Here as the Centre of the World
Book proposal, by Lucy Cotter

Kurdish poet Cahit Sitki Taranci wrote that as a child he had a map, “a souvenir from school, with continents and seas and coloured countries – a splendid world.” As an adult he hardly knows that world and mourns instead that his map “is all in blood.” Today, many would share Taranci’s sense of loss of a mappable world, a world that could be imagined separate from bloody struggles over trade, oil, territory and cultural hegemony. Those who had hoped in the 1990s that globalisation would enable every place on the globe to have the same value, have been confronted in the 2000s with the reality that there are now thirty mega-cities worldwide that “rise up from a sea of poverty.” The early 1990s embrace of the “peripheries” as new sources of postmodern creativity seems naïve in light of the identity politics that followed in its wake. Postcolonial theorists, such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, highlight the impossibility of creating a tabula rasa that neatly separates contemporary culture from a history of colonialism and unequal cultural flows.
The world cultural order is increasingly complex. Ethnic conflicts have highlighted that “the nation” can be conceived in many ways and that national formations do not necessarily follow cultural formations. Old centre/periphery binaries associated with nations have not fully disappeared but their structures and processes are now secondary to and cannot be defined in isolation from broader global pressures. Furthermore, it has become clear from the Middle East that national belonging does not necessarily override such determinants as religious belonging. Questions surrounding national identity and its relationship to citizenship have also been complicated by the increasing flow of human traffic, to the extent that sociologists talk about the “deterritorialisation of culture.” “Here” no longer implies a direct connection between location, culture and identity.
The current challenge lies in finding the terms with which to conduct global discourses without falling back on culturally essentialist conceptions of pure cultures or using terms like “national culture” or “globalisation” without recognising that they are in danger of remaining a mere projection for much of the world. Since the mid 1990s and particularly over the past five years, thinkers in the fields of political philosophy, sociology and cultural theory have gone back to the drawing board to find ways to articulate a more nuanced relationship between the local and the global. As Chantal Mouffe explains, to be capable of thinking politics or culture today and understand the nature of these new struggles, it is necessary to look at cultures and identities as standing at points of intersection of a multiplicity of subject positions, and of social, economic and technological relations. The writers, artists and theorists in this book engage with the overlapping layers of political, cultural and artistic discourse of each location, often writing from the city itself or viewing the city with the double cultural consciousness brought about by emigration.
It is not coincidental that many of the locations appear to be peripheral or even marginal locations. As political theorist Etienne Balibar suggests, it is in “the zones called peripheral, where secular and religious cultures confront one another, where differences in economic prosperity become more pronounced and strained” that the formation of peoples take place. They are some of the central sites for the re-imagining of the world order. This book looks at a number of locations (such as Diyarbakir and Khartoum) where local struggles for cultural determination or human rights intersect with global struggles for oil and hegemony and where poverty and new industry sit side by side. In its juxtaposition of diverse and highly differentiated locations, the book brings together discourses that often remain separate. To use HannahAhrendt's phrase, the locations are “in concert,” generating at times unexpected crossovers and contradictions.
Rather than remain at an abstract level, the various projects and discourses take the street as a microcosm of the globalising city, which in turn is viewed within and beyond the physical and conceptual container of the nation. In this way, questions regarding identity and citizenship cut across discourses on the use of public space, of surveillance, of heightened censorship. How do we inhabit the ‘here’? How we belong to ‘here’? Balibar points out that the economic inclusion and political exclusion of migrant workers is by no means limited to Europe. In many of the six locations, public space becomes inseparable from, but not coterminous with the existence of a public sphere; the possibility of civil discourse and agency, local and global.
Here as the Centre of the World proposes to make an engaged contribution to the furthering of current cultural debates through theoretical and literary reflections, as well as the intervention of a major artistic research project, which offers a hands-on in-situ counterpart to theoretical reflections and a rich visual insight into the locations at hand. It brings together global names and emerging voices and a gamut of cultural institutions worldwide, offering a valuable platform for discussion, exposure and a creative sourcebook and practical contact point for further cultural interventions.
Endnotes