THE NEW FLÂNEUR

Abstract

Situated within subaltern cultural studies, and building on the work of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin, this essay tells the story of the ‘new flâneur’, a recent immigrant and refugee group of continental francophone African youth, who are attending an urban French-language high school in south-western Ontario, Canada. In it, I offer an alternative cultural framework of ‘translation’ and ‘negotiation’ as a way of seeing that which is supposedly competing and conflicting is indeed re-de-and-transformed and negotiated into New ways that make them radically performed. Their radicalness stems, precisely, from the notation that displaced identities, the focus of the paper, are not oppositionally articulated; on the contrary, they are negotiated, translated, and re-born in a more complex and hybrid space: a third one. This hybridity, I will show, is habitually performed in and through language – in its broad semiological sense. As part of an ethnographic research project, the essay will show the different ways in which the new flâneurs form and perform their identities. Here, the Old and the New are not ethnographically observed in competition; both are translated in the identity formation processes and in the process, they are negotiated so that both are found in the same sentence, in the same garments, at the same time to produce a third hybrid space.

To walk is to vegetate

To stroll is to live

Balzac

Keywords:

• subaltern cultural studies
• African youth
• Canada
• blackness
• identity
• hybridity
• language

Notes

1. I am using flâneur in its nomadic sense, where nomads, especially desert nomads, do not walk aimlessly as the original meaning suggests. They have a destiny and have a macro- and micro-knowledge and understanding of what surrounds them geographically, culturally and linguistically. The new flâneur, however, are still learning, they are ethnographers and translators of that which surrounds them. One might refer to them as the post-modern nomads who can easily travel corporeally and intellectually from South to North and vice versa thanks to digital technology and accessibility of transportation. For this paper, I am interested in the physical displacement, the actual corporeal move. As we shall see, the new flâneurs I am talking about here are not the most privileged, they moved to the North, namely Canada, because of war and civil unrest. Privileged or not, their identities, I conclude, are best understood within what Stuart Hall (1991) calls New Identity [see Chris Jenks (1995) for other definitions of the flâneur].

2. I understand semiotic space as a symbolic market of exchange or a field (Bourdieu 1991) of language, culture, history and memory where identities are both formed and performed. It is a space of symbolic signs where the value of any sign is not determined in relation to a pre-existing entity or a concept, but by their relationships with others in a system. Corollary, signs are both producers and a product of a system of meaning and representation; and language, signs and their meaning are historically, culturally and socially produced. As I conceive it, the semiotic space of in-betweenness is an operative psychic space that allows one to function in two separate, yet interrelated systems of culture, language, history and sociality. And thanks to translation and negotiation, as we shall see, it enables the subject to function in, and articulate (Hall 1986), two semiotic systems that, on the surface, have no points of connection. Canada and Somalia, for example, I will show, have the strongest connection within the ‘third space,’ the articulation of trialectic identity.

3. Modestly, my intent is not to create a dichotomy between textuality and reality, but to be contextually specific. My approach to this debate is closer to Handel Wright (1998, 2003a, 2003b). Talking about African orature, literature, and cultural studies, Wright (2003a) convincingly argued that, we ‘need to acknowledge and incorporate traditional African orature, new media and popular culture text, the expertise of non-academic teachers (e.g. traditional griots), an emphasis on performance and the utilization of literature in African development. The result is a discourse and praxis that obfuscates borders between text and lived culture, the academy and the community, the canonical and the popular, the literary and the socioeconomic, electronic and traditional texts’ (pp. 810–811). This is why my study is influenced as much by textuality as by ethnographic ‘reality.’ It is to be found in what Stuart Hall (1997) calls ‘dirty intersection’ of text and context.

4. For Simon and Dippo (1986, p. 195), critical ethnographic research is a set of activities situated within a project that seeks and works its way towards social transformation. This project is political as well as pedagogical, and who the researcher is and what his or her racial, gender, and class embodiments are necessarily govern the research questions and findings. The project, then, according to Simon and Dippo, is ‘an activity determined both by real and present conditions, and certain conditions still to come which it is trying to bring into being’ (1986, p. 196). The assumption underpinning my project was based on the assertion that Canadian society is ‘inequitably structured and dominated by a hegemonic culture that suppresses a consideration and understanding of why things are the way they are and what must be done for things to be otherwise’ (p. 196).

5. All names are pseudonyms.

6. Here is Amani's (17-year-old, grade 12, from Somalia) reflection during my focus group interview with female students on the contention that identification is the starting point of identity formation: ‘We have to wonder why we try to really follow the model of the Americans who are Blacks? Because when you search for yourself, search for identification, you search for someone who reflects you, with whom you have something in common’. Amani seems to name blackness as a site of interpellation (Althusser 1971), the Other that entered the Self only to become part of it.

7. A 19-year-old male from Djibouti who has been at the school since grade 8; he is the school rapper and ‘the Jordan’ of the basketball court.

8. A 20-year-old male from Djibouti who was ‘pushed out’ of school; he presently hosts a show at CUIT, a local radio station in Toronto, where he airs rap in French and English.

9. A 15-year-old Djiboutian girl and amongst the African girls Najat is the most ‘popular’ girl in the school and the most identifying with Hip-Hop culture.