Re-membering the re-enacment

From the above it follows that rather than representing history as majoritarian event, memory or repetition of history needs to question the underlying assumptions of the representation and become minoritarian. Thus the turmoil occurring in relation to the 150th anniversary of the emancipation of the Danish slaves can be seen as a disruption and a questioning of the re-enactment and the History it was repeating. The scare of the disruptiveness of Bryan, causing turmoil, throws into relief the consumerism of the re-enactment and the celebrations. His perceived aggressiveness brought forth the complicity of the white colonisers (whose admirable (speech)act of emancipation was on display and in focus) and made apparent ‘the comfort found in repressing its own complicity’ (Parr 2006: 134) as well as exposing it to be neo-colonialist and imperialist. The turmoil or disruption, I think, may present a challenge to the representation in that it exposes it as a construction, which in turn is underlined by the Danish actor’s remark that he will ‘probably not be going on stage today…’. It is not that Bryan’s political agenda ‘wins’ over the agenda set for the re-enactment event, rather the disruption brings about the possibility of creating a new historical beginning that signals new ways of remembering and writing history (Parr 2006: 142).

Through encounters with others, processes occur and as mentioned above, the disruption opened up potential new spaces for interpreting the event. But did it enable a process of possible becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) or did it reposition the binary of oppression and hegemony? The encounter of the event in the event as it was abruptly presented in the documentary was aggressive and frightening, and I argue that the un-contextualised aggression blocked the possibility of an affirmative generated becoming. Instead the aggression forced a dialectic positioning of ‘us’ and

‘them’ which denied the viewer a chance for empathy or ethical response – in contrast, ‘[t]he nomadic subject thus engages with his or her external others in a constructive, “symbiotic” block of becoming, which bypasses dialectical interaction’

(Braidotti 2002: 119). Moreover, Bryan underscores the dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’

103 This is obviously not the same use of the term and the concept of destiny which Amartya Sen (2006) critiques.

and reconstitutes a structure which he holds in common with the Historical view.

Bryan calls on an identity-based approach to historical accounts – an approach which re-stabilises or fixates what his intervention into the re-enactment event de-stabilised.

Bryan exchanges History for another History – but a History nonetheless – when he insists on a closed experience of slavery generating a binary of two respectively reciprocal entities. As discussed throughout chapter 1, I believe identity politics to be limiting the dialogues and relations between people in that it denies access to a common humanity of what might be termed singular relations. It also re-posits memory in the reterritorialising realm of History and common social imaginary.

***

If both the genealogical archival accounts and the memory-driven and legend-based accounts of history are simply re-territorialising and majoritarian and what is suggested is rather creative imaginings and productions of re-inventions, how may journalism enable another form of memory production devoid of binaries and negative drives? How may the binary of post-colonial politics and representations be challenged by and through journalism-becoming-minoritarian? A journalistic practice that stays aware of the constant repositioning of journalistic production and journalistic subjectivity may be part of an answer. I suggest in chapter 2 that the journalist-subject prevents a reterritorialisation in that s/he would enable a constant re-negotiation and re-positioning in relation to the community and the topic of the journalism produced. This might be by means of a reworking of cosmopolitan journalistic subjectivity, which consists of a displacement and an estrangement from cultural and political hegemony while acknowledging that the journalist-subject always remains a part of this hegemony. Because of the singular presence of journalist-subjects in the field the re-negotiations and re-positioning are ethical relations as described in the first three chapters, and to which I return in the conclusion to this dissertation.

1.7 CONCLUSION

The fixity of identity-based understandings of the social imaginary is prevalent in the documentary Slavernes Slægt (Larsen 2005). Relations across generations, continents and historical realities are understood to be the foundation of personal as well as

national identity. Larsen (implicitly and sheltered by the practices of journalism and of journalistic practice) argues that ‘we’ as Danes need to reject¹⁰⁴ the Danish historical narrative about the colonial past in order to imagine ourselves as the other and thus change our relation to others and to act in solidarity and moral responsibility in the future. The project is noteworthy and appreciated, but it does not manage to straddle the gap between the experience or reality of the Crucian and the Danish conception and perception of social imaginaries and historical reproductions. It stays within an idea of dialectic postcolonial relations. The two-headed memory of archives and legends is too simplistic and reductionist in this context and runs the risk of essentialising yet another European/colonial binary. This means that the power relations between (former) coloniser and colonised remain the same and are seen as natural and fixed. The naturalisation and fixity strips the subject of responsibility and thus denies the subject an opportunity to act and assume accountability for historical and current cultural memory productions. Moreover, the identity-ridden accounts of genealogical and historical accountability merely express fixed and punctual entities making up History, because they are based on limited archival knowledge-power relations (Bastian 2003). What is needed instead is a multilayered notion of power and relations, so that (journalistic) cultural memories may change the world and perception of interrelationships which in turn may make a call for affirmative journalism of relation and ethical accountability.

The Deleuzian nomadism of memory emphasises the processes in-between the historical events and experiences. ‘The coherence of this system is the result of the affinity and empathy that allowed for the preliminary selection to be made in the first place, resulting in storage of the data in or as memory’ (Braidotti 2006: 172) and if so, then it is important to acknowledge the points of remembrance available. If we want the social imaginary to change through a re-definition of common cultural memory of the past or by nuancing and diversifying the historical accounts, we need to make available alternative ways of empathising, which are not based on citations of texts as clumps of factual events ready for re-enactment, but to think of text as ‘a relay point between different moments in space and time’ (Braidotti 2006: 171, my emphasis)

104 Rather than re-inventing the historical tradition (Hobsbawm 1983), which to some extent would deconstruct the identity politics, Larsen argues for a replacement of the old narrative with an already constituted other.

connected to a rhizomatic thinking process.¹⁰⁵ Such a nomadic methodology sees memory as process connected to creative productions. It redefines history from a linear progressing account of past events to a rhizomatic, non-unitary and ethical understanding of remembrance embodied and embedded in (journalistic) subjectivities. It also redefines inter-relations accordingly – as a web of multiple co-constructions of affirmative forms of mutual specification by subjects that are complex and in-process.