Diaspora, cultural practice and syncretic visuality

Abstract

This paper offers an investigation of the relationship between diaspora, cultural practices and the field of visuality studies. Since the groundbreaking work of Edward Said, there have been ample studies on the formation of a colonial Western gaze which has objectified people living in the non‐West, indigenous populations in colonised or formerly colonised nations and migrant groups in Western societies. More attention needs to be given, however, to the visualities produced by these very subjects. Such visualities demonstrate transculturation and autoethnography in the context of global visual politics and are often a contestation of both colonial and exclusionary nationalist visualities. This paper specifically explores the syncretic quality of visualities produced by subjects of the postmodern diasporic experience—in this case, the photographers Hou Leong and Yean Leng Lim who have experienced the Chinese diaspora in the Australian context. It argues that such syncretism is produced through an intercultural mixing of visual regimes and that diasporic visuality often exhibits an ironic and critical dimension (i.e. a critical syncretism) that challenges norms of nationalist subjectivity and culture.