Multiplex cultures and citizenships
by Francio Guadeloupe
“His dance was like a carefully placed explosive that destroyed the prison houses of race, gender, class, and ethnicity with which we imprison others and ourselves. His torso, his smile, his arms, his legs, moving with a syncopation that was majestic in its humbleness and humble in his majesty, told a story that these prison houses often make us forget: humankind is essentially a No to all categories of identity.
He was still a Bahia man, a black man, a poor man, an oppressed man, a favela man, and more than likely a patriarchal man. But he was all this in a different way. these were identifications, not his essential identity (as if he had any). he was a verb not a noun. Pure movement, embodied differance – differing and deferring, not to be pigeon holed in anyway. His dancing touched me in a way that forced me to move out of the common senses that blinded me from seeing without truly seeing. And though we did not speak, he remained a stranger that i gazed at and he gazed back with his body, I thank him for giving me the sight that allows me to feel (and therefore to affectively see) the human beyond exclusionary identity labels.”
This is the first paragraph of my new essay in the edited volume of Nicholas Faraclas which presents views about and from the Dutch Caribbean and beyond. Something I know Ini Statia, Rose Mary Allen, Gregory Richardson, Ieteke Witteveen, Guno Jones, and Michiel van Kempen, among others, have been on the forefront in promoting. Theirs is a critical scholarship on the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Check it out peeps:
Multiplex cultures and citizenships: multiple perspectives on language, literature, education and society in the ABC-Islands and beyond. Ed. Nicholas Faraclas a.o. Uitgave: Willemstad: FPI, Fundashon pa Planifikashon di Idioma, 2012, omvang 445 pagina’s.
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