Figure 1 Miss Hybrid by Shirin Allabadi
The above photograph by Iranian artist Shirin Allabadi (Figure 1) is titled Miss Hybrid. The woman in the photograph blows gum defiantly into a viewer’s face. This is an example of an act of creative resistance to the gaze and orientalist representation. Moreover, it is a rejection of a way that the hegemonic forces of Iranian society would like to represent women in their society. We are used to stereotypical representations of Eastern women, whether they are images of women in burkas or Gerome’s harem odalisques, and here we have something different. Allabadi takes the issue of representation of ‘Oriental woman’ into her own hands. She presents a sum of cultural signifiers that question a traditional and ‘authentic’ representation of Iranian women – nose patch that alludes to recent surgery, denim jacket, blonde wig, ‘Western’ symbol of chewing gum, blue contact lenses. Allabadi brings us a young Iranian woman from the streets of Teheran, with a hybrid mixture of cultural signifiers that subvert the stereotypical dualistic representations of Easterner versus Westerner. Miss Hybrid ‘blows’ those pre-conceptions back into the viewer’s face.
The theoretical framework of hybridity and hybrid identities has historically been linked with the cultural politics of ‘migration’, especially in the writing of Homi Bhabba (1991). The actual migratory processes reveal the stark power inequalities of globalisation. There is the pressing context of growing economic inequality and wars in Middle East that have resulted in the increasing migration of people to the EU and the West. In 2015 Europe was affected by its biggest refugee crisis since the 2nd World War (DePillis 2016). The map (Figure 2) shows the direction of the migrant route into Europe. If compared to the map (Figure 3) of my Dis-Orient Express journey, it shows a similar migratory route, but in the opposite direction.
Figure 2 The map provided by the BBC to illustrate migration of predominantly Syrian refugees in 2015
Figure 3 The map showing my research journey from London to Istanbul in 2012
In the context of my point about the opposing directions between the research journey and the flow of migration, the maps above reflect on the stark inequalities between many others and myself who like me can travel freely through Europe and those who are struggling to make the journey to Europe in pursuit of basic human rights. However, it is perhaps worth pointing out that I made a similarly perilous journey from the occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina, just before the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, to arrive in Britain. My journey followed the same migration route that is currently being followed by the refugees from the Middle Eastern conflicts.I do not want to conflate these experiences, but I venture as far as to state that this radical change in personal circumstances supports my argument on fluidity of identity as opposed to fixity of identity, reinforcing the postmodern view of identity as fluid and open to change.
In 1995 I was a refugee fleeing to Western Europe, and nearly twenty years later I was a PhD researcher tracing the opposite direction. This view of identity as open to change may appear abstract and complacent to those who are displaced and in pursuit of basic human rights, but it is emancipatory and full of hope. In my artistic practice I have investigated the play of the multiplicity and liminality of identity, in order to understand my experience of displacement and wider powers that are implicated in structuring group identities.
The maps fittingly illustrate the multi-directional migratory processes that have come to define what it means to be European today. The picture is very different to a hundred years ago when the Orient Express was in its prime. Europe today is characterised by growing anxieties over immigration of people from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, particularly immigration of Muslims, who have historically been seen as ‘the Other’ to a European Christian white identity. In 2007 Sneja Gunew in her lecture entitled Who Counts as European? From Orientalism to Occidentalism asked the following question:
Who, after all, would have predicted that the familiar binaries would resurface with such a vengeance and that they would seek their origins in those constitutive old myths of East and West, Islam and Christianity? Once again we have the claims made on behalf of the modern Self in terms of having a privileged access to modernity, which includes the moral high ground of being more civilized and more ethical, although no histories support this, as we know. (Gunew 2016)
Looking more broadly, the current refugee crisis of 2015/2016 is another outbreak of a long-term condition of global crisis, or in the words of Naomi Klein of ‘crisis globalisation’ (2007). When viewed through the prism of this urgent context of global inequality, the concept of migration uncovers the need to make a distinction between those who chose to travel and those who have to. As Carol Becker says in The Romance of Nomadism:
Unfortunately, the world now seems divided between what Jacques Attali calls the rich and poor nomads: the nomadic elite who travel at will, expanding their world, and the disenfranchised poor who travel because they are desperate to improve their conditions. However indigent artists may sometimes be, we in the art world are very distinct from those migratory laborers who cross borders illegally, return again and again, live on the margins, negotiate cultures because there is no other way to earn a living. These people move at constant risk to their lives without the romance of travel or the delirium of adventure (2009: 27).
Those who manage to break through the ever-growing fences of the ‘Fortress Europe’ often face stereotyping and reductive labelling along the lines of their political status. The language of crisis that has shaped the representation of the recent refugee situation by the mass media and government politics does not acknowledge the counter-narratives of the ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’ themselves. While some sections of the media give diverse opinions, mass media works to categorise the immigrants (especially if they happen to be Muslim) as the number one threat to British security, stability, economy and system of values. However, the post-colonial turn in studying how cultures interact points out a two-way process, which blurs the divisions between ‘the Other’ and ‘the Westerner’ and as such, migrants are the agents, rather than victims in this cross-cultural exchange. As Rocio G Davies (et al) claim:
Migrants often strategically use mass media, such as film and television, and the visual and performance arts to claim cultural space, social visibility, or a political voice. (2010)
More recent post-colonial perspectives on histories of modernity (Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer) have questioned the euro-centric normative view of history as a discourse by which ‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Kenyan’ and so on’ (Dipesh Chakrabarty 2010: 1). The new trans-culturalist perspectives have highlighted how aesthetic and political practices of migrant artists show multidirectional appropriation and cross-cultural borrowing. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers, edited by Kobena Mercer (2008), takes a global, non-eurocentric perspective to show the numerous ways in which artists of hybrid identities have re-shaped our collective imaginary. In The Migrant Image by T.J. Demos (2013) we are shown critical and creative ways that artists have intervened in the cultural politics of globalization. These re-orientations and de-colonisations in thinking have pointed out a much more complex landscape by which ‘Others of Europe’ have come to shape Europe as a site of multi-directional influences and powers.
Artworks such as Allabadi’s ‘Miss Hybrid’ point out the value of artistic agency in re-shaping the dominant stereotypes that serve particular political purposes. The value of such artistic practices is even more emphasised in the times of a diminishing tolerance of difference, as we are witnessing at present. The artists that inhabit hybrid identity, especially those who have decided to tackle the complexities of that identity as part of their art practice, have an opportunity to intervene productively in the current political landscape.
(re-written from my PhD thesis 2017)
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Chakrabarty, D. 2010. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts? Representations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories 1992: 1-26
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