|
Monica L. Miller,
"Taking the Temperature of True North"
(page 3 of 3)
In "Stranger in the Village," James Baldwin certainly paid the "price
of the ticket" for his racialized, gendered and sexualized journey into
a white "European" space. In True North, the ticket seems to be
bought and paid for before we even get there. Again, this change
matters because now, as Julien's film reminds us, we have a new place
within which to explore black identities, an actual new landscape (the
polar north), but most importantly, a new place in the mind. As much as
True North is about actual polar exploration, it seems to me that
it offers the possibility for a new mental landscape, one that
encourages us to expand our thinking about the diaspora, as not simply a
journey away from "home," riddled by the experience of loss, dominated
by the hope for return. The Arctic may be a new route to and for
diasporic thinking, but I see True North as a reminder about
other roots for the field ideologically and methodologically. We have,
over the last few years, been trained to see race and racialization
intersectionally, with attention to the way in which race, gender,
sexuality, class, nation are interstitial categories of identity
formation and expression.[6]
True North asks us to add another
"intersection" to that list, one that I'm going to call "temperature."
Taking the "temperature" of diaspora adds another dimension to it, not
of geography, but of an investigation of phase, of multiple home
"states." "Temperature" in True North is an expression of space
and time, represented by the repeated images of transformations between
water, snow and ice that are associated with black presence and agency
in the film. "Temperature" points our attention to the motion between
different states of being; the possibility that identity, blackness,
diaspora is routed/rooted not just in motion, but in transformation,
endless change of phase. I like to think that near the beginning of
the film, when we see the black female figure stumble, perhaps fall into
a crevasse or a kind of polar "black hole," we should think not of loss,
but rather transportation into another "black" place or state, another
home-like diasporic phase or location. We travel toward True
North to get to this place, only to realize, once there, that we
have already arrived.
Endnotes
1. Brent Edwards, "Diapora," Keywords for
American Cultural Studies, eds. Burgett and Hendler (New York: New
York University Press, 2007): 83. [Return to text]
2. Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black
Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke
University Press, forthcoming Fall 2009). [Return to text]
3. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1992). [Return to text]
4. James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" in
Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York:
Literary Classics of the United States (Library of America)): 117-129. [Return to text]
5. Baldwin, 129. [Return to text]
6. For an originary moment of this critical
paradigm, see Kimberle Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of
Color" Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241-99. [Return to text]
Page: 1 | 2 | 3
|
