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.The research on both visuality and diaspora has dramatically increased in the past decade and a significant relation between these fields exists. Visualities constructed in the context of the diasporic experience are syncretic and mix the values and aesthetics of once culturally distinct formations of vision and visualisation. The photography of both Hou Leong and Yean Leng Lim, subjects who have experienced the Chinese diaspora in the Australian context, exemplify the construction of diasporic visuality and the quality of critical syncretism that characterises such visuality. Diasporic visuality involves the deployment of tactics such as syncretism, irony, juxtapositioning and intercultural aesthetic cross-hatching which operate collectively to enact both the specificities of diasporic cultural identity and a cultural politics which challenges exclusionary norms of nationalist subjectivity and culture.While many studies, post-Said's (1978) well-known critique of the Western construction of the Orient he terms Orientalism, have attempted to unmask the assumptions governing the construction of the 'Other' within the cultural practices

Jewish identification and critical theory: The political significance of conceptual categories

“…Times of Israel I explore visual culture in two modern pedagogic contexts: 5 firstly, Jewish educational settings, at Conservative and Reform synagogues in North America, wherein Jews present a vision of non-Jews (''others'') for themselves in the service of fostering the consumption of Judaism and production of Jews; and secondly, the recent move to visualizing tefilah (prayer), in which Jews produce images of Jews and Judaism in order to inspire and cultivate Jewishness. The production of these images when read through the framework of visual regimes often reveals processes of ''autoethnography'' (McFarlane, 2004). The notion of ''visual regimes'' helps us to think about the ways in which social, cultural, spiritual, and imaginative norms are envisioned, established, reproduced and, in many senses, delimited through the production of images.…”