Cartographies of Diasporic Thinking

ABSTRACT

Inspired by Judith Butler’s critique of Zionism, this article explores one artistic practice that may be considered as developing a diasporic thinking that is specifically rooted in the experience of forced displacement in Colombia. We concentrate on an artwork of Colombian artist Libia Posada as an example of the attempt to embody experiences of dispossession and eviction that goes beyond the simple acknowledgment of victimhood that has characterized the work of state institutions in dealing with displaced populations. In her installation, titled Signos cardinales (Cardinal Signs), Posada presents a series of photographs of displaced women’s feet and legs. On these bodily parts, Posada has drawn a map detailing the journey each of these women was forced to take from her native land to a different part of the country, during the armed conflict that has been affecting Colombia since the second half of the twentieth century. We focus on what we believe is the “content” of the diasporic thinking conveyed by this artwork: (1) re-inscribing a memory of displacement, thus aiming at a double exercise of re-appropriation and transformation of identity; and (2) creating a counter-genealogy of the production of space, which in the case of Signos cardinales is concretely established as what we call a “counter-cartography.”

KEYWORDS:

• Judith Butler
• Libia Posada
• Signos cardinales
• diasporic thinking
• forced displacement

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Libia Posada for granting us a long interview which proved key to developing this article, as well as permission to publish images of Signos cardinales.

Thanks also to a very engaged audience in Bucaramanga where an early version of this article was first presented. We also thank Anya Topolski and Louis Klee for their fruitful comments.

Notes

1. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossesion, 18.

2. Butler, Parting Ways, 15. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

3. According to the UN Refugee Agency’s 2017 report on Forced Displacement, Colombia has the second largest number of displaced people in the world, but occupies the first place when it comes to internally displaced people.

4. Following Deleuze and Guattari, a striated space (space strié) is distinguished from a smooth space (space lisse) in that the first corresponds to a regular, calculable, and homogeneous space (as Euclidean space), whereas the second is heterogeneous, acentered, non-calculable, and explorable in a nomadic fashion. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, especially chaps. 12 and 14.

5. CNMH, Una nación desplazada, 16. According to this report, more than 50% of the displaced persons are women.

6. Most of our information on the creation of Signos cardinales was conveyed to us in a personal interview with Libia Posada in June 2018.

7. More specifically, this bodily work was done on twelve women, and on two men who insisted on participating. In our interview, Posada told us that she chose only the photographs of women for the final exhibition.

8. Boyarin and Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora, 14.

9. This use goes back to the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek where verses 28:25 of Deuteronomy mention the forced displacement of the ancient Jews: “Thou shalt be in diaspora in [or among] all kingdoms of the earth [ἔσῃ ἐν διασπορᾷ ἐν πάσαις ταῖς βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς].” Brooke and McLean, The Old Testament in Greek. We thank Louis Klee for this reference.

10. See Habermas, “Notes on a Post-secular Society.”

11. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 131.

12. Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 1.

13. Ibid., 5–7.

14. Boyarin and Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora, 4.

15. Ibid., 4.

16. Unlike Rizvi in “Stuart Hall on Racism,” for whom “diasporic thinking” is a key notion in the context of globalization, emergent transnationalism and cosmopolitan learning, we do not use the concept to champion more comprehensive transnational circuits of communication in a liberal key. Rather, by following Butler, we use the political potential of diaspora to formulate a critique of state violence and its exclusionary nature.

17. Deleuze, Cinema I, 211–14.

18. See, e.g., Agamben, Idea of Prose, 115–17; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka; Butler, Gender Trouble, 165–66, 185–86.

19. Libia Posada, interview with the authors, June 2018.

20. Spinoza’s notion of identity is synonymous with his notion of an individual biography: forgetting one’s memories means forgetting who one is and, by the same token, this means losing one’s life. See Cortés, “Vie, mort et mort en vie.”

21. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, Proposition 39, Scholium. We cite Edwin Curley’s translation in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I.

22. See Vinciguerra, Spinoza et le signe, 155, note 2.

23. See Spinoza, Ethics, Book 2, Postulate 5, after Proposition 13.

24. Deleuze, Pintura, 41–42.

25. Ibid., 52.

26. Libia Posada, interview with the authors, June 2018.

27. Branch, Cartographic State, 5.

28. It is worth noting that the symbols composing the “Non-Conventional Conventions Map” would correspond almost literally to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of a smooth space: “Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: non metric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without ‘counting’ it and can ‘be explored only by legwork’.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 371.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catalina Hidalgo Nieto

Catalina Hidalgo Nieto is currently working on a Masters in psychoanalysis at the University of Paris 8, Saint Denis, and lectures at the School of Human Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario, Bogota, Colombia, where she also earned a Masters in philosophy. Her research interests are aesthetics, contemporary political philosophy, and feminism. She is part of the Red de Estudios Críticos–Latinomérica (REC–Latinoamérica).

Nicolas Lema Habash

Nicolas Lema Habash is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He completed a Master’s degree in Ancient philosophy at the University of Oxford, and is currently an associate researcher at the Centro de Estudios Históricos, Universidad Bernardo O’Higgins (Chile). His research focuses on Spinoza and contemporary French philosophy, and he has published on the history of philosophy and on Latin American thought and cinema.