ ; a cae tury modernity, to the poet ™~ 1s in nineteenth-cen tot Bias predecessor Joseph Conrad, for whom the ‘native piry nti ng list J . the mows of both race and sex to become the prime object gt ne ° ; rt of imaginary darkness, which was, as sty, Pica gestae ie athe European traveller’s own baggage ili remerat journey, with its cargo of sexual adventure and que identity’ are structured through the oppositions: here and there, home a abroad, light and dark, safety and danger, famil(iarit)y ang sex i. seeing and touching, thinking and feeling.* These antimonies Converge ig be embodied through the contrasting figures of geographically Aispersey but mythically interdependent femininities: “At either end of this journe stand two figures, each of whom has a profound mythological pat white woman at home and her polar opposite, the black woman abroad’ (ibid.). In the European imaginary, the white woman is mother, sister, wife opposed to the negative mirror-image of the black woman, ‘the dark lady of the sonnets, savage, sexual and eternally other. At her best she is, “natural woman” sensuous, dignified and fruitful. At her worst she is witch, representing loss of self, loss of consciousness and loss of meaning (ibid.). It is her irreducible strangeness which gives her value and makes her an object of white man’s fascination but never a subject of historical acknowledgement or recognition of her cultural, historical and psycho- logical status as a subject. Gauguin’s painting was produced within that antimony. But it also contains within its space an internal doubling which juxtaposes the two aspects of the ‘dark lady’ in awkward and menacing combination, The one Promises a warm, lovable ‘naturally’ sensuous young woman on the bed, her sexuality not so much offered to, as sadistically anticipated by the viewer. She is watched by the other — a dark forbidding figure conjured up by Gauguin aesthetically as a pastiche of a carved ancestral figure culled from several cultures indiscriminately, whose aesthetic order this Eur” Pean man can only perceive as so strange and other that it is like deat! itself. It is this duality which in fact reflects what I have called Gauguin’ feel Barde gambit’, which the painting was meant to enact on his Le sepoel beat when it took its place in the gallery showrooms a es ‘as bu sie - 1893, Gauguin’s Painting relies upon intended represe™ ane ios cieulted a displacement of, a major avant-garde f ed int the cultural at Ympia (Figure 4.2), painted in 1863, but re ia and ee a pol ics of the 1980s by its purchase for the Bea 9 There Gauguin had mae oo Of Modern art, the Luxembourg, in is in 18932" another gallery font, of it, a canvas also exhibited ET a ike Olympia, Gauguin's aon which Manao Tupapau was bein anet's pitt ing, T suggest, can Wee peng juxtaposes two female figures. ai Only redefines the cand es ettically ant-Orientalist projet We e- ally heterogeneous female body in art FoyFigure 4.2 Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 (oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris. assite of a distinctly modern sexuality, commercial and classed, but inflects the specific colonial phrasing of that trope with a demythicizing reference to modernity in the person of the African attendant/partner.'° She wears both a turban and an ill-fitting European dress. In Olympia, therefore, two stock characters from the Western artistic imaginary, the nude white woman at her toilet or in her boudoir attended to by an African woman, (examples are by Nattier, Mlle Clermont at her Bath 1733 (London, Wallace Collection) and Debat-Ponsan, Massage 1883 (Toulouse, Musée des Augustins)) are set into a proletarian working relationship soca other, and against the spectator, who is challenged by the armed an inl arming stare of the reclining woman, and is resisted by the anaes a of the other woman with her own other. ‘Laure’ looks & ve whom she is presenting the flowers. Gauguin’s paint 5 mT ernie Politics of his reference text, the Manet, ands in that state e pata insensitivity or ideological blindness, his Wor Te-0 ‘and Both Gauguin's finiies are ‘other’, doubling the image one ik ey juxtaposing but also linking her youthful sexuality €0 28 er body in look of the rectining woman is ‘disarmed’ BY the expe pout this painting, this vulnerable pose. Gauguin wrote to his Danish a cae the painting omitting details of the marital arrangements which . meties when they Possible, in order to ‘arm’ her (Mette) ‘against<=e 68 Griselda Pollock. bombard you with their malicious questions’ 12 The we, to deflect the recognition of an overt display of ga) POmy hey spurious tourist fabrication of out-of-date ethnography! fot; Pig invented notions of socient religions and current a isplaces his, Gauguin’s sadistic voyeurism on to he, titions th Sal specific paranoia. Tahitians, he ‘explains’, aoa any the dead stalk you in the dark. His own ‘tourist attractioy that ‘ii sense of what attracts and that which is the attraction) leary the ag ‘the religious symbolism of primitive peoples’, confirming ety {oq supposition about modern tourism. ACCanne, The mundane restaging of the cultural trope of Woman/native) Gauguin’s painting and the sexual, personal and professional He Me it was produced to perform serve to illustrate my point of ‘dcpatture the overdetermined relations of woman to territorialized ae 2 whether in the cultural texts or the texts of their critical analysts, yan disorder the standard narratives of the tropical journey by inserting woman-to-woman narratives in feminized geographies. These controgt issues of difference which cannot be reduced to this sliding system of signifiers down a phallocentric chain of eternal pairings. Here conta. dictions and desire do not figure themselves on the bodies of the other, of woman as other, as native, as difference. Instead they propose an inte subjective locus for complex psycho-social transactions which expose the racism installed in the structures of subjectivity as part of the very cultural identity of the white child, and specifically the colonial child. I will draw here upon the transforming feminist conceptualization of a symbolic shaped by the matrix advanced by Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, wo argues for another model for that of Self and Other, proposing a stratum ef subjectivity based on the coexistence in space of the several, an Land some non-Is, unknown to me in some dimension, and yet not Other. ‘These disorderly thoughts and images will keep circling back to the problen the territorialization of desire — the question of the native me "isis ae of nativity, and its elective displacement, of the impose wait to oie aed identity confronted by the telos of nativity tion be the ters historical and political nature of the migr Thave started with Gauguin’s painti «its hallowed art history’s coinplici ae 's painting not becaus' ‘hits impet fo dations nee ds to be a with the tropical journey an Jeast it my 12° ‘ book on Gander hallenged — that has been begun at IAs ea historical analysis i the Colour of Art History.'* The pai the visu! tra? f OF this essay trie il it Bave rise allow me to establish OF ingges © doubling, of ; ngulation between two women and a Ma venll Tet mans ever ally, alliances ae &azes, of coloured oppositions, of pairs an oct! tween the elective af cat Past bei ffinities’. An unexpected exchanet quid ©ing studied and the present in which " Superstitil. of tae sa ee SSS Territor peeween an art historical icon and its waa ee reading not only possible but urgent, for moa {alyst. What makes rem placement in a history T can find sh least, are the traces fm own Jes and circuits of desire enacted in the ear tithe doubles wranent of that historical trajectory. And {ihe cultural forms of iia mom subjective formation within another legacy of ease ont 2 ie ow om rom which the Gauguin ret legacy of colonial tourism wate aprsounter and indeed refuse art history's collec esc eld meanin ; ing's founding, colonial myths, This, Er Oe eon ith the pain ineulgent kind of ego-histoire, the subjecti collapsing back into a sel becomes the objective gaze that can read asthe i ey ela historically framed masculinities and femini er history of the subject, of unanticipated connections. nities in their specific and iven the growing fashion f guuua bn even the Goncepts Of tetogeal ae oe es make one further qualification of this project. ah a wees, bia iva several voices: art historian, story-telle ate tic aa feminist critic. These are all ‘me’, the dative uly) prioaoiy alesis Theor i eaten deren attended to, considered significant and then writt. a atoeaak fiat implicit. condition of all discourse becomes t cane aarlar analytical enquiry in which the ‘author’ acts as Bois dial ata i The tactic fs ot to centre this thetocially "pe Sale ee aie autobiographical subject the ultimate actetat Of the aie Piyctail move ~ but precisely in order to decolonize the texts by analysing in order ba splace a specific historical subject and subjectivity, that of the white man, from the picture. In contradistinction to the collapse of historical peers into the autobiographical circle, I aim to create the space fora pire sents BPRS anor in which avowing all aspects of the sll become nbemary Dat OF reflexive and responsible acknowledge- Sclenical 4 istoricity of all subjectivities. Thus autohistory can refuse the ais a ‘ lelusion of a separation between the public and the private, the Brdfesional an the personal at all levels of the text, and in terms of its inahed Hanes as well as its contents, since the two are inextricably eae want to use this paradox ‘and dare to traverse the polite ties that maintain a symbolic distance between the territory of history and desire of the historian. MIGRati ONG) 2 R TELLING TALES ND RETURN: A TIME FO J, which will serve, despite 1 of both doubled is decidedly non- ry-telliny ternative model ion which Twat tint 10 move to another register of sto ‘os isjuncture it effects, to stage an al ‘an-to-woman relations and a triangulatt70 Griselda Pollock nd non-Oedipal. It also suggests other, feminist . ymbolism of primitive peoples’ : ston tell astory about some economic migrants, a fami, , . abe mine jn their own land to seek food and survival 2 trie by ing country. A mother, her husband and their two sons travel Eby, Jand-locked sea to the mountainous regions they have watcheg ra Disaster, however, Soo! Western al ‘religious S| ay, n befalls the family. The father dies, Th ‘OM fay marry local women, going against a deeply held prohibition in they ty culture to mingle with the women of their adopted land, They a iT home for breaking the taboo, for ‘sleeping with the enemy’, for there 8 Price and die. The relicts of this sad tale are thus three women: a fall i widow, and two childless daughters-in-law. The widow decides to aoe and bids her two daughters-in-law return to their own mothers i rt blood kin. Eventually after protest, one does. But the younger fiaa abandon her mother-in-law. She then says: to Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not to follow you. For wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you live, I will live. Your people shall be my people. Your God shall be my God. Where you die, I will die and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you. This is a powerful affirmation of personal loyalty. Item by item, the daughter-in-law identifies the typical criteria of our belonging, of cultural identity and its relation to matters of location, of religion and, significantly if surprisingly, of death. It poses a shift of identity as primarily one of movement, a journey (‘Where you go, I will go’), This relocation § fonsolidated by settling in a place (‘Where you live, I will live’), fllovel y a entry into a community (“Your people shall be my people’) "NY ition of the culture signified through its God/gods, its belief system. ie declaration is sworn, like a marriage vow, until death do us patt aoe gions, which Some of you will have recognized, comes Or, the Tewish " included in both the Hebrew and Christian Be festival Si Of its origin, it is read annually on the eatly t Mount Single is Celebrates she covenant. The delivery of the Law # at the time were 1 a covenant between God and his chosen peoPl” Tire, foi wine fe ‘andless exiles, fugitives from slavery in a power ierneS of total social aby nd eSeaped but seven weeks before. In the vated asi People/culture by en this Motley stateless crowd was to be oe social moral, economy, te LAW Providing for ethical guidance in OV" 4s at important Sua legal and ritual area of life. This episode ere Mt in the history of human religions. Religio®_— —— Territories of desire 74 as an ethical and social code t: settee makes a major break from ee agreement between Nes which were scen to be literally wcographinl Ane religions and cali, associated with bits of land oF even ea ee landscape Judaism is the religion of choice and covena wandering nite ie cee é Paradoxically, it 1s the foreign woman who chose cot. who has become the symbolic figure of the covenant pea ieeantd Ruth, their God. Yet the Jewish people were given choice at the atl moment at the foot of Mount Sinai, and it is this idea which defines Judaism’s theological distance from the notions of race and nation which since the late eighteenth century have framed anti-semitism, and popular misconceptions of Judaism and the Jewish people. Ruth was, however, not only a non-Jew. She was a Moabite, and for the historical Israelites, that meant she was a prohibited other, the stranger. Yet she became the most famous proselyte to Judaism, a moment of acknowledgement of the stranger as someone who can be assimilated and not as that which can only induce cither aggression and violent resistance or fascinated and ultimately disfiguring desire. The Greek word ‘proselyte’ is often seen as a mere synonym for the Latin term ‘convert’. In fact, proselyte means immigrant. Conversion implies change from one currency or substance to another, while the concept of proselyte as immigrant involves displacement and admission in a way that may uproot the immigrant from a native culture, but provides other ways of transacting outside of the native/other dichotomies. The promises Ruth makes to Naomi involve movement, relocation and cultural transformation, but above all, they signify a covenant between two people, formed in difference, able to resolve that difference without self- annihilation. Although this text is usually used as an example of Sonieans choosing Judaism, it places God neither first nor last, but only as tl Ne penultimate change in a longish list which primarily stresses person: to-person loyalties. The last sentence is often paid scant ST itis crucial: ‘Where you die, I will die and there will The ar statement will resonate profoundly for small and battered a . scout nities for it acknowledges the obligations on family mem Tens ‘ew appropriate burial for relatives. To die childless and without a eS die alone, unprotected and forgotten. Thus this text AT apcie ot important question of memory. The continuity of @ La eat so much its its many acts of particular remembering. What is VT of collective nativity, but its history, which is a continuous an0 living 3et igor bit. memorial which does not depend necessarily on the lant complete Ruth’s reference to death and burial is symbolical!y a migration toanew the transition from being a native through the process te a changed relation ~Talmost use the word — patriation. I want to indicat features of the int made with a72. Griselda Pollock to the territory he land of on dopted community amongst whom one may cheeses adop' ot be a matter of patriation for the t rth, of one’s ancestors ‘ Vere, 0 die ang a TSug the this case it cannot TANSACtion je Ui two women and it thus becomes the model of a mMatrixial ee ie Aa a. 8 a insider and the outsider — the migrant who returns with tion; the another e opposite direction —- who form a mutually acknowie edging 8 going in th i ec. voila identity is hinged on how we Tefuse death memory, living in the presence of tradition and historica| ch Modernist tourists were 1n the act of refusing the space and time of ae own cultural death while inflicting it on everyone else, Modernity a the to uproot, deracinate, detraditionalize societies. It thus makes difficult, not impossible, the sense of belonging which could only be found ee migration in time and space backwards to the pre-modern pasts tee other peoples’s memories, or the fictions of them, could be ‘colonize’ to do service for what the Western moderns felt they had lost; to arm then against what they felt they were experiencing, a living death. Travel thus becomes a fetishizing activity, journeying as disavowal of both the present and of death. What I want to stress is that the cultural displacement Ruth chooses is stated as allegiance to a person, namely Naomi. It is an astonishing act of woman-to-woman covenanting. Yet in the history of Western art, for which the Book of Ruth has served as a source, there is no visual represen tation of this transaction. Instead we find many paintings of the harvesters of Naomi’s rich kinsman, Boaz, in whose fields Ruth was sent to glean. The text itself also displaces the matrix and the matriline, created by Ruth and Naomi’s alliance, so that it would seem that two quite different narratives inhabit this one text,1 é The subsequent chapters of the Book of Ruth dramatize the Jewish i of the levirate (when a kinsman must take up his deceased win's tend ne) aris means of Ruth’s integration into the Bethlehem yi ie here, patrilineal. For in this second narrative, itis a thus of heoat lus as the widow, the relict property of her husban he has" ‘r-in-law Elimelech, that Ruth enters this community. sce het cout as she is an adjunct to the father-in-law’s land ener Us redemptior pees left unharvested and barren. Jewish law prov! 0 take 0 the inheritesoes Wasted land by calling upon the next of kin © 4 he claiming of then make it fruitful again in the name of the °° he dead kin. Ruth th © Property inheritance involves any other ree inconsist even here Fo Gleaner is also Ruth the Gleaned. The text 8" she merely part of ytmes Ruth appears as owner or inheritors jy foe aomteaa a the inheritance: “When you acquire the a ife att deceased so se yet the Moabite, you must also acquire HFT ate “S f0 perpetuate the name of the deceased UP" through Cua isTerritories of desire 73 ee Tam drawing attention here to this contrary wa within this narrative. In its patriarchal form my exchanged, the body whose potential to I labour and pi irth i ie as part of a property. Reduced to her female body. om ni , se jouily with the land as property, as attribute of man lacks the is Ie to make her productive by planting of hi: r fat ee peat for ee ean name Seed. Like his lan, she e conflict between the patrilineal and the matrilin See at gas resolved by the birth of a male chit.” The hen ee Bethlehem proclaim, however: ‘a son is born to Naomi’ — thus replacin; the lineage of the father (-in-law, Elimelech) with that of the mother . law, Naomi). And yet, the sentence structure is ambiguous, for it is as Naomi gave birth to the said son, and thus had her maternal desire gratified. The child can be seen as the gift of the loving woman who has chosen to be with her. Thus birth ceases to function merely as timeless cycle of female biological reproduction in which one woman can more or less stand in for another in a constant replication. Instead the child registers as part of a symbolic activity. Furthermore, Ruth enacts what Kaja Silverman has argued is one crucial and underexplored aspect of specifically feminine desire, namely the wish to fulfil the desire of the mother, by giving her a child. These transactions utterly displace, for a moment, the typical phallic economies that govern women and children in the fulfilment of masculine desire and patriarchal law. The transitivity — or heterogeneity — of the text is continued in the next sentence. For having had the child proclaimed as hers, Naomi puts the child to her own breast. She thus suckles her ‘grandson’, forming a completely non-phallic triangle composed of the two mothers and their son. The maleness of the offspring doubles as the signifier of desire under the sign of the phallus and as the gift between mother and daughter which marks the terms of their union. The restoration to Naomi of the Dove of life is utterly at odds with the imagery of the patrilincal narrate © Naomi’s barren state and Ruth’s function as unfertilized property ee to suggest that this triangle of bonded women of different culutes oom = ted via a nativity, via the son one bears to ensure matrilineal epotin Y of the other, offers this relation as a matrixial model directly ote enacted in modern, patriarchal tourist fantasy of the OE he end of the The patriline has the last word, however, for tacked on (OT the 00k is a seemingly bizarre listing of the genealogy OF Te and future King David, Ruth’s great grandson, from w or se nds the et mother-in-law-in-love are completely absented. ane tion as their stake Mother and daughter-in-law (two women) can als0 {UATE the jevel inthe other, patrilineal system which effectively exclM°8 TT gnifers of the significds but uses their female bodies at the levi tus as US We arrive at these incompatible yet coexisting °a Position of the figure of she is woman, the sign to74 Griselda Pollock property; nativity as connection. I want to use the Story of oe and their child as the ‘matrixial axis on which to Pivot i uth andy, \ perspective on migration, nativity, death and alliance ae a fen ‘blical and a postcolonial era. bot, ni biblical at ~ THER PLACE: AN AF ANOTHER TIME, ANO es CHILDHOOD RECONSIDERED N A photograph from a family album — a necessary Teference to ai of respect for Jo Spence who alerted us to the historical andt| in the everyday and every family archive — registers a socia complex across the bodies of two women and several children cas framed in a photographer's viewfinder (Figure 4.3). It is a scene! beach. As such it could be anywhere. I know it was taken in Desssh 1950 at a popular holiday resort called St Michael’s-on-Sea, near Durbar on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa. It is a poor Photograph, messy badly composed, with too much extraneous detail. Yet the amateur’s weak compositional skill has made the photograph an unexpected document of its place of origin which resonates far beyond the reaches of its casual occurrence in a family album. Including what is typically off-screen yet foundational in constituting the social and historical specificity of the scene and of the seeing, the photograph emerges out of its archive as a document both political and personal. In the middle ground a European mother and child are caught in an almost emblematic moment. It would not take Victor Burgin or Mary Kelly to tell us what fantasy was activated in the person carrying the camera by that moment of transient intimacy - a sturdy toddler busy with some newly acquired skill practised under the quiescet! attention and enveloping gaze of its attentive mother (Figure 4.4). i _The photographer was too far away from what had made him take a his camera (the photographer was surely the father) and so his object ; desire is encumbered with extraneous tote bags and other people. eles Still, his activity has become the object of a gaze within the photorr . The picture thus looks back at him, from a point off-centre (Feu! That Steady gaze makes him a pure Lacanian subject — “photos eld of He is a picture for the unconsidered but not invisible other in Ihe ig vision he does not control. The man photographing his little fan otis yr bya woman who halts her work to look across at his ee altel Euro, eta (Figure 4.6). She is an African employed Tae of adull Woman and arc” whose mother is absent. While the COV ye of te scene, it eh ld pretends to simulate the dyad at the o fing inste™ socio-cultnuteS that unity of mother and child, representine ' ont! the third ae antithesis or underside. Furthermore the ual in its io anda dete ee ‘triangle which appears in the photo oY » Noliday form as the maternal dyad. a MOM Peete nd PoliticFigure 4.3 Family photograph, taken at St Michael's on Sea, South Africa, 1950. Figure 4.4 Detail of Figure 4.3.* ae. Figure 4.5 Detail of Figure 4.3. a Figure 4.6 Detail of Figure 4.3.Territories of desire 77 re dak lady and the white wifefmother o oe of the photograph, their relations an, contained by the mastering gaze of grapher We encountered in first section fag women coexist but not in any chosen i Ts inthe biblical story of Ruth and Nao mi. Across the ti r Imes an oesneir production and uses, unexpected transactions emerge Flay en an. terly mundane family snap and one of the icons of W = wpa (Figure 4.2). Tnote the sorority between tan their borrowed costumes of servitude caring for the white woman. ae tae aren, while acknowledging the shocking incongruity of the comparison within our normal codes of academic divisions between the historically relevant and personally mundane. In Manet’s case, the figure of ‘Laure’ is raised by his calculated strategies of proto-modernist disruption to being a critical signifier in a way that cannot seriously be claimed for the chance concurrence of the two women in a family snap. Here, in the photograph, however, instead of the containment of a black woman’s gaze — or its murder and exploitation in the Gauguin painting (Figure 4.1), where it became the gaze of death in the place of sexuality — we unexpectedly encounter a returned and critical look. In Barbara Kruger fashion, this gaze puts its other ~ the absent European gaze which, pace Linda Nochlin, is the real meaning of the Orientalist project — on the spot.!® Her gaze punctures the space which should frame and contain the European dyad as simply and universally ‘mother and child’. Yet because of what Richard Dyer has suggested is the racism imprinted in the technologies and lighting codes of Western photography itself, her African face threatens to dissi- Pate into what Christopher Miller, writing of French Africanist discourse, has called ‘blank darkness’.'? A final observation — in my developing theme of the pot” the axis of the tropical Onrtey, this photograph contains within one ei both white woman and dark lady, although syntactically and pork they axe rigidly separated (except, perhaps, in AO oe oterhat Lam White Euro-African child). I recognize the critical fa fulfilment saying — a self-indulgence perhaps to focus on my white 9 SE epic Feet of Lubaina Himid’s astringent remarks about how whit re hey Seeing themselves at the centre of other people’s pict” Absorb the efforts and energies of others. I cannot SP for the African Woman in that picture as I cannot even speak for the Whose re Siti’ who normally cared for me al name was not ‘Julia’, who 9 ‘and about my W’ and at home in South Africa. I can speak 10 00) © played her part in that woman's servitude. 1 Cr ays alt tit®~ forged in the series of psychic lossc® which are ay bo. extured — is ‘territorialized’ upon a black woman "i place ‘ t in 1, placed now as the viewer in and yet "0 oat in the same Space and _ contradiction not, how. ore tourist/artist/ ‘ e chapter. Two mother- ‘Ovenant or alliance such as f the polarized woman as3 Griselda Pollock 7 ducer, can therefore respond to her Afri otograph’s procut’ ‘ali see ae as comforting to me, the colonialist/economic that of the ee meine with her own child which o¢o, of the image. = is labour and mostly the labour of women, Iti class, of gender and of race, as here. Some privileged Women yu ater do their childcare. It is one of the major employer—empio a TS to between women - a class system at the heart of the socal - Telations bourgeois household.” In South Africa, African women are a abe European women to look after the latter’s children, while their Pioyed by children are left at home with relatives — in the townships if the OWN black in the homelands if not. The child in the photograph was thus ae lucky, seven years. Emotional bonding and psychic formation took ice socially and culturally permeable household of the Western bourgeoie = postcolonial economic migrants. My parents left England in 1947 to tae = postwar cold and rationing for a tropical journey that was a sisi somewhere better to raise a family. The white child born into this situation is the perplexed meeting point — a subjective nexus — of the social and cultural contradictions which are resolvable neither by sexuality nor by conversion (Figure 4.7). 7 The child, however innocent, is being formed as a bearer of the domi- an order of whiteness through an Oedipalization which is profoundly neta eine fet am arguing here, racial. The situation is not neutral hieraraiy beescae ” ferences of culture and class are being patterned as (white), whe ince a relations between the leisured mother ribbed otheraente ce A ild, and the working mother (black), ny level the child gras a5 Toes copter snagecant eae a mate a ‘The white child is see a series of affects, complexes, loyalties a 7 Awan Wotan tone en of unequal exchange which infantalizes the a the realm and stare i what she does as an adult identifies her We work makes heron of her childish charge. The servant/employce e motherlemployer ee oes home’ with the child, thus freeing the Wi usually allows to itee eo, the personal freedoms the leisured boure™ woluatg s men: to meet with friends, to play golf or bridge: © i 'Y Work, or indeed to be a j : ae tive agai artheid, to belong t a journalist, to be politically a! el take lovers, to gon’ © Women’s organizations like Black Sash, t0 tr Liberation for eas to create herself as a bourgeois individual. ioe of another's servitude ney vomen in this situation is gained at we Peed this white mother actrees"! Pain. But the point is that the re wil the bourgeois we eves is a version of what we typically ass00r sie at home. He is the Sekne Our accounts of the metropolitan boure! pio of money, exchange ocd traveller through and occupant of public te Postcolonial ae, i leisure and power. In the mid-twentieth Ce", bu! Cciety allows some women access to his PM" can gare. > Migrant’ wiih UPies the inte, & edte a Srtitories of desire 79 Figure 4.7 ‘Rough proof’ — childhood portrait. only by overlaying the gender of African women with the multiple sub- ordinations of race and class. In writing his biography of Flaubert — another of the tropical travellers of the sexual quest - Sartre discusses the formation of class consciousness in the child of the bourgeoisie by suggesting that class is invisible within the family, following Marx perhaps who wrote: : me Upon the diff roperty, upon the social conditions o Ron the different forms of PrP re of distinct and peculiarly existence, rises an entire superstructure ; fe, The formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. at entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations Ke * corresponding social relations. The single individual, whe derives then through tradition and upbringing, may, imagine ‘hey form Motives and starting point of his activity. seedar iat "takes a historical but always social moment of crisis confct ane individual ~ the child of my discourse - to see its parents it tn oa thers, for class consciousness to be forced upon the childs , rewish in the “gues a Jewish child only recognizes himself or herself es Jemempts 1 SI ofthe anti-semite other, Tn the images by whieh SANE—_ 80 Griselda Pollock = . i tity and the role of th ie i esis on social iden < fe other. 4. explain I rated in relation to the postcolonial experi ®™ “hich Pa, erie ran A Steedman’s analysis of class and subjectivig, a Whig ripe d Woman, there is often a ‘castrating’ moment in Which asc, por aw cing-class child is the traumatized witness to the Tevelati Pk oO ial lack in the parent, Who, up to that point, has been iat” of rte hority and power.”* The child has to recognin ed re of autl Esa a Be 2 Mize, with eee injury to its own narcissism (since its identity is fone”, ih t rm identification, i, introjection of the imago of its parents), the yt omnipotence and plenitude in the figure with which the child identities, ie thus wounded by the authoritative gaze of the empowered SOci; : which reduces her/his own beloved caretaker. In one sense this ‘ce moment is the social re-enactment, or staging on the plane Where social and psychic realities interface, of the Freudian schema of the male child's trauma at the site of apparent female, i.e., the mother’s Benital insufh. ciency which is symbolic of her want of power and authority. I want to combine both models — or rather map the social and the psychic on tocach other to extend both — in the triangulated structure within the family. The typical triangle of the Freudian story is between a son and his sexually differentiated parents. The one I want to overlay is that between a female child and two women, a mother and a nanny who are by this ‘moment’ inscribed differentially in terms of class and race. What the ‘white’ child (or rather the one who will become ‘white’ by this lesson) learns is a structure of difference and authority relative to which she must take up not merely a gender position (she could potentially identify with both women because they are both of her gender) but also one of class and race (Figure 4.8). Or, we could put it thus, she must adjudge between two positions, one in which Privilege comes to be inscribed through a differentiation of power that is ‘resented linguistically as a physical and cultural difference, as race. This difference is thereby not recognized as the result of class, of social in lations, cultural exploitation and so forth; rather here, like Freut : schema, anatomy — skin colour, voice, looks — seems to give the different @ natural origin, ‘i Jn th situation of colonial childcare within the colonizer’s hovel the (white) child, abandoned by ; d the (black) moter deprived of he il led by its mother, an “re of class id culture into * child/ren, are thrown together across the rifts of hey 91 th, ina siate otiow Fee ntoty dependency ne isu and be cuddled by. Thel ni deprivation, find surrogate bodi d metonym™s: T world is already one of metaphors ane I’ F : i dis trianguise t*© Substitute for that for which each “realy” Ion This ally empower bY the father so much as by the economically a 4 ihe desired tite White mother. She represents for the wnt tio is intensified awa ideal, f iden! from tH? ‘sely by her mobility in the world, her differen? ial other, ‘astrating’ey Figure 4.8 ‘Underdeveloped’/Overexposed’ — childhood Portrait. beloved’ native surrogate mother, confined by her and with her to the tealm of the domestic, the infantile, the powerless. The typical Freudian model of Oedipalization has offered a means of explaining the formation of human infants in sexual difference (limited as its effectivity was to the male child). In its postcolonial situations, the white itl child, in whom I am primarily interested here, 'S positioned simul- taneously in two hierarchies: as a child subject to the power of the motes Who appears free to come and go, to be absent and to determine eo er increasingly idealized person; and, secondly, she is identified wiN Fo Temains behind at home, in the thus ‘subordinated’ realm. The ah : anny belongs there with her, but also 10 her, creating for the cul fantasy of control sanctioned by the conditions of employmen82 Griselda Pollock __— hild is thus ‘empowered’ vis-@-vis a figure = i 3 sical created poverty c i — but by ihe ee ae not ~ al a whose adulthood ane authority towards the child. her Clarke. maintain her in nil has a stake through which to traverse ‘ied vision, The colonialist a similarity to the mother which is signified not as namely her physic ves, as race. The child can thus imagine an identifi- gender but as sine ‘and authority the mother represents vis-@-vis the cation with the pow' he system of phallic sexual differ- : | like the penis in t ee . African manny rent physical detail ~ skin colour — is invested with the eof sgnficaton, signifying within the colonial symbolic its racism. identify with the mother and her culture ~ her gods, her People, her tobe lhe death (to recall the terms of Ruth’s cultural identification) is to be infantilized and blackened, to be like the native and the other and, in all its patriarchal negativity, woman. 2 Colonialism colours gender, and gender inferiority can be displaced by cultural power expressed through race, in a way that then makes the articulations of a specifically feminist consciousness in South African strug- gles seem utterly diversionary from the overwhelming obscenity and vio- lence of that society’s racism. It should be noted, none the less, how important debates about women’s rights have become in the arguments advanced by African women in the formulation of a new constitution for South Africa, in ways that demand reconsideration of the double legacy of an ona both Traditional and colonial patriarchies.** The question aie yeas oon through the very fact of gender identification ion and perpetuation of racism needs also to be acknowledged ~ opening the wa: i e 1 y for woman-to-wor i he struggle against a racism that white women ma‘ Nuun teens as part of their sense of being * Place inside the whi Psycho-political ie societies and thei Journey that is always taking + psychoanalysis has allowed us 4 tit Skee of phallocentric sexist ae hoe terms to analyse the Y in colonial societies — t© man’s head, If of the conti Pa inities, mig er mat chil com whi wor whe gen dau —w int col the one Aft rec Soy tru: acl con int by anc an)_ Te ; 53 tris of desice 3 formation of ae as @ contradictory pres al imagos produced in societies where the enn of divi wen is further patterned through race as wel] wan division dill little white girl I was, born and formed in this soci [know the twin forces that conflict between ide: S SOCio-psychic ther and its possible freedoms for a woman aeetth with the Urgeois lack woman, who omple® ce mol le freedo a mo the lost fantastic identification with a by world, ; her own pain and desperate sense of exploitation gave me her care and nurtured me at th and loss, ; 5 Ie Cost of ghter'sneed for her mothering. In the racist formation of tech aa ‘watever the poltiesor her later years - there isa danger of being trapped iathe psychic time and space in which a mythical Africa and its landscape. qolours, textiles and music become an imagined but forbidden native space, the metonymic image of the woman whom she the once-child imagines Fas one ofher lost mothers. In her autobiography and celebration of black South African women’s courage and creativity, Call Me Woman,” Ellen Kuzwayo records her meeting with a white woman, Elizabeth Wolpert, who came to Soweto in search of African women’s self-help groups in order to establish a trustin memory of a black woman named Maggie Magaba who nursed her as achild. Elizabeth Wolpert translated that childhood debt into an alliance, a covenanting for social activist struggle which brought traditional strangers into political alliance in the manner of Ruth and Naomi. I was deeply struck by Elizabeth Wolpert’s action. I thought, “That’s a way to turn from the trap and engage in the political struggle for change.’ But then, I couldn't do anything like it. I do not even know ‘her’ name.” When I was younger, people would ask: Where are you from? Identity 5° often a matter of origins. As a white child of a postcolonial trent century, T honestly could not answer the real question: Who are you ie bink? Of what place are you a ‘native’? I could, by way of trying no! "ude, give as a reply the itinerary of my childhood. Born in Bloem! on is ev up in Johannesburg, then moved to Toronto, Canada, and Iter Sled in Francophone Catholic Quebec until, in my MICK 9), OYE to England. I had two nationalities (South Africa” ee Lused op : : British). Thea 1 to pepe (South African) and picked up oie ¢ Bri) ica and his disjoi : ; i jointed story a bit and say sim eary, Tt NaS: rene! 80 further revealing specification would be Mr i Dinh, NOM) Not mere embarrassment about having f© acy recognize thar @White South African, though that was real NOW formation dex 88 expressing the territorialization Of MY Ce. only links wt ani? i8 childhood and in specific social relations W'S), jg a lands & lang People T once loved was, typically» aisPlee Signigee ©? @ territorial signifer: Africa. je Wor exclusions er not of Property but of loss and permanen on v africa’ became rica’ beet,4 Griselda Pollock Pa an/native/other modalit functioned not dissimilarly Saroiu lat mother(s) of a raion Western masculinity. Mt ae to this ‘Africa’ for it is not a spatial historical femininity gy. It is to be hoped that I can never go back to that ey ica" palitieo-economic configuration of colonialism and apartheid whore destruction is being actively struggled for in this our present. Lam using these stories of locations, identities and beginnings to recon. sider the question of nativity, nationality and migration: to fracture the notion of origins as the source of identity both in the colonial discourse on ‘natives’ and in its own fantasies about nativity, i.e. relations to a ‘fantastic’ maternal space and sign. Shall I be like Ruth and affirm loyalty toa chosen national identity - to Britain, to Canada? Or do I remain a South African by ‘birth’, a ‘white’ by acculturation, and thus a ‘racist’ by psychological formation in such a society? At what point can we make these issues political, a matter of covenants, alliances and chosen realignments which involve rejection of original formations and the refashioning of new, painful but negotiated affiliation? But to what South Africa could I want to belong — that of my childhood written in my desire and memory, or toa new and painfully struggled-for democratic space to which I cannot claim any connection? Or can we, like Ruth, throw off a culture, a formation, a tradition and an upbringing, and decide negatively: that is, not to belong to any myth of origin, in terms of time or space? Rather the project is to enter into dialogues, political transactions on the symbolic territories of the international women’s movements. A critically self-examining feminist project allows us the possibilities both of escaping from the political hysteria — hysterics suffer from reminiscences — of colonial formations and of producing futures, new lives for our ‘children’ or our political and cultural progeny based on acts of alliance. T suspect that, in the words of Janina Bauman, writing of the complex choices in her life as a Jewish survivor in postwar communist Poland, that Teale ae of belonging! made acute not because of tourism but land, to nativity a coke i in we be proselytes without a claim toa carol of ay false Hs corre late nationhood, or worse nationalism? The to rein anaes ee story, as well as Gauguin’s story, is that we need lism and identity polities and join ake eee al forms of nations women, in breaking u m and join Lubaina Himid’s well-travelled modern power structures eaters thee and in talking strategies of revenge on the earth. In her powerful Paintin; Furtas S one nee et hols oe in her major 1952 exhibition, Reverse aon carves X 4, 1991) shove energetic dialogue in an interior in iy 1 193 Sc ney ae ne nism) vies with ancient Aftican Egypt, sie ger Cintemational mode’ Sypt, signified in formalized papytsFigure 4.9 Lubai .9 Lubaina Himid, Fi Art Gallery, on oa” Himid, Five, 1992. Leeds, City flowers (writi TS (writing, culture, histo’ . > ry) and a luminous and intense yellow (th 1e lightness an antid + fe) ‘ ae is a jug of eis invented “blank darkness’). On th fit eee, throughout thi appeared in several paintings. Water is a ae Sb joumeys, th ue exhibition. It connotes both the water of the ehh milli on ‘African middle passage, endured but not survived by create pitalism. It is aupeor in the era of European enslavement and aye used by ‘alae celebratory reference to the water beloved and ei ecture. Lubaina Hi Ne civilizations in Africa in their gardens and tical politics of ee work ambitiously creates @ figuration of the orary cult lake the i a8 j he initiative to f sural practice: where tplack women i Which the cultural form the immediate historical nd dilem- nd an tural forms of canonized Western and mé Beath having provided an imagery est etic for 4 rov' a Se oureohies colonial and postcolo tic projects of the lakes ov 4 iS 4% Col + the colour which Gauguin used as his avant-garde gambit, ate that m ne leadi g critic, the ! ade Tahiti exotic, strange © renic. she gives it a historical jstories of al and cultures: 2 dangers al Tevealed to b om © profoundly implicated as nial tourist! le Colou; t that m: cul ade a ‘brown Olympia’ according tool ation. 4 utmakees dtarti akes it articulate conerete 186 Griselda Pollock = Sey GE ee : i sition — the white s is the black/white opposition — the white ang he oe ae reeeied to intervene in this in a major installation, the dark lady. 1987), which critically reworks its referent tex, ; iage i vow a43). The African slave serving coffee to the eager listener i 0 ; woman artist, yet she still finds hers oe i eee on Acie artist into whom she keeps pouring =H ee In ihe Revenge series there can only be black women in the Picture for that is the only way to resist the power of the colonial trope which makes the black ‘woman, native and other’. But as a white woman, Tecan be party to this dialogue, if I am prepared to listen and Participate ina space that is not a matter of doubles and triangles. For the Space is open in the painting, and the table is round, and we all need to discuss strategies of revenge for what Gayatri Spivak calls the ‘abject script modern western history has bequeathed to us’. I am wrenching Lubaina Himid’s painting from its original place in-a large and major exhibition where its meaning was created as a part of complex artistic syntax of women journeying to rewrite the travels of Columbus in 1492, perhaps loosening it from its own act of artistic decolon- ization and reconstruction of a new cartography written to the measure of black women’s desire. I am asking of it to mark a break with the doubling of women so far encountered within the culture of colonial and post- colonial Europeans, be it in the work of Gauguin or my own childhood album. Perhaps I am hoping it can be connected to the story of Ruth -to woman-to-woman covenants across cultures, to reciprocal tenderness between ‘strangers’, to created loyalties and constructed solidarities, to dialogical moments of reciprocated gazes and listened-to voices. ‘After Mourning comes Revenge’, Lubaina Himid has written 2° Against moder- nity’s Spatial travels — colonialism in all its forms and legacies — in order to return in time, we need a present, which is here and now, and it is between us. So I end with an image that utterly displaces from sight both the white man and the white woman, but creates a space at the table of political strategizing for anyone who will listen and f i any other kind of triangle, but th iiallapee eee Said vei h singularity and similarity, difference mat iene othe SNE it we Y, difference and divergence can form the basis of Negotiated connection and politi i i onan apelin covenant for transformation boun NOTES 1 Chinua A “An i oie shebe. “An image of Africa’, 2 Johannes Fabian, Time New York, Columbia Research into African Literatures % ¢ and the Other: How vs Object University Press, toys, A@hropology Makes its Obie li 12 13 14 1sTerri Cannell, The Tourist: A New The note of eg 8 3 penn Ma ks, 1976, ONY OF the Leisure Bool z Ch spokes snielsson, Gauguin in the South aN York, I account of Ga Pink, London oe eae, & Unwin, 1965, gives a ful BC. T want to men’s tim rt ante complete grasp of the langua e in Tahiti, and vs fm called Mane Tupapau, which expion Mo here Ane senna modelling fr the painting. The fim s dant Meta 5 Ceo Mone en t59; Claude Levine” Lévi-Strausg enove ow 16, 1975, PP- 7-29; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trav Massachusens Y Weightman, New York, Athenaeum, 1975, °° /"7Piques [1955 rar nat 1. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writin, | Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1980" 7 MoNelly js thinking of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 2 (1902), in which > ‘She walked with measured steps, di Rustinped eredota ‘dark lady’ ‘s r ‘eps, draped in st coths, treading, the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and fish of bones aments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in th ortat she had brass leggings to her knees, brass wire gauntletste the tore crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step . . . She was savage. And wild-eyed and magnifi- cent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.’ (Penguin edition, 1973, pp. 100-1), For a feminist reading of Baudelaire’s involvement with the ‘dark lady’, see Angela Carter Black Venus, London, Picador Books, 1985, for a short story told in the persona of Jeanne Duval. 8 McNelly, op. cit., p. 10. Zé 9 For discussion of the avant-garde as a game of relate A colour of difference, see my Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-93: Gender Ort re chapter Art History, London, Thames & Hudson, 1993. This s draws on the longer discussion in that book. ats mntalism, London, "0 Grentalism, italy theorized by Edward 2 i oeeanalse the visual Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, has been bias Yoni others, specifically, imagery of Europe’s cultural transactions with it i overica and the neat at, but not exclusively in the Islamic world of North ©The Polis Linda Nochlin’s article “The imaginary Orient 1°P' el Vision, London, Thames & Hudson, 1991, TeViERS we are all Me age Paintings and provides a critical reading of thet Ca c ‘1am indebted to Mieke Bal, Reading Reem an oe niversity Press, 1991, for her analysis of iconOBTD cognition: f= Teference texts and failures to do so: see Ch. 9+ 4, Sten 1 weing stories’, rrionds, #28 Henry a Paul Gauguin, Letters to his Wife wh 4. pP- 177-8. pipferenoo * + 1g potdon, The Saturn Press, 1949, Letter 12° eframorphoss* eas, trans. Reginalg § Postcoloniality and ining» Art acha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, ‘Matrix 8 colour of g-Ettinger, ‘Ma e. nd the ; is oe and her essay included in this eae sp-93: Gender from his elda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits - summer ( ls Two: London, “Thames & Hudson, 199% choles og © famous examples are paintings PY "pacing, 189°" ‘our Seasons) and J.B. Millet, Harveste”sa8 Griselda Pollock oe i pted to Naomi Segal, ‘Readin, . yf the text IS indel 5 I aS 9 16 My thinking about an Naomi’, University of Leeds Review 32, 198999, feminist: the case ‘ ot . 37-57. an’s later formulations on the constitution of ty 7 sm thinking about Lae ze is outside: Lam Jooked at, that isto say Lay fubject Im the scopic felt gare and at the heart of the institution of th a picture. Thisis the Mr erermines me, at the most profound level, in the subject in the visible. ie through the gaze that I enter light and itis visible, is the side tte, Hence it comes about that the gaze is th from the gaze that Irene ee s Hened and through which... 1 am Nh wv. Lacan Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973), photogrape i ae A Sheridan, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1979, pp, bd. J.A. Miller, trans. A- S1CTT Tis concept see K. Silverman, The Acoustic 95-6). For further comm : oD Mirror, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, pp. , me Nochlin, “The imaginary Orient in ‘The Politics of Vision, London, Thames & Hudson 1991, pp. 33-59. ¥ ; aa 19 The reference to Linda Nochlin is from Nochlin, op. cit. R. Dyer, ‘White’, Screen 29: 4, 1988, pp- 44-65; C. Miller, Blank Darkness, Africanist Discourse serch, London and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985. 20 Feminists have done a lot of work on the critical importance of the working- class women who cared for and contributed to the formation of bourgeois children at both social and psychic levels, for instance T. Davidoff, ‘Class and gender in Victorian England’ in Sex and Class in Women ”s History, ed. Judith L. Seton et al.. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; J. Gallop, Feminism ‘and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction, London, Macmillan, 1982. nk Mark, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852], reprinted it Marx and Engels Selected Works In One Volume, London, Lawrence & Wichast, 1968. p. 117; JP. Sartre, ‘Class consciousness in Flaubert’, Modern Occasions 1: 3, 1971. 22 F. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks [1952], London, Pluto Press, 1986: C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, London, Virago, 1987 Steedman soit about tr ae scenes when her mother is criticized by a middle- social worker, the other when her father is chasti icking flowers in a publ ark by the park warden ie for Re We a i ery are that wine etal in these situations ever see their black nannies ers? OUTER TS: ZO both servants’ quarters and trips to the African workers’ homes are severely prohibited. Th ‘ctl ‘butfor me, the memori rohibited. The restrictions are ‘of course broken, RE Oar Ba ee ea garden, jn which may fandily and 1 live i bed up on bricks, its utter contrast to the luxury ed were painful moments — a confusion of feelin#® about the awi iti + < via to ee fil saci hich someone so loved and needed by me Was this situation as a child are limited . poled owen eee Responses 0 this other kind of ‘witness’ ed ~ political activism later ma! be a result of of feelings ation ane ca eeg Social ‘castration’. But this Mer ckrowledged bos) other outcomes — in the = by children raised in these circumstances ¢@" ave upon African women agate Of the male child, sexual uses and abuses, enacted in the European household vere the formulation of bourgeois ‘masculinity Which Freud analysed in his set) Working-class nannies and child minders: the sphere of love? [1912} Praag ane universal tendency to debasement it Harmondsworth, Penguin Pelican Library: On Sexuality Yo! " guin Books, 1977, y y nd 24 Thandabantu Nhl: lapo, * SE Po, “Women’s rights and the family in traditional *Tertitori : Nes Of desire 89 ene Ginwala, ‘Women and the clephan law’, a dont in Putting Women on the Agenda, ed st0! der OP] , 1991, is SCuTB, Rate Winian London, The Women's Press, 198s, ota zwayo, Call ed as domestic servants ate after wi Workingeclass os Ellen kevomen employed countries were, given names by their employers nin the Stas eroded by the employee identity being known only in ih; names, like Julia, Daniel, Pus, sah so iously European id by obvi t: the neeg to . Susan, Bazilii, yomel ‘rican househol ing, London, Virago, 1989, torfuman, A Dream of Pie Bae Art Gallery, Rochdale, England, 7 J. Baum: Himid, Revenge, i \d Maud Sulter. sg Lubaina Him Jill Morgan an 18 Labaint edited by ~ Catalog!