Islanded Lives: Envisioning the Tourist As Migrant

Islanded Lives: Envisioning the Tourist As Migrant1 Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián – f.j.adrian@durham.ac.uk Please do not cite or reproduce this text without the author’s written permission. El Mégano In this paper I engage with a short film made in Cuba in 1955 that film scholars – scholars as influential as British critic and filmmaker Michael Chanan – consider in various ways to be both rare and important. This short film, called El Mégano, was made by one of Cuba’s renowned filmmakers, Julio García Espinosa (1926-2016), in collaboration with a key director of Latin American and Third (or ‘Third-World’) cinema, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996). The film was produced, filmed and edited illegally in the last decade of capitalist Cuba in the early 1950s. Chanan writes: El Megano [sic] became something of a cause célèbre when it was seized by Batista’s police at its first screening at the University of Havana. Julio García Espinosa, as head of the group that made it, was taken away for interrogation. He was released on condition that they bring the film to the police. The group used the breathing space to look for a way of getting a copy made. (Chanan 2004, 110)2 For such a rare film – a film that barely made it outside Cuba and thus entered transnational film consciousness as a pre-revolutionary oddity –, El Mégano seems to be experiencing a second life, or at least a European second life.3 I had the opportunity to see it a month ago in Madrid’s Reina Sofía Art Centre, where it featured as the opening 1 screening of a series on the cinema of the Cuban Revolution curated in part by Michael Chanan: ‘For an Impossible Cinema. Documentary and Avant-Garde in Cuba (19591972)’. It will be screened at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival in November 2016. Clip 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gni19znGZs When El Mégano was first screened for a group of students and professors at the University of Havana in 1955, the island of Cuba was a de facto dominion of the United States. Cuba was a notoriously favourite destination for North American, European and Latin American exoticist travel and tourism. This was the heyday of hemispheric imperialism and, while decolonial movements grew and expanded across the former colonial world, conservative and authoritarian political regimes also thrived in this first decade of the so-called Cold War. In 1955 – the year of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia –, Cuba had started a transition from sugar island to tourist island.4 This “transition” (a transition with several turns, setbacks and transformations) was sometimes enacted in the visual cultures of the revolutionary period, in films as diverse as I Am Cuba (1964) and The Godfather: Part II (1974). The meaning of what I am calling here a transition involves a transformation in the discursive and representational production of images and stereotypes of Cuba. On one hand, the cultures of sugar growing and refining had long been tied to the histories of slavery, indentured labour and intra-Caribbean migrant labour. On the other, the “sugar islands” of the 2 Atlantic and the Caribbean had long been the objects of travellers’ and, increasingly, of tourists’ attention since the second half of the 19th century. I am interested in responding to what I see as El Mégano’s strategic elision of industrialized sugar making for the sake of something (something) as obscure and precarious as the manual extraction of submerged wood – a form of underwater logging – for the purposes of coal-making. Yet this is not a docudrama about extractive ecologies, but about the material and figural status of precarious lives. The figure El Mégano seeks to represent is testimonial rather than representative of Cuban reality at large, but in presenting us with the challenge of its imperfectly stated contours, it is the film’s intention (its cinematic gaze or lens) that becomes an instance of migrant – if by migrant we understand s/he or that which migrates with a purpose, and whose mobility is driven by a desire to locate an adequate figure for political urgency. In other words, I am arguing that the “tourist gaze,” that I conceptualise here, somewhat playfully, as “tourist lens,” shifts away from predictably tourist subjects and “migrates” in search of a different (migratory, migrant) context. El Mégano represents a peripheral and transitional visuality – arguably, a dying visuality – that now returns not so much as a revenant in the Derridean sense, but as lost memory, old enough to be reconsidered, yet for a long time not valuable enough and therefore conveniently and perhaps unjustly forgotten: “First, cinema – at least for Derrida – is a medium with an overtly spectral structure. It projects image-bodies that are neither living nor dead. Like ghosts, the apparitions on the screen linger in between presence and absence” (Bachmann 2014). Of course El Mégano is also important from a film history perspective. It bridges Italian neorealism and other cinemas of poverty and 3 precarity, and it is an early precursor, if not an example, of a Latin American film movement called “imperfect cinema.”5 In Chanan’s view: Neorealism was a strong element in the film’s style, in the shaping of the narrative, and in the use of non-professional actors, but the film can also be taken as belonging to a tradition of documentary denunciation incorporating reenactment that goes back to Borinage of 1934, by Joris Ivens and Henri Storck, and some of the work of the British documentary movement of the 1930s (Chanan 2004, 110). In my reading, while retaining both Derridean and film-historical accents, I seek above all to recuperate, retain and consider the living and material aspects of the filmic text, not just its referential and spectral dimensions. Islanded Lives The questions I try to address today are: What remains and persists of that way of seeing from Cuba? What remains and persists of a singularly Cuban and Caribbean visuality? And what has been incorporated into ways of looking at Cuba and other Caribbean spaces and Global South economies of seeing and silencing today? I am thinking through Michaeline Crichlow and Pat Northover’s book, Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (2009); with Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011); with Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labour (2013); with Saskia Sassen’s Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014); with Thomas Nail’s The Figure 4 of the Migrant (2015); and with Sharmani Patricia Gabriel’s and Fernando Rosa’s recent edited volume: Cosmopolitan Asia: Littoral epistemologies of the Global South (2016). Several categories in these books are relevant to my argument because of the different ways in which they insist on defining spatial and global thinking locally and figurally.6 Let me start with these two analogous figures of the tourist and the migrant. For me, the tourist and the migrant do not necessarily embody different ways of seeing and being seen, but facets, figures and limits of an insular and archipelagic visual dialectic. Rather, they bracket two diverse extremes that can either obscure or encourage archipelagic, non-dualistic thinking.7 At least in this short paper that both figures – tourist and migrant – represent or, rather, evoke, two ways of being materially on or of the island – the island of Cuba, the Caribbean island, and the islanded context of labour that we are witnessing today. These are visualities of the margin, or what I have called elsewhere perspectives off the margin (Hernández Adrián). The islanded lives are of course frightfully our own, side by side with the racist and racialized, the privileged and disenfranchised that the media claims we are or we are not. What, then, of the island in these islanded lives? To envision the tourist as migrant might involve us as participants on both sides of my ludicrous formulation: are we not, if we choose to be – implicated as both those who see and those who are seen? Might we imagine a practice of the migrant gaze that transcends the temporalities, inequalities and borders separating the leisurely tourist point of view from the arrested and paradoxical conflation of the migrant-native-refugee into one monstrous, amphibian formulation? 5 Envisioning Leisure The tourist is the privileged trope and figure of the necessary outsider in Caribbean, Atlantic, Mediterranean, African, Pacific and Northern contexts. The tourist enacts, elicits and obscures visualities. It produces rich and troubled oppositions, surveying, documenting and missing other figures, or simplifying them: the native, savage and picturesque subjects of photography; the indigenous, creole and authoritarian islander; the grotesquely subservient, mixed-race and intermediary other of tourist and postcolonial transactions; the diasporic and displaced immigrant; the precarious seasonal worker; the balsero (rafter); the illegal alien, the refugee, the detainee, and the slave – all faces and (disfigured) figures of the “disposable people” of our present, protagonists of ever increasing practices of spatial and biopolitical control, commodification and expulsion (Bales; Sassen).8 There are vast and deep visual archives beckoning us to study how these figural entanglements have changed throughout late modernity and continue to change today. The migrant, diasporic or not, somehow remains hidden from sight or represents too much visuality, an ideologically charged and aesthetically overwhelming sincerity of the body in space, the shored-up, islanded body.9 Hidden from the banality of mediatised visuality, eluding representation and discourse, the migrant operates like white noise or parasite, an unseen and even unfelt travel companion of contemporary modernity. Yet, the migrant also moves, travels, sees and perceives, producing precious little in the way of translatable discourse. The migrant is more spoken about than genuinely represented or remembered – its traces are vague, its contours are quickly disembodied and figured, 6 they are forgotten in this way. They strike, leave again, and enter myth rather than consciousness, a bit like disempowered but potentially, insidiously threatening pirates. Clip 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gni19znGZs The Sinking Present The lives in El Mégano are islanded in the sense that their taskscapes or spaces of labour, bodies, communities and elusive pasts are singularly bound to a specific aspect of Cuban experience that is both contiguous with plantation economies on the island and simultaneously separate from the context of Cuban neo-colonialism under US tutelage.10 Unlike neo-realist films like Visconti’s La terra trema (1948) and Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), El Mégano remains outdoors and outside, incapable or unwilling to enter the realms of familiarity, domesticity and community that undergird national fictions. And yet its outsider subjects seem encamped and oppressed by the very space of labour, slavery and precarity that they figure. In Rossellini’s Stromboli, the female protagonist, Karen (played by Ingrid Bergman) says: ‘This is a ghost island’. Karen arrives in the small volcanic island of Stromboli after marrying an Italian islander, but she not a concentration camp survivor – she is a detention camp refugee, perhaps a Nazi collaborator, perhaps a perpetrator of some of the violence she is now trying to escape. The ghosts in the island are her displaced own, and Europe’s ghosts. There are no ghosts in El Mégano and in the cinematic languages that it helped shape. Amphibious, only half human in the labour context, these uneasily Cuban subjects are alive and immersed in tropical water, rubbing against wet, rotten wood. These fishers 7 of dead wood are half boats, half fish, and half fishermen. These are images that, like those of other extractive and manufacturing activities, express a prosthetic intimacy with the tools, means and spaces of labour. The spaces of labour I have in mind here are mining; certain forms of fishing (Tabu); and certain modern and contemporary kinds of textile and other sweatshops. Through its re-inscription of hat fragile bedrock in film history, Italian and Italian-inspired international neo-realism, El Mégano prefigures a cinema of scarcity, poverty and precarity – but also a cinema of passion and compassion, resourcefulness, resistance, and political defiance. Toiling in water is a kind of social, political and cinematic fable: “Life is not about stories, about actions oriented towards an end, but about situations open in every direction. Life has nothing to do with dramatic progression, but is instead a long and continuous movement made up of an infinity of micro-movements” (Rancière 2). El mégano considers an elemental scene not only in cinema but also in historical consciousness. And yet, this is a Cuban film that had a direct influence on the cinema of the Cuban Revolution and, indirectly, on Third Film – and on the films of the Global South. More than foundational, this was an exemplary film, yet its meaning is of course deferred, like all cinematic meaning, through the very conditions of photographic and cinematic construction. El Mégano is a reflection of the swamped, sinking present. This short film is a hybrid of the documentary and the neorealist fable. 11 It also announces spaces of resistance that are bound to local, singular political struggles and wildly far-reaching strategies of visual and material resistance across the Global South (Comaroff and 8 Comaroff 1-50). We might be sinking back into the rising waters of economic, biopolitical, and ecological transformation. * * * We, too, might have become amphibians, our lives paradoxically less mobile, more islanded than we thought. I end in a quotation that did not make the spoken version of this paper: ‘The voice [the visuality and filmography, the ideological and geopolitical contexts] reaching us from a great distance must find a place in the text. Thus primitive orality has to be written in the ethnological discourse: the “genius” of “mythologies” and religious “fables” (as the Encyclopédie puts it) has to be written in a scholarly discipline, or the “voice of the people” has to be written in Michelet’s historiography. What is audible, but far away, will thus be transformed into texts in conformity with the Western desire to read its products’ (De Certeau 159; my insert in square brackets). What is this “place in the text” evoked in De Certeau? Whose visual text and whose place remain as we confront the fable of El mégano? There are places, not only place, in the relative remoteness of this visual text that challenges us from that halfsubmerged island of Cuban and Caribbean visual histories. What, then, of the figures that these places invoke and whose traces remain? And what lies before, beyond these figures? 9 Works Cited Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” Trans. Ralph Manheim. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 11-78. Bachmann, Michael. ‘Derrida on Film: Staging Spectral Sincerity’. The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Cultural Memory in the Present), eds. Ernst Van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. 214-29. Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Cassano, Franco. Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean. Ed. and trans. Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary. London: British Film Institute, 2007. ---. Cuban Cinema. Minneapolis and London: U Minnesota P, 2004. ---. The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba. BFI and Indiana UP, 1985. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Crichlow, Michaeline, with Patricia Northover. Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes of Fleeing the Plantation. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Davies, Catherine. “Modernity, masculinity and Imperfect Cinema in Cuba.” Screen 38.4 (Winter 1997): 345-59. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 10 Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia, and Fernando Rosa, eds. Cosmopolitan Asia: Littoral epistemologies of the Global South. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Hardt, Michael. “Today’s Bandung?” A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible? Ed. Tom Mertes. London and New York: Verso, 2004. 230-36. Hernández Adrián, Francisco-J. “Wolfgang Tillmans’ Still Islands: Photographic Aesthetics off the Margin.” Third Text 28.4-5 (2014): 377-92. Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 15274. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labour. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Nail, Thomas. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London: Routledge, 2003. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry eds. Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. London: Routledge, 2004. Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. 11 Filmography El mégano (dir. Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1955) I Am Cuba (dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, Cuba and Soviet Union, 1964) The Godfather: Part II (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974) La terra trema (dir. Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1948) Paisà (dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1946) Stromboli (dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1950) Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (dir. F.W. Murnau, USA, 1931) 1 I am grateful to Marie-Claire Barnet, Simon During and Alice Feldman for their generous questions and reactions to the first public reading of this evolving piece at the “Risking the Future: Vulnerability, Resistance, Hope” conference, Durham University, 12-13 July 2016. http://matarikiriskhumani.wixsite.com/matariki-risknetwork/single-post/2016/04/05/CFPRisking-the-Future-Vulnerability-Resistance-Hope 2 I am provisionally keeping Chanan’s 1985 and later, expanded 2004 version of his influential study of Cuban cinema in the list of works cited. Both versions represent important moments in the critical construction and subsequent reevaluation of Cuban cinema cultures in the Cold War period and in its aftermath. Both books helped shape Chanan’s views in his more recent The Politics of Documentary (2007). 3 Mégano is a Spanish word that can be translated as dune or swamp. Notice the semantic overlap with médano and, by extension, arenas movedizas: colloid hydrogel, quicksand. 4 The reference to Bandung is not coincidental. As Michael Hardt notes: “Rather than opposing the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre to the World Economic Forum in New York, it is more revealing to imagine it as the distant offspring of the historic Bandung Conference that took place in Indonesia in 1955. Both were conceived as attempts to counter the dominant world order: colonialism and the oppressive Cold War binary in the case of Bandung, and the rule of capitalist globalization in that of Porto Alegre. … [W]hereas Bandung was conducted by a small group of national political leaders and representatives, Porto Alegre was populated by a swarming multitude and a network of movements. This multitude of protagonists is the great novelty of the World Social Forum, and central to the hope it offers for the future” (Hardt 230). 5 See Catherine Davies’ important piece, and in particular the following two paragraphs: “By 1970 these revolutionary ideas and practices had been formulated into a theory of cinema or, more precisely, an aesthetic, a ‘new poetics’. Labelled in Latin America as Imperfect Cinema it was hailed as the continent's response to the Hollywood industry which since the 1920s had monopolized film production. Filmmakers such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Argentina) and Julio Garcia Espinosa (Cuba), whose 1970 Cine cubano article ‘For an imperfect cinema’ began with the words 'nowadays perfect cinema – technically and artistically masterful – is almost always reactionary cinema', turned material shortcomings into an advantage. If Perfect Cinema was technically ‘perfect’, expressing a conformist ideology in 12 seemingly neutral forms by means of nonintrusive camerawork creating an illusion of the real, Imperfect Cinema on the other hand (taking its cue from Italian Neorealism, French New Wave and cinema verite) was creative, popular art challenging the mass culture of acquiescent consumption. It aimed to present a plurality of non-judgmental, non-prescriptive expositions of the problems faced by ‘people who struggle’ as a process: in Garcia Espinosa's words ‘to show the process of a problem is like showing the very development of the news item, without commentary’. Its preferred form was critical socialist realism which simultaneously produced and undermined the illusion of the real. In this respect Imperfect Cinema encouraged criticalcognitive ‘lucidity’, as well as the emotive-utopian aspects of cultural work. Cuban cinema thus positioned itself at the cutting edge of countercinema practice” (346). 6 That is, figurally and not only figuratively. I am drawing on Erich Auerbach’s insight in his 1938 essay, “Figura”: ‘Originally figura … meant “plastic form”’ (Auerbach 11). 7 I am mindful throughout this talk of two important books whose authors have been ‘travel companions’ in thinking about Caribbean and tropical visualities for some time (Sheller; Thompson). I am particularly conscious of chapter 2 in Sheller: ‘Iconic islands: nature, landscape, and the tropical tourist gaze’ (Sheller 36-70). 8 The rhetoric, tropology and ideological extent of these and other, no less fraught figures, is rhizomatic in volume and critical contours. I am thinking of such figures as they appear in the work of Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, David Rousset, Jacques Derrida, Gloria Anzaldúa, Arjun Appadurai, Giorgio Agamben, Étienne Balibar (especially his pieces on the “sans papiers” and on refugees), Ursula Biemann, Franco Cassano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Saskia Sassen, Michaeline Crichlow and Patricia Northover, Ariella Azoulay, Claudia Milian, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Thomas Nail, and Verónica Gago. 9 Thomas Nail attempts to expand the figure of the migrant by narrowing it down, in my view, to the rather stable categories of “the Nomad,” “the Barbarian”, “the Vagabond,” “the Proletariat” (Nail 130-75). Although he conceptualizes “kinopolitics” and “pedetics,” he does not engage with the work of Franco Casano, which offers a view from the (Mediterranean) South – Cassano writes about “thinking on foot” and “homo currens” – or more recently, the work of Comaroff and Comaroff, speaking from – and for – an African South (Nail 21, 125; Cassano 9, 41; Comaroff and Comaroff 1-50). 10 On taskscapes see Tim Ingold’s claims: “I argue that we should adopt … what I call a ‘dwelling perspective’, according to which the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves” (Ingold 152). He lays out what he means by ‘dwelling perspective’ more precisely in the following passage: “One of the great mistakes of recent anthropology – what Reynolds (1993: 410) calls ‘the great tool-use fallacy’ – has been to insist upon a separation between the domains of technical and social activity, a separation that has blinded us to the fact that one of the outstanding features of human technical practices lies in their embeddedness in the current of sociality. It is to the entire ensemble of tasks, in their mutual interlocking, that I refer by the concept of taskscape. Just as the landscape is an array of related features, so – by analogy – the taskscape is an array of related activities. And as with the landscape, it is qualitative and heterogeneous: we can ask of a taskscape, as of a landscape, what it is like, but not how much of it there is. In short, the taskscape is to labour what the landscape is to land, and indeed what an ensemble of use-values is to value in general” (Ingold 158). 11 I locate Rancière’s reading of Jean Epstein’s film poetics (Rancière’s emphasis on the Aristotelian fable/story distinction) in neorealist and post-neorealist formalism. El mégano, a 25minute short film and docudrama, is about the same length as the first section or “fable” in Rossellini’s Paisà. Its contents, however, come closer to the slightly shorter last section. 13