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No Master Territories

TRINH T.MINH-HA*

CENTRE AND MARGIN

THE IMPERVIOUSNESS IN the West of the many branches of knowledge

to everything that does not fall inside their predetermined scope has been
repeatedly challenged by its thinkers throughout the years. They extol the
concept of decolonization and continuously invite into their fold ‘the
challenge of the Third World.’ Yet, they do not seem to realize the
difference when they find themselves face to face with it—a difference
which does not announce itself, which they do not quite anticipate and
cannot fit into any single varying compartment of their catalogued world;
a difference they keep on measuring with inadequate sticks designed for
their own morbid purpose. When they confront the challenge ‘in the flesh,’
they naturally do not recognize it as a challenge. Do not hear, do not see.
They promptly reject it as they assign it to their one-place-fits-all ‘other’
category and either warily explain that it is ‘not quite what we are looking
for’ and that they are not the right people for it; or they kindly refer it to
other ‘more adequate’ whereabouts such as the ‘counter-culture,’ ‘smaller
independent,’ ‘experimental’ margins.
They? Yes, they. But, in the colonial periphery (as in elsewhere), we are
often them as well. Colored skins, white masks; colored masks, white skins.
Reversal strategies have reigned for some time. They accept the margins; so
do we. For without the margin, there is no center, no heart. The English
and the French precipitate towards us, to look at themselves in our mirror.
Following the old colonizers who mixed their blood in their turn, having
lost their colonies and their blondness—little by little touched by this
swarthy tint spreading like an oil stain over the world—they will come to
Buenos Aires in pious pilgrimmage to try to understand how one cannot
be, yet always be (Ortiz 1987:96). The margins, our sites of survival,

* From When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics
New York and London: Routledge, 1991.

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become our fighting grounds and their site for pilgrimage. Thus, while we
turn around and reclaim them as our exclusive territory, they happily
approve, for the divisions between margin and center should be preserved,
and as clearly demarcated as possible, if the two positions are to remain
intact in their power relations. Without a certain work of displacement,
again, the margins can easily recomfort the center in its goodwill and
liberalism; strategies of reversal thereby meet with their own limits. The
critical work that has led to an acceptance of negativity and to a new
positivity would have to continue its course, so that even in its negativity
and positivity, it baffles, displaces, rather than suppresses. By displacing, it
never allows this classifying world to exert its classificatory power without
returning it to its own ethnocentric classifications. All the while, it points
to an elsewhere-within-here whose boundaries would continue to compel
frenzied attempts at ‘baptizing’ through logocentric naming and
objectivizing to reflect on themselves as they face their own constricting
apparatus of refined grids and partitioning walls.
The center itself is marginal…[H]ow possible is it to undertake a process
of decentralization without being made aware of the margins within the
center and the centers within the margin? Without encountering
marginalization from both the ruling center and the established margin?
Wherever she goes she is asked to show her identity papers. What side does
she speak up for? Where does she belong (politically, economically)?
Where does she place her loyalty (sexually, ethnically, professionally)?
Should she be met at the center, where they invite her in with much display,
it is often only to be reminded that she holds the permanent status of a
‘foreign worker,’ ‘a migrant,’ or ‘a temporary sojourner’—a status whose
definable location is necessary to the maintenance of a central power.
‘How about a concrete example from your own culture?’ ‘Could you tell us
what it is like in…(your country)?’ As a minority woman, I…As an Asian-
American woman, I…As a woman-of-color filmmaker, I…As a feminist,
a…, and a…I…. Not foreigner, yet foreign. At times rejected by her own
community, other times needfully retrieved, she is both useless and useful.
The irreducibility of the margin in all explanation. The ceaseless war
against dehumanization. This shuttling in-between frontiers is a working
out of and an appeal to another sensibility, another consciousness of the
condition of marginality: that in which marginality is the condition of the
center.
To use marginality as a starting point rather than an ending point is also
to cross beyond it towards other affirmations and negations. There cannot
be any grand totalizing integration without massive suppression, which is
a way of recirculating the effects of domination. Liberation opens up new
relationships of power, which have to be controlled by practices of liberty
(Foucault 1988:4). Displacement involves the invention of new forms of
subjectivities, of pleasures, of intensities, of relationships, which also
implies the continuous renewal of a critical work that looks carefully and

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intensively at the very system of values to which one refers in fabricating

the tools of resistance. The risk of reproducing totalitarianism is always
present and one would have to confront, in whatever capacity one has, the
controversial values likely to be taken on faith as universal truths by one’s
own culture(s)….

OUTSIDE IN INSIDE OUT

…Essential difference allows those who rely on it to rest reassuringly on its
gamut of fixed notions. Any mutation in identity, in essence, in regularity,
and even in physical place poses a problem, if not a threat, in terms of
classification and control. If you can’t locate the other, how are you to
locate yourself?
One’s sense of self is always mediated by the image one has of the
other. (I have asked myself at times whether a superficial knowledge of
the other, in terms of some stereotype, is not a way of preserving a
superficial image of oneself.)
(Crapanzano 1985:54)
Furthermore, where should the dividing line between outsider and insider
stop? How should it be defined? By skin color (no blacks should make
films on yellows)? By language (only Fulani can talk about Fulani, a
Bassari is a foreigner here)? By nation (only Vietnamese can produce works
on Vietnam)? By geography (in the North-South setting, East is East and
East can’t meet West)? Or by political affinity (Third World on Third
World counter First and Second Worlds)? What about those with
hyphenated identities and hybrid realities? (It is worth noting here a
journalist’s report in a recent Time issue, which is entitled ‘A Crazy Game
of Musical Chairs.’ In this brief but concise report, attention is drawn on
the fact that South Africans, who are classified by race and placed into one
of the nine racial categories that determine where they can live and work,
can have their classification changed if they can prove they were put in the
wrong group. Thus, in an announcement of racial reclassifications by the
Home Affairs Minister, one learns that: ‘nine whites became colored, 506
coloreds became white, two whites became Malay, 14 Malay became
white…40 coloreds became black, 666 blacks became colored, 87 coloreds
became Indian, 67 Indians became colored, 26 coloreds became Malay, 50
Malays became Indian, 61 Indians became Malay…and the list goes on.
However, says the Minister, no blacks applied to become white, and no
whites became black (Time 9 March 1987:54).
The moment the insider steps out from the inside, she is no longer a
mere insider (and vice versa). She necessarily looks in from the outside
while also looking out from the inside. Like the outsider, she steps back and
records what never occurs to her the insider as being worth or in need of
recording. But unlike the outsider, she also resorts to non-explicative,

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nontotalizing strategies that suspend meaning and resist closure. (This is

often viewed by the outsiders as strategies of partial concealment and
disclosure aimed at preserving secrets that should only be imparted to
initiates.) She refuses to reduce herself to an Other, and her reflections to a
mere outsider’s objective reasoning or insider’s subjective feeling. She
knows, probably like Zora Neale Hurston the insider-anthropologist knew,
that she is not an outsider like the foreign outsider. She knows she is
different while at the same time being Him. Not quite the Same, not quite
the Other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she
constantly drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition,
her intervention is necessarily that of both a deceptive insider and a
deceptive outsider. She is this Inappropriate Other/Same who moves about
with always at least two/four gestures: that of affirming ‘I am like you’
while persisting in her difference; and that of reminding ‘I am different’
while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at….
Whether she turns the inside out or the outside in, she is, like the two
sides of a coin, the same impure, both-in-one insider/outsider. For there can
hardly be such a thing as an essential inside that can be homogeneously
represented by all insiders; an authentic insider in there, an absolute reality
out there, or an incorrupted representative who cannot be questioned by
another incorrupted representative….
In the context of this Inappropriate Other, questions like ‘How loyal a
representative of his/her people is s/he?’ (the filmmaker as insider), or
‘How authentic is his/her representation of the culture observed?’ (the
filmmaker as outsider) are of little relevance. When the magic of essences
ceases to impress and intimidate, there no longer is a position of authority
from which one can definitely judge the verisimilitude value of the
representation. In the first question, the questioning subject, even if s/he is
an insider, is no more authentic and has no more authority on the subject
matter than the subject whom the questions concern.
This is not to say that the historical ‘I’ can be obscured or ignored, and
that differentiation cannot be made; but that ‘I’ is not unitary, culture has
never been monolithic, and more or less is always more or less in relation
to a judging subject. Differences do not only exist between outsider and
insider—two entities—, they are also at work within the outsider or the
insider—a single entity. This leads us to the second question in which the
film-maker is an outsider. As long as the filmmaker takes up a positivistic
attitude and chooses to bypass the inter-subjectivities and realities
involved, factual truth remains the dominant criterion for evaluation and
the question as to whether his/her work successfully represents the reality
it claims would continue to exert its power. The more the representation
leans on verisimilitude, the more it is subject to normative verification.

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