Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory

Fashion Theory
The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20
Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory
Nirmal Puwar
To cite this article: Nirmal Puwar (2003) Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory, Fashion Theory,
7:3-4, 257-274
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/136270403778052023
Published online: 27 Apr 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 25
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfft20
Download by: [Washington State University Libraries ] Date: 11 April 2016, At: 06:18
Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory 257
Fashion Theory, Volume 7, Issue 3/4, pp. 257–274

Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2003 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.
Downloaded by [Washington State University Libraries ] at 06:18 11 April 2016
Exhibiting
Spectacle
Nirmal Puwar and Memory
Nirmal Puwar is a Senior Lecturer/ The body is a cipher that awaits deciphering . . . what allows the
Research fellow in Sociology at
seen body to be converted into the known body, or what turns the
University College Northampton.
Her publications include the book spatial organisation of the body into a semantic organisation of
Space Invaders: Race, Gender, vocabulary—and vice versa—is the transformation of the body into
Bodies out of Place (Berg, 2003)
extension, into open interiority like a book, or like a silent corpse
and a co-edited book with P.
Raghuram, South Asian Women placed under our eyes.
in the Diaspora (Berg, 2003). She de Certeau, reprinted 2000: 158
is on the editorial collective of the
international journal Feminist
Review. Enter cyberspace to do an Internet search for the words “Asian women”
and what is delivered? For the most part, porn sites where bulletins
attempt to entice viewers with their highly reified and exoticized images
258 Nirmal Puwar
and commentaries. These assemblages are not all that different from the
colorful glossy cards squeezed into the tiniest of gaps in public telephone
cubicles. In an instant these dial-ups promise to take you to another land,
through the body of a woman. The sexual difference is channeled within
a set of national framings. While the websites offer a taste of different
parts of the “East” in digestible portions for the Orientalist palate within
speeded-up multicultural capitalism, the fondness for these flavors has
long routes embedded in highly “civilized” parts of genteel society. The
courteous and the not so virtuous have sought a way into “Other”
cultures, both culturally and physically, through the bodies of women.

Scientists, artists, novelists, politicians, and academics have all found
visions of landscape splayed out on and in women. They have looked at
them, and through them, as spectacles, in order to make sense of the world
and to fashion its language. There have also, however, been significant
interventions in these imaginings. Exhibits, displays, performances, stage
drama, film, and photography have all been sites of intervention for
revisiting the trauma of the (un)clothed body of racially ethnicized women.
Bodies, Borders and Maps
Highly intricate classifications and taxonomies have placed racialized

bodies as prized possessions in cabinets of curiosity, in both private and
public collections. They have been peered at with what at best can be
described as an unhealthy exuberance. Patricia Williams mentions the
“racial voyeurism” in existence today, which propels “bus loads of tourists
[to] flock to black churches on a Sunday morning” in black neighbor-
hoods like Harlem in the United States. Sardonically she remarks, “It’s
great theatre, according to the guidebook hit list of hits, all those black
people dressed in their quaint finery, singing and swooning and singing
some more” (Williams 1997: 19). A parallel process is in operation on a
global scale. Tourist industries market the adventures of other countries
whose cultures offer a spiritual and sensual journey. And it is no coinci-
dence that airlines and tourist boards have the body of a woman in
“national” costume that promises the gentle transition of a journey into
another world.
The bodies of women are often called into play in the operation of
boundary markers between different constituencies and communities.
Allegories of the nation commonly feature women’s bodies in monuments,
anthems, and money for instance, where they symbolize national beauty,
virtue, and the “essence” of the nation. As McClintock puts it “women
are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary
and metaphoric limit . . . Women are typically constructed as the symbolic
bearers of the nation” (1995: 354). Moreover, colonial landscapes are
often imagined through the language of the female body. Maps have for
instance been conceived in terms of female breasts (see Young (1996: 63)
for comments on Haggard, and McClintock (1995: 22) on Christopher

Columbus). Global distinctions between the “West and the Rest” (Hall
1992; Said 1994) or the civilized and those in need of civilization (read
colonization) produce difference through the body of women.
In marking territories that go into the making of imperial nations, the
banknotes of France offer a case in point. On French colonial banknotes,
unclothed “dusky native maidens” with tropical fruits and lush vegetation
were featured next to their clothed, “civilized” sisters from the West. Thus,
who was nature and who was culture was held up for all to see. Repre-
sented as spectacles of both exotic desire and passivity, the “dusky native
maidens” exemplify the Orientalist construction of “Other” cultures as
simultaneously fantastic and demonic. They are exoticized as sensuous,
seductive, and full of the hot, spiritual aroma of the East, and simultane-
ously subjected to the barbarism of their own cultures. Hence, in comes
the knight in shining armor, representing the white man’s burden or indeed
the white woman’s burden (Spivak 1988; Rajan 1993). A rich literature
in the area of race and gender has helped us to see how ideas about “third-
world difference” are marked by a paternalistic attitude towards women
in the “third world.” Within this difference “third-world women as a
group are automatically and necessarily defined as: religious (read ‘not
progressive’), family-oriented (read ‘traditional’), legal minors (read ‘they-
are-still-not-conscious-of-their rights’), illiterate (read ‘ignorant’), dom-
estic (read ‘backward’), and sometimes revolutionary (read ‘their-country-
is-in-a-state-of-war; they-must-fight!)” (Mohanty 1988: 80). This political
pantomime has been played out over and over again throughout time and
in different temporal and social contexts, and textualized through political
speeches, literature, the arts, and popular culture.
Live Exhibits
There was a time when people from these other “strange,” “unusual,”
and “exotic” countries were actually transported to the metropoles of the
West to display their difference and distinctiveness from Europeans. At
the British Empire Exhibition (1924–5), which took place in Wembley
(London), alongside the display of trade, business, travel, manufacturing,
and scientific developments, there was a live exhibit of people brought
over from the colonies to offer audiences an “authentic” taste of what
life was like in these other worlds (Bennett 1999; Lidchi 1997; Rydell
1999). Similar exhibitions, where people from what were seen to be
distant worlds were organized in live displays to mimic the everyday lives
of these peoples, also took place in several other Western cities. The
Exposition Universelle (Paris 1867) and the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase
Exposition in 1904 are famous examples. Anthropologists, along with
scientists, often had access to the people used in the live exhibits, behind
the scenes and before the exhibitions were opened to millions of visitors.
260 Nirmal Puwar
These occasions enabled researchers to get close to, dissect, categorize,

and classify what were seen to be rather peculiar, alien, but nonetheless
fascinating creatures. Such curiosity about lives and objects that lie across
the shores is a longstanding feature of exploration, discovery and enlighten-
ment. It is an intellectual habit embedded in the very social fabric of
knowledge construction (Scheurich 1997).
The story of Saartje Baartman, known as the “The Hottentot Venus”
(Gilman 1985; Hall 1997) exemplifies how the bodies of women were
pivotal to distinctions of “us” and them within the West. Baartman was
an African woman who was brought to England in 1819 by a Boer farmer

and a doctor from South Africa. She was exhibited on a raised stage
throughout London and Paris as a spectacle of what was perceived to be
the “strangeness” of African female sexuality. Not only did the general
public observe her as some sort of freak show (similar to how they viewed
John Merrick, derogatorily known as “The Elephant Man”); intellectuals
took a central position in looking at her. They dissected every detail of
her anatomy, wrote articles, gave lectures, and made wax models of parts
of her body. Baartman’s buttocks and genitalia were represented as
strangely pathological and intriguing at the same time. This inspection
continued even when she was dead and parts of her body are to this day
preserved in the Musée L’Homme in Paris.
Preserving “Traditions”
One of the fortes of museums has been the preservation of culture. They
have acted as the guardians of all that is in danger of getting lost with
time. Museums are jam-packed with collections (mostly hidden behind
the scenes) usually initiated as private possessions of men and women who
traveled the world, which have been taken from ex-colonies. The Pitt
Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford is a case in point. Here
drawers and drawers of cabinets of curiosity containing objects, photo-
graphs, and manuscripts from all parts of the world are available for
public viewing on three crammed stuffy floors (http://units.ox.ac.uk/
departments/prm). Initiated as a private collection gathered by Lord Pitt
Rivers during his various expeditions around the world, the items are
organized in accordance with a typological evolutionary classificatory
schema which slots different cultures in different places on the evolu-
tionary ladder. Although today the assumptions behind the collection have
been disputed and contested, the museum exemplifies how knowledge has
been framed through a Eurocentric mind-set, which has measured “Other”
cultures in relation to itself. Rivers was particularly keen to collect for
the sake of preservation; he feared that many of the “primitive” cultures
risked being wiped out. Interestingly, the threat of extinction is an often-
repeated justification for bringing back items from different countries.
There is a particular fascination with having an authentic piece of what
are read as “traditional” items.
Items of female clothing frequently figure in displays that attempt to

teach the audience something about the rules and rituals of “traditional”
societies. Particular ceremonies, especially weddings, are discussed through
a whole set of associated items. The dress of women draws on familiar
narratives, mentioned by Mohanty above, which show the beauty and
the beautification processes surrounding the bride, who is subjected to
the pacifying effects of tradition. Thus exotica and despotic practices are
intermeshed in this particular framing of traditional cultures. Tradition
itself is seen to imbue static and timeless qualities characteristic of the
essence of a particular grouping. In these flat, simple, depictions, the

notion that what counts as “tradition” might be a contested category
fought over in hegemonic struggles is disallowed (cf. Mani 1998). There
is no disputing the fact that people who are curators or audiences of these
kinds of exhibits want to learn about other cultures. They have a keen
interest in wanting to know about the meanings of all the intricate
affectations of “traditional” rituals. However, it is too easily assumed that
different ways of organizing life can easily be translated into European
idioms. Moreover, the interpretations are repeatedly funneled through
dichotomous notions of modern and traditional societies. While modern
is read as progressive, rational, democratic, and enlightened, conversely
traditional is located as fixed, ahistorical, spiritual, and mythical.
Museums that endeavor to display representative collections in the light
of postcolonial migrations to the metropoles are also prone to the traps
of dichotomous thinking. Seeking to show something from the “ethnic
communities” who reside in their cities, they bring in what are read as
“cultural” items into their usually dimly lit crevices. Musical instruments,
pots and pans, food packages, and the bridal wedding dress are regular
items found on display. People from racialized communities are usually
pleased to see these items if only because they give racialized minorities
a visible place in the stories of the nation. Their roles, for instance, in the
making of the industrial age, either through empire and trade, or as
workers in factories, are hardly ever mentioned or acknowledged. The
copious space and time given over to war histories is also unable to cope
with the place of “black” soldiers and those from the ex-colonies who
fought in the struggle against fascism (Gilroy 1987; Phillips and Phillips
1999; Ramdin 1999). War stories and memories are whitewashed and
fastened to selective national stories. Instead racialized minorities are
anthropologized. The fact that their wedding dresses or food practices
are constantly changing is overlooked in the search for neat relics of a
bygone age, which they are seen to quaintly carry on. They are part of
the here and now not as moderns but as vestiges of an exotic essence. Such
forms of museumization are marked by a deeply problematic multi-
culturalism that has been harnessed to institutional regimes in the name
of diversity. It is a multiculturalism that embraces the international in neat
bundles of “culture” rather like the international family of little dolls in
national costume. The long colonial lineage of contact, the dynamic
262 Nirmal Puwar
making of postcolonial lives and the ever-moving intermeshed nature of

cultures and histories are lost, forgotten, and erased.
Exhibitory Interventions
The limited categories through which the bodies of racialized minorities

have been understood is an aspect of everyday life. It is a “look” that is
felt as one walks down the street, gets on a bus, shops or works (Fanon
1986). It is possible to ignore it but regular reminders will ensure that you
do not forget. At the same time, though, it is important to bear in mind
that the racialized look and treatment does not define how ethnically
racialized groups live life. There is resistance and there is joy, memory,
and desire, in spite of the force of racism (Hall 2002). On a daily existence
people intervene and disrupt racist framings. Negative, bad or misleading
images are not simply reversed by positive, good, and complex stories,
but rather categories which limit and strait-jacket are rerouted out of their
enclosures into an openness that breathes life into fresh directions while
having a conversation with long-established spectacles.
Coco Fusco employs performative tactics to “tease” and “irritate” the
reified, fetishized, and commodified body of the black and Latin subject
(Fisher 2001: 228) found within serious academic enterprises such as
museums, capitalist markets, and the tourist industry. Her performances
are enacted in a variety of public sites, including shopping malls, open
squares, as well as museums and universities. Fusco uses her own body
to show how stereotypical representations of the “Other” operate in
collective consciousness. Through performative-fictive blasts from the
past, she brings to the surface the deep residues of colonial and racist
fantasies that are still in operation in multicultural societies today. In one
of her most famous pieces titled Two Undiscovered Amer-Indians Visit
the West (1992) Fusco collaborated with Gillermo Gomez-Pena in a cage
display, which re-enacted the live exhibits of the colonial period. They
presented themselves as two Amer-Indians from a fictive island in the Gulf
of Mexico, which had not been discovered by European voyagers. Fusco
donned a leopard-skin-print bikini top and grass skirt and Gomez-Pena
wore a studded collar with a Mexican wrestling mask. He told “tradi-
tional” stories in a fictive language while Fusco danced for a nominal fee.
Props and paraphernalia were presented as artifacts from their make-
believe land. These were combined with kitsch elements of tourism, such
as badges, plastic sunglasses, a plastic snake, brightly colored fabrics, and
a gaudy souvenir tablecloth. Maps and texts of Guatinaui with taxonomic
information were also provided for this cross-cultural scientific encounter.
The spectators were invited to participate in the visual technologies of
capturing “natives” in fixed frames by buying Polaroid photographs of
themselves and the “specimens.” This performance/exhibit was presented
in public spaces all over the world. The anthropological, tourist institu-
tions and genres of “scientific” knowledge as spectacle were all put on

display in these performances.
Some audiences were so entrenched in the truth of knowledge and
racialized thinking that they failed to see the event as a satire. Of this Fusco
says: “We did not anticipate that our self-conscious commentary on this
practice could be believable. We underestimated public faith in museums
as bastions of truth, and institutional investment in that role. Furthermore,
we did not anticipate that literalism would dominate the interpretation
of the world” (cited in Vercoe 2001: 234). Here we see how the technique
of re-entering traumatizing stereotypes is, like any other strategy, a risky

business. There are no guarantees that the audience will see it as an ironic
satire that questions established norms and practices. Instead, they could,
as some of them did in this particular case, carry on believing what is
constructed to disrupt, as a literal truth. The intervention can reaffirm
existing stereotypes just as much as it can jolt one out of them. One has
to, thus, be prepared to endure, yet again, the symbolic violence of racism.
The repetition of a trauma can thus once again re-invite pain, a pain that
is already overwhelming in its forbearance upon daily existence. Nonethe-
less, it is necessary to bear in mind that there is always the possibility that
audiences can be shocked into remembering and acknowledging the
symbolic and physical violence.
In another satire on the commodification of exoticism and the play of
racialized bodies within this, Fusco and Gomez-Pena performed a piece
called Mexarcane International (1994–95) in shopping malls in Britain
and Canada. They set up a fictitious market research center, which created
designer exotic experiences to the specific tastes of shoppers. Fusco
interviewed shoppers about their ideal exotic experience. The results were
analyzed and the participants were asked to press a request for Live Action
A, B, C, D or O. Gomez-Pena would then perform a random act which
bore no correlation to the letters, but still carried the impression of choice
and precision. He sat in a bamboo cage and his array of acts included
eating a human heart made of rubber, performing a “native” dance or
speaking to the viewer in a fictitious language. Again, a range of “exotic”
props were used and documents provided to authenticate their status as
a real and legal company. The whole drama was carried out in conven-
tional shopping malls located near a food hall. The consumption of
exotica is brought home in the theme of containment—both physical and
stereotypical. There is also of course the other link to be made with
scientized containment in museums. Deborah Root watched this perform-
ance in Toronto, where she says “on a typical afternoon you can see people
wearing West African lappas, Indian saris, or rock-and-roll clothes,
shoppers who are likely to know a thing or two about colonial history”
(1996: viii). According to Root, “Despite the appearance of plurality,
Toronto remains a colonial city in which many prefer to forget the past
or, rather, to assume that colonial history is something that is finished,
over and done with, as archaic as the British North America Act and the
264 Nirmal Puwar
fur traders of the Hudson Bay Company” (1996: viii). Of the exhibit she
notes: “Gomez-Pena’s display of his body as a living museum specimen
underlines the extent to which a vast range of sites of Western cultural
practice are underpinned by an imperial project that continually seeks to
exercise and display power over foreign bodies” (1996: x).
A Laughing Matter
More conventional media, such as theater and television comedy, have

been yielded by other artists who have sought to disrupt processes of
fetishized ethnicization by going back into a territory that is replete with
stereotypical meaning (Mercer 1995). Like Fusco they return to sites
of trauma through parody and satire. In this process they undertake re-
enactment with a difference. They turn the tables around by being the
authors of events they were the objects of. They thus look back and in this
looking back they re-route hegemonic definitions of racialized minorities.
An interview by Peter Jackson with the Senior Brand Manager of Shar-
woods provides a fine illustration of how in marketing specific ethnic
goods internationally the company taps into and further fuels a reservoir
of feelings in relation to the Ethnic (via food):
It’s how it makes them feel, definitely. Ethnic food, it’s special. It’s
not fish and chips or bangers and mash, you know. It makes people
feel excited and exciting, it inspires them, it makes people feel kind
of empowered . . . it’s a bit out of the ordinary . . . they’re looking
for a bit of adventure . . . that’s how they feel when they cook ethnic
food (cited in Jackson 2002: 10).
Rather predictably Sharwoods seek to “hail” customers by inviting them

to take up the irresistible subject position of ethnic excitement, sizzle, and
adventure. Cuisines usually contain an array of cultures and histories, but
these messy encounters are left in the backyard for the marketing of
specifically demarcated “ethnic” cuisines (Narayan 1997). In what is now
a widely cited scene from the British comedy series Goodness Gracious
Me,1 a group of Asian actors ethnicize and exoticize English food in a
manner that parodies a typical night out in Britain at an Indian restaurant.
Instead of consuming copious amounts of lager and asking for the hottest
curry (read as being the most authentic “Indian”) they ask for the blandest
food. In this exercise in televisual comedy they make whiteness, rather
than Indianness, the object of ethnicity. That which has been able to pass
as normal is made strange, different, fetishized, and hence exciting. The
satirical mimicry of white people in an Indian restaurant—a traumatic
scene where racist abuse (even death) of waiters is meted out along with
the pouring of alcohol and curry down one’s gullet—is able to mock the
terror of whiteness, and make it the object of ridicule, wherein English
food is cut down to size as a source of Saturday night fetish.
bell hooks (1991) and Deborah Root (1996), as well as others, have
offered a critical evaluation of the place of difference in multicultural
consumption. They criticize global markets for reducing black and ethnic
cultures to commodities to be parasitically “eaten.” In his research on
global “ethnic” foods Peter Jackson takes issue with this theoretical
position, for, as he puts it, overlooking how the commodification of
difference can “provide an entrée to more critical forms of multicultural-
ism” (2002: 16). Given that in England the national dish is curry and we
all know how much people like to eat Asian-inspired food, is not the
underside of this consumption in need of reiteration? The violence that

sits right inside sites of enjoyment needs to be heard, even though these
voices make one hot under the collar while relishing a curry. The discom-
forting sounds coming from Root and hooks cannot be easily surpassed
precisely because we have failed to fully hear them. Listening is indeed a
difficult exercise, requiring prolonged periods of attention.
In a short ten-minute black-and-white film titled A Love Supreme
(2001, dir.: Nilesh Patel) the camera zooms in on the labor involved in
one individual making a samosa. Throughout the film, all the audience
sees are the woman’s hands making this food item that is found every-
where—supermarkets, restaurants, office lunches, and railway stations.
The ability to manage the thin texture of the dough as it is rolled, folded,
and sealed together after the vegetable mix fills the pocket of pastry is
chronicled. The final formation brings the samosa to life in the shape of
the item we handle when it is placed in sizzling hot oil and fried. Interest-
ingly, there is no commentary throughout the entire film. We are just asked
to watch and pay attention to the art/work. Metric measurements are not
provided. Those who constantly demand translations, from their “ethnic”
friends, of eating practices and wedding ceremonies would find this quest
for knowledge frustrating. It is difficult to actually make mental notes of
what is going on. The language that converts complicated points of
interaction and appreciation into anthropological rules and rituals for
those who need to ethnographically frame their encounter with the
“Other” is not offered in this film. It is refreshing to see the director not
attending to every whim and need of white voyeurs who automatically
demand explanations for “What is going on?” The mandate to be native
is sometimes so strong that “we” invent reasons of “What is going on?”—
which are then treated as truth claims. But here we are, instead, quietly
asked to think of this highly ethnicized food item—a samosa—outside
of a racialized framework that bands together saris, samosas, and steel
bands into a neat multicultural translation. A different kind of aura of
touch, taste, art, smell, shape, and rhythm is brought before us—one that
escapes the regular melodies of ethnic exoticization. All of this urges us
to not just listen to something quite different, but also to listen differently,
without the need to Know and Master it all.
266 Nirmal Puwar
Re-Killing Butterfly
The opera Madama Butterfly (music by Puccini, based on a story by John

Luther Long, debuted in 1904) sits among the top ten most-performed
operas in the world. The submissive, exotic Oriental woman is the domi-
nant narrative in this work. Crudely put, the plot centers around Lieuten-
ant Pinkerton, an American naval officer stationed in Nagasaki in the Meji
period in Japan. He marries a fifteen-year-old geisha named Cho-Cho-
san (butterfly in Japanese). For Pinkerton, this is just a temporary marriage
before the real proper marriage he will one day make with a fellow
American woman. For Butterfly, it is the real thing even though it is a
marriage her family does not approve of. Soon after the marriage, Pinker-
ton undertakes a long voyage and does not return for years. In the mean
time, Butterfly has given birth to a son. When Pinkerton eventually does
return he brings his American wife with him and wants to take the son
back to America so that he can have a “better life.” On realizing this,
Butterfly kills herself in a climatic crescendo where Pinkerton acclaims
Butterfly!
Kondo (1997), as well as others, has noted how in Madama Butterfly
Puccini draws on and recirculates familiar tropes. Kondo notes:
In Western eyes, Japanese women are meant to sacrifice, and Butter-

fly sacrifices her “husband,” her religion, her people, her son, and
ultimately her very life . . . the predictable happens: West wins over
East, Man over Woman, White over Asian. The music with its soar-
ing arias and bombastic orchestral interludes amplifies the points
and draws us into further complicity with convention. Butterfly is
forced into tonal registers that edge into a realm beyond rational
control, demanding a resolution which arrives, (porno)graphically,
with the crash of the gong. Music and text collaborate, to render
inevitable this tragic-but oh-so-satisfying-denouement: Butterfly,
the little Asian woman, crumpled on the floor. The perfect closure
(1997: 34–5).
David Henry Hwang’s replay of Madama Butterfly in the androgynously

titled M. Butterfly,2 revisits the conventional narratives of Oriental
women, discourses that are pervasive in aesthetic production on an
everyday level, and breaks them out of their bounds. Here again we see
a representation that is familiar but also highly charged, especially for
those women whose identities are implicated in these productions. Once
again I offer the bare bones of the theatrical piece. Hwang reverses the
gender/racial power relations within stereotypes of Oriental womanhood
by having a male actor play the part of the Butterfly in a play within the
play. The Western male protagonist falls in love with what he thinks is a
woman, who, for him, is a Perfect woman that affirms his Perfect man-
hood. Modesty, embarrassment, and timidity are assigned as being her
inner Oriental female self. When he realizes that the woman he was in
love with was a man, he identifies with the fantasy of Butterfly—as the
clichéd Perfect Oriental Woman—with such intensity that he becomes her.
He dons the make-up and attire of a geisha. And in a reversal of the
conventional Madama Butterfly, he kills himself. Kondo takes us to the
contrary final scene, noting how he “plunges the knife into his body and
collapses to the floor. Then, the coup de grace. A spotlight focuses dimly
on Song, ‘who stands as the man’ atop a sweeping ramp. Tendrils of smoke
from his cigarette ascend toward the lights, and we hear him say ‘Butter-
fly?’ as the stage darkens” (1997: 42). Now it is the white Western man
crumpled on the floor in the guise of a Japanese woman. He is, as Hwang
says, “a man who loved a woman created by a man” (cited in Kondo
1997: 44). Hwang looks/speaks back at hegemonic narratives of the
Oriental woman.
Guarding Butterfly
The artist Lesley Sanderson uses the medium of art, with her own body
as central to the whole endeavor, to undo predominant stereotypes of
South-East Asian women from within. As noted by Irene Gedalof, she
“fearlessly enters the world of the supposedly alluring, exotic, submissive
stereotype, as a means of debilitating and subverting it” (1999: 100). In
Time for a Change (1988) Sanderson uses two images to talk back at
Orientalist depictions of her. A naked figure sits on the floor in front of
a painting of an Oriental woman. There is a contrast between the model
in the painting and the figure in front of her, with the former clothed in
what would be easily recognized as “Far Eastern Costume.” She has a
flower in her hair and her eyes are modestly downcast. She resembles
Madama Butterfly or more specifically Tretchikoff’s print Chinese Girl,
who is simultaneously exotic and passive. The artist, by contrast, is
unclothed, with her breasts covered and an unshaven head. She looks at
the viewers head on and captures their gaze, interrupting what could very
easily be a pornographic viewing. As noted by Rosemary Betterton,
Sanderson “intervenes in the space between the ‘gendered subaltern’ (the
Asian woman) and master narrative (the Western tradition of art making)
using the particularity of her own experience as means of interrogating
both” (Betterton 1996: 168–9). As the viewers move their eyes—here and
there, before and now—between the subdued image and the one that
commands engagement, slowly they are led into the subject position of
the artist, who forms a self in contestation but not untouched by Oriental-
ist framings. We are arrested from the easy readings that may be incited
by the familiar Orientalist image of the model, by the intervention posed
by the body and look of the artist. A regular line of thinking gets inter-
rupted right in the middle of the act of viewing. The usual trip becomes
disturbed. We are re-routed from the routine trappings of Orientalist
268 Nirmal Puwar
consumption of the female body into another journey; one that leaves
things much more open ended. The containment/closure of the image of
the model, rather like the satirical performances orchestrated by Fusco,
is suspended by a different kind of self-display—one that is not a woman
created by the fantasies of a man. While the trauma of the force of the
Orientalist en/closure of the passive/exotic Oriental woman is revisited,
it is this time accompanied by a stubborn sitter who baulks at the incredul-
ity of the easy racial voyeurism that has time and time again been meted
out to the established/accepted image.
In our Mothers’ Trunks
Hee Jin Kang3 throws a glossy photograph (see Figure 1) of a young

woman in a dress that is splayed out like a butterfly into a series of art
photographs taken by her of a childhood friend who wears clothes
brought over by her mother and her friends to North America when they
migrated from Korea in the 1970s. Kang’s images draw out the color and
textures of the clothes, comprising, in the main, of bright canary yellow
and white floaty organza material. The sharpness of her photography
enables a bodily contact with the cloth. Her work allows us to take a
journey into a sense of texture, beauty, and color without the necessity
of ethnic marking. She touches on a sense of aesthetics outside of Oriental-
ism. At the same time, though, her play with the image of Asian women
as butterflies is a reminder of the constant pressures of ethnic marking.
Figure 1
Hee Jin Kang, J’ai un Amant,
2000. Hee Jin Kang courtesy
Shine Gallery, London.
Even the work of Kang as an artist is routinely received via a set of filters
that locate her work in her ethnicity or race. Thus she is not able to speak
about texture, color, memory, and vulnerability, which are regular themes
in her photography, as a generic artist. Instead, her work is considered
as being immediately marked by ethnicity in a way that white artists are
not. They are able to evade being raced precisely because whiteness is
invisible as a racially marked position. Hence they occupy a normative
position, which contains the privilege of being able to speak about any-
thing, from a position of nowhere (even though they are located as ethnic,
classed and gendered bodies; cf. Chambers 1999). By throwing the female
butterfly into her collection, Kang is able to knowingly laugh at predict-
able and standard binaries used to see and hear both herself and her work.
Importantly Kang’s work does not stay in the realm of looking back.
In fact, most of her work is not about undoing stereotypes. Although she
revisits a site that has been heavily ethnicized—Asian female dress—she
concentrates on a sense of aesthetics that rarely sees the light of day. Her
images are not caught up in contesting racist images. Rather, they take
us to another level of conversation usually unavailable in the public realm.
Tastes and textures, which people have brought from continents outside
of Europe, are illuminated as objects of beauty without collapsing them
into the standard frame of “ethnic costume.” She is able to bring pictures
of young Asian women living in the West, wearing clothes so often seen
to be beautiful but Other into predominantly white public spaces as items
that deserve attention in a different way. The postures of her model and
the locations in which the photographs are taken are crucial. She is able
to evade the “ethnic costume” reading by taking the photos in bathrooms
and bedrooms, where the body of her friend is either collapsed on the floor
(see Figure 2) or relaxed on a bed (see Figure 3). We see ceramic tiles and
cheap carpets alongside delicately textured fabrics. The arms and legs are
not demurely tightly held together, as a gaze looking for the ideal image
of the Oriental female might expect. Instead the body is calmly spread
out. The eyes of the model look away from the viewer; they are immersed
in their own thoughts. In fact, the model is oblivious of the viewer; she
has a world of feelings, language, and aesthetics of her own to consider.
Each image has its own story to tell—one that is part fictional, part
fairytale, and part social history. The strength of Kang’s images for me is
that they are able to let us know that there is a world outside of the
Orientalist gaze, yet a world she does not attempt to once again translate
for the audience. Instead it is allowed to just be; to have a contemplative
existence of its own.
It is possible to accept a different sense of aesthetics, which is wrapped
up in varying lines of memory without romanticizing this other space. It
is not necessary to see it as a pure, mythical or idealized space (Chow
1993) in order to acknowledge its existence. No doubt it will have its own
power lines, and many of them will overlap with neo/postcolonial capital-
ism. At the same time, however, there exists a different web of networks—
270 Nirmal Puwar
Figure 2
Untitled, from J’ai un Amant,
2000. Hee Jin Kang courtesy
Shine Gallery, London.
social, psychic, and economic—which run alongside, and yet are not
totally contained within, the dominant lines of exchange and travel. We
are familiar with chains of profit and taste that move trunks of sugar, tea,
and pashmina scarves around the globe. But we are not so familiar, in
the public realm, with the versions of beauty and history that sit, meta-
phorically, and sometimes literally, in our mothers’ trunks (Puwar 2002).
While the litany of specialists will want to get their hands on the saris,
kimonos, and sarongs as “ethnic costume” for multicultural displays in
museums, those trunks contain fraught, hidden, and beautiful stories of
a scent, splendor, and charm that calls for a revised vocabulary. In between
the yarns there are no doubt documents of ships boarded, visas obtained,
passports, and photos from years spent in the colonial British armies.
These archives, long forgotten and erased by official national histories,
need to be recovered and read against the grain of colonial archives (Hall
2001) alongside the trail of adornment wrapped around them. Those
clunky metal trunks need revisiting if we are to re-vision the past in the
present without simply seeking easy multiculture, or using all our energies
in shouting back at Orientalism. What lies before us is an archaeological
expedition that ducks and dives the violating epistemic threads in the work
of reconstruction: a delicate exercise indeed—and a traumatic one.
Acknowledgments
This article was written during the course of an AHRB-funded project

titled “Britishness: Re-visioning Erasure” (2002–3). The support for
Figure 3
Untitled, from J’ai un Amant, 2000. Hee Jin Kang courtesy Shine Gallery, London.
272 Nirmal Puwar
sabbatical provided by the Sociology and Politics Division (especially by

Nick Sage and Helen Rainbird) at a time when teaching timetables are
stretched also helped enormously.
I would also like to thank Hee Jin Kang for her cooperation. In addition
to the time she made available for a personal interview she kindly, in
liaison with The Shine Gallery (London, UK), where I first came into
contact with her work, gave permission to print her artwork.
Notes
1. A critically acclaimed award-winning BBC comedy.

2. A play that had a long run on Broadway and was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize. See Kondo (1997) for an extensive discussion of the
differing interpretations of it.
3. A personal interview with Hee Jin Kang in London (December 2002).
References
Bennett, T. 1999. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” In D. Boswell and J.

Evans (eds) Representing the Nation: A Reader. London: Routledge/
Open University Press.
Betterton, R. 1996. An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body.
London: Routledge.
Chambers, E. 1999. “Eddie Chambers: Interview with Petrine Archer-
Straw.” In E. Chambers (ed.) Annotations 5. London: Institute of
International Visual Arts (inIVA).
Chow, R. 1993. Writing Diaspora. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN:
Indiana University Press.
de Certeau, M. 2000. “Writings and Histories.” In T. Spargo (ed.) Reading
the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Fanon, F. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto.
Fisher, J. 2001. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco
Fusco.” In C. Fusco (ed.) The Bodies that were not Ours. London:
Routledge/Institute of International Visual Arts.
Gedalof, I. 1999. Against Purity: Rethinking Identity with Indian and
Western Feminisms. London: Routledge.
Gilman, S. 1985. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race
and Madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gilroy, P. 1987. “There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack:” The Cultural
Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson.
Hall, S. 1992. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In S. Hall
and B. Gieben (eds) Formations of Modernity, pp. 275–320. Oxford:
Polity/Open University.
Hall, S. 1997. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’” In S. Hall (ed.) Representa-

tion: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage/
Open University.
Hall, S. 2001. “Constituting an Archive.” Third Text 54: 89–92.
Hall, S. 2002. “Reconstruction Work: Images of Post War Black Settle-
ment.” In B. Highmore (ed.) Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge.
hooks, b. 1991. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. London:
Turnaround.
Jackson, P. 2002. “Commercial Cultures: Transcending the Cultural and
the Economic.” Progress in Human Geography 26(1): 3–18.

Kondo, D. 1997. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre.
London: Routledge.
Lidchi, H. 1997. “The Poetics and Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures.”
In S. Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices. London: Sage/Open University.
Mani, L. 1998. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Colonial Sati in
India. London: University of California Press.
McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial Leather. London: Routledge.
Mercer, K. 1995. “Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia.” In R. Farr
(ed.) Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. London: Institute
of Contemporary Arts/Institute of International Visual Arts.
Mohanty, C. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30: 60–88.
Narayan, U. 1997. Dislocating Cultures. London: Routledge.
Phillips, T. and Phillips, M. 1999. Windrush. London: HarperCollins.
Puwar, N. 2002. “Multicultural Fashion . . . Stirrings of Another Sense
of Aesthetics and Memory.” Feminist Review 71: 63–87.
Rajan, S. R. 1993. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and
Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.
Ramdin, R. 1999. Reimaging Britain. London: Pluto.
Root, D. 1996. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodi-
fication of Difference. Oxford: Westview Press.
Rydell, R. 1999. “The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893:
‘And was Jerusalem Builded Here’?” In D. Boswell and J. Evans (eds)
Representing the Nation: A Reader. London: Routledge/Open Uni-
versity Press.
Said, E. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
Scheurich, J. 1997. Research Method in the Postmodern. London: Falmer
Press.
Spivak, G. C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In C. Nelson and L.
Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London:
Macmillan.
Vercoe, C. 2001. “Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco
Fusco.” In C. Fusco (ed.) The Bodies that were not Ours. London:
Routledge/Institute of International Visual Arts.
274 Nirmal Puwar
Williams, P. J. 1997. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race.

London: Virago Press.
Young, L. 1996. Fear of the Dark: “Race”, Gender and Sexuality in the
Cinema. London: Routledge.

Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20

Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/136270403778052023

Published online: 27 Apr 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Fashion Theory, Volume 7, Issue 3/4, pp. 257–274

cultures, both culturally and physically, through the bodies of women.

Bodies, Borders and Maps

Highly intricate classifications and taxonomies have placed racialized

for comments on Haggard, and McClintock (1995: 22) on Christopher

These occasions enabled researchers to get close to, dissect, categorize,

an African woman who was brought to England in 1819 by a Boer farmer

Items of female clothing frequently figure in displays that attempt to

essence of a particular grouping. In these flat, simple, depictions, the

making of postcolonial lives and the ever-moving intermeshed nature of

The limited categories through which the bodies of racialized minorities

tions and genres of “scientific” knowledge as spectacle were all put on

of re-entering traumatizing stereotypes is, like any other strategy, a risky

More conventional media, such as theater and television comedy, have

Rather predictably Sharwoods seek to “hail” customers by inviting them

underside of this consumption in need of reiteration? The violence that

The opera Madama Butterfly (music by Puccini, based on a story by John

In Western eyes, Japanese women are meant to sacrifice, and Butter-

David Henry Hwang’s replay of Madama Butterfly in the androgynously

In our Mothers’ Trunks

Hee Jin Kang3 throws a glossy photograph (see Figure 1) of a young

This article was written during the course of an AHRB-funded project

sabbatical provided by the Sociology and Politics Division (especially by

1. A critically acclaimed award-winning BBC comedy.

Bennett, T. 1999. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” In D. Boswell and J.

Hall, S. 1997. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’” In S. Hall (ed.) Representa-

the Economic.” Progress in Human Geography 26(1): 3–18.

Williams, P. J. 1997. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race.

Potrebbero piacerti anche