Susan Leigh Foster examines this paradox, asserting that deeper awareness of one’s own movements––logically, an intensely interospective and therefore private ‘lived experience’ of one’s own body––actually allows access to understanding how another moving body might feel, a body that is external yet at the same time continuous with the subject…Kinesthesia, in short, implies an intimacy with the other that is sustained by an intimacy with the self.
-Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment
In thinking about the act of coming into presence, it is impossible not to address the body, both one’s own body and the bodies of others. Indeed, Diana Taylor begins ¡Presente! with a quote from Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui on walking and talking with others before I can become myself. In class, we have participated in workshops where we don’t verbally speak but rather communicate through our bodies; I have found this practice to be especially powerful because it involves a heightened sense of attention to one another, a deeper layer of coming into presence, hacer presencia. I can talk to you with my back turned, but if we are communicating through our bodies, if you are following my hand with your face, there is no chance that we can establish a dialogue without facing each other, without following each other’s movements and developing a shared rhythm-dialogue with intense concentration. Carrie Noland’s conceptualizations of the gestural self and embodied agency further remind me of the importance to physically be with each other in everything we do– and to be in touch with an intimacy with the self– I read this intimacy as an exercise in vulnerability, or how we may unmask ourselves. In attempting to answer –at least partially– the question of how we can “be with”, I find dance to be especially pertinent to understanding both our own body and how our bodies share space, and am looking forward to exploring collaborative movement further in our group project.
But back to the topic at hand: I think that what we keep returning to here is a new relationality –or awareness of the inherent ways we are all connected to each other– in the face of ongoing colonialities of power (Quijano) tied to the violence of racial difference and erasure of non-Eurocentric epistemologies and knowledges. Therefore, being together becomes a form of radical resistance against the state of division that characterizes our current world.
In materializing the many ways these structures of difference appear, I find Taylor’s inclusion of biological studies important as we must recognize the toll that extractive practices are taking on our environment and the fact that we share this planet with nonhuman forms of life. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter has been key to my own understanding of the relationships that exist between us and the material world, and how these assemblages make themselves appear in acts of thingness that implicate us in relationships of responsibility that we can no longer ignore.
I also hold an interest in how Taylor characterizes “betweenness and negotiation as integral components of thought and presence” (5), or of “being with.” We can point to a representation of temporality as time-in-between, we are always in-between the past, present, and future in the notion of spiral time, or to our existence in a state of in-betweenness in terms of personal or cultural identity. I personally relate to Taylor’s anecdotes of growing up between two cultures as a first-generation Chinese American– diaspora has taken a central role in my research as I attempt to understand movements between geographies that create a physical and emotional sense of existing in-between. Kim Cheng Boey, a Singapore-born Australian poet of Chinese descent, says that through migration, “transit has a way of lasting” (26). Moving to Gloria Anzaldúa’s The New Mestiza, I find her text especially poignant because she captures the pain and violence –”The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta” (3)– that has followed the constructions –physical and within nationalist discourses– of the border. Let us recognize that the migrant is not necessarily safe upon crossing the border either, as the female migrant especially may be subjected to a precarious existence marked by fear and vulnerability, and forced to live in a legal and subjective sense of in-betweeness.
While I thoroughly enjoyed Anzaldúa’s book, I find it important to highlight that the term mestizaje, especially in Mexico, did not only represent a “theory…of inclusivity” (77), but was also used by the nationalist post-revolutionary government to instill violent processes of exclusion on populations such as the Chinese, that did not fall into the narrative of mestizaje (conceptualized by Vascocelos as a mix between “Whites, Blacks, and Indians”). I am interested in examining these violences that occur at a transnational level and how we may confront and move beyond the limits of cultural hybridity, a demanding exercise in itself of “being with.”
Boey, Kim Cheng. Clear Brightness. Glebe, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2012. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. United States: Duke University Press, 2009. Noland, Carrie. Agency and Embodiment. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2009. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Boderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987. Print.