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in between cultures
The In Between Cultures. The Canary Islands in the Atlantic Axis project should be seen within the framework of the dialogue among cultures that to a large extent shapes the debates among intellectuals and other social actors and the transformations that the process of globalization has brought about. The Canary Islands are located on the articulating axis of a number of cultural, economic and geopolitical relations that have encouraged links between the islands and the Spanish mainland and northern Africa, as well as with Subsaharan Africa, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali or Cape Verde. The project is to be understood as well against the background of UNESCO's attempts to strengthen cultural industries and the “symbolic” capital of the societies of emerging countries in world markets. For, as Frederic Jameson suggests, the present can only be understood in terms of the “logic” of a late capitalism, in which both its culture and economy evolve along parallel paths to reveal the structural layers that underpin the current historical transitions.
Rather than taking refuge in an exclusive identity model or surrendering their cultural heritage under the weight of economic and political globalization, we believe that each of the “local” cultures and traditions to be found within the global context should jointly aim at developing some shared values beyond the diversity that characterizes them -always on the premise that culture and economy are not antagonistic, that they can be critical and subversive in their transforming potential. On the understanding that art is not only suffused and impregnated with social elements but is also conditioned by other factors such as the economy, and that cultures discover themselves in each other, the Gabinete Literario de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria will promote a number of events (symposia, virtual exhibitions, thematic exhibitions, discussion fora, blogs that will chronologically gather texts from several authors, publications and so on) in the hope not only of generating critical discourses, as David Harvey has set forth, vindicating the right to the city and to human as opposed to mercantile values, but also of bringing about a modernization of the relationship between the I and the Other on the basis of a dialogue that allows for the discovery of the Other in terms of equality and interdependence, laying aside the stereotypes that lead different cultures to look at each other without seeing or understanding each other. And this on the assumption that each culture looks on the “other” as on an event, as an open door, as a chance to establish new bonds in a plural space that overcome the anthropological and ontological differences between cultures and their specific self-referential traits .
After the breaking and suppression of traditional barriers anchored to colonial and ethnocentric concepts of “us” and “them”, it becomes necessary to seek a dialogue and encounter between cultures, pointing also to the relevance of imaginary productions to social constructions, and the importance of social constructions in imaginary productions. In other words, it is necessary to seek a three-way dialogue or encounter among cultural manifestations in the Canary Islands, mainland Spain and Africa, a dialogue whose possibility and condition would be precisely its own limit or absence of dialogue: “For dialogue to take place”, the Iranian thinker Ramin Jahanbegloo has stated, “ we need not just its absence, but for the limit between one and the other to display certain conditions that will make the dialogue or its rules possible”.
All the above places our project squarely in the midst of the theories of interculturality, which, according to the theoretician Arjun Appadurai, argue for the existence of powerful alternative forms of organizing the traffic of resources, of images, ideas and forms which either challenge the nation-state actively or amount to peaceful antagonistic alternatives that conjure up large scale political loyalties.
Thinking “beyond the nation” (understood as the last bulwark of ethnic totalitarianism) but taking into consideration the multiple fragmentary national realities is not only a recurrent theme in the studies of global politics, but it can also be very clarifying in our field of work: the field of visual culture and contemporary theory of art and its position between the global and the local: what is the position of the local, of local identities (we no longer speak of national, regional, vernacular, peripheral, ethnic or subaltern identities) within the scheme of global flows? What is the meaning of the local (and in addition to the local, of contemporary subjectivities) in a world of diasporal flows, a world that has undergone a process of deterritorialization, a world, moreover, where the electronic mass media are transforming the relationship between information and mediation?
These and other related issues will be raised at the different events organized within the In Between Cultures. The Canary Islands on the Atlantic Axis project. These events will be staged within the framework of an “intercultural” philosophy that overcomes the old dichotomy between identity and difference and which encourages the dialogue between different national contexts through a greater appreciation of subjectivities, of the particular realities of every human being beyond an “ethnic” concept and through a more intense dialogue, relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial, between the universal and the local. An intercultural rather than a multicultural approach in as much as the latter would distance itself from the Other by means of a privileged universality, whereas the interculturalist, at least in their most idealized form, would erase any distinctions, defending a shared universality above all: “We are all universal. We are all exotic”.
Image detail: Alfredo Jaar, Emergency, 1998. Courtesy of the author.
Travesías Culturales
