who dwells in the margins, surviving and navigating a life of spatial and temporal displacement’.5 Thus, at one level, Search presents a portrait of forced migration generated by the violent biopolitics of a deeply uneven global landscape, registered through the physical and psychic experiences of the gendered body. In this, it enacts a powerfully transcultural feminist Figure 6.1 Hayv Kahraman, Search, 2016, oil on linen, 96 × 73 inches. © Hayv Kahraman. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
agenda, reminding us, as much transnational and decolonial feminist anal-ysis already has, ‘of the intimate connections between war, political econ-omy, nationalism, and human displacement and their various impacts’,6 while foregrounding the centrality of gendered identity, embodiment, and positionality to the experience of forced migration.
Yet in its deliberate fragmentation, its spectral spaces of incomplete tracing, and its rupture of two-dimensionality, this work also exceeds the straightforwardly autobiographical or political, presenting a deeply defi-ant return of the viewer’s gaze. For the women in Search are neither sim-ply cut-out figures of U.S. occupation nor silent victims of displacement but hybrid, shifting, mobile subjects whose reappropriation of the sen-sory language of warfare engages the viewer in a potently feminocentric dance. While the female subjects of Kahraman’s work certainly register violence and dislocation, they also present a heterogeneous and shifting community of those who, like Kahraman herself, appear ‘wounded and healed and transcended’.7 These are women who not only cross over and beyond the two-dimensional realm but actively challenge the legibility of national, racial, and ethnic boundaries, forming between them what Kahraman has described as an ‘army of fierce women’8 that resists narra-tive and interprenarra-tive fixity via the fluid expressionism of their own forms.
Theirs is a multiple mobilisation, then. United by their uprootedness, they also present a call to community that stands in radical contrast to the androcentric, exclusionary, and violent biopolitics of the nation state.
In this, they position themselves firmly within the territory into which this book has sought to guide the reader: in the transcultural feminist imagination.
How might Search enable us to visualise the nature of this transcultural feminist territory? Like Kahraman’s ‘army of fierce women’, the figures that circulate across the multidisciplinary, multisensory, transnational terrains of variously defined feminist imaginaries both are and are not legible as forced migrant women. Just as the figure of ‘She’ in Search proves an amal-gamation of projected stereotypes and of a colonising gaze, forced migrant women have also often featured as palimpsests of external presupposition, surfacing as figureheads and symbols, heroines and villains of imaginations variously hostile and humanitarian; as targets of military violence and of benevolence in equal measure. Yet each chapter of this book has also re-vealed how women who experience forced migration variously perform, embody, exceed, or resist the tropes that are often imposed upon them – tropes that range from ‘the mother’, ‘the victim’, and ‘the subaltern’ to ‘the heroine’, ‘the detainee’, and ‘the queer subject’. Indeed, we have seen how those operating from a transcultural feminist positionality in their creative practice often work to destabilise these tropes and to realise alternative representational possibilities. Just as the women in Kahraman’s work push back against reductive attempts to determine their identity or location, so have many of the creative representations presented within this volume ac-tively sought to break the frames that typically limit the narratives through
which forced migrant women have too often been defined and read. As Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed observes, it is perhaps therefore most pro-ductive to understand the formation of identity for women who experience forced migration as ‘dialogic’, ‘a continuous and relational process’ rather than a fixed construct in which ‘every new location or situation challenges [the] sense of self’ yet also ‘generate[s] resisting discourses…[and new] initi-atives in their everyday lives’.9 The category of ‘the forced migrant woman’
proves a redundant one in the transcultural feminist imagination, then, leading us instead towards a realm of mobile imaginative possibility in which gendered experiences, identities, and positionalities are in constant states of transition and transformation.
Just as the women in Search assume shifting positions in their visual dance with the viewer, the creative works explored over the course of this volume also reveal the varied positions that women with lived experience of forced migration assume within the transcultural feminist imagination.
At times, those with lived experience may assume the role of author, di-rector, or artist; of activist or of leader; of collaborator or conversant; and of performer or subject. While it proves empowering for those with lived experience of forced migration to assume self-representational powers in many instances, there are also circumstances in which the demand ‘to speak’ may become a performative burden in its own right. At these times, solidarity and alliance with others also present vital opportunities. Thus, the representational networks that circulate across transcultural contexts prove essential, revealing feminism as a necessarily collective and expansive project that must respond strategically to the unique contexts in which each representational act occurs.
As we have also seen over the course of this book, though, ‘feminism’
proves as diverse in its construction as the notion of ‘forced migrant wom-anhood’ in itself. In the early chapters of this book in particular, selective strands of ‘feminist’ discourse – particularly those driven by Eurocentric humanitarianism or ‘colonial rescue fantasy’ – emerge as complicit in the political regimes that have ultimately silenced the agency of forced migrant women, seeking to ‘speak for’, ‘rescue’, or ‘mother’ forced migrant women as subjects of their own political imaginaries. At times, these discourses have even proved complicit with military violence that ultimately generates women’s displacement. Yet as the works examined in this book affirm (in a move that echoes Mohanty), feminisms also prove capable of mobilising against such discourses through the shared tools of anticapitalist, anticolo-nial struggles for gender equality.10 This proves to be the case when trans-cultural feminisms work to reveal and counter the global conditions that produce forced migration – such as the regimes of ‘bordering’, detention, and state violence that typically demarcate the global landscape. These transcultural feminist discourses, though, surface in forms as varied and as fluid as the those presented by the women in Search, appearing sometimes via decolonial, postcolonial, queer, trans, or other specifically identifiable
feminist stances, while at others, emerging via more ambiguous modes of solidarity, alliance, and activism in the form of literary, visual, sonic, or multidisciplinary creativities. What ultimately unites the transcultural feminist imaginations examined in this book, however, is the shared com-mitment to non-reductive representation that expands rather than limits the range of gendered identities, experiences, and positionalities circulating around women who have engaged with forms of forced migration during their lifetimes. In this, the transcultural feminist imagination proves a shift-ing and contshift-ingent realm that, like the landscape of Search, yields a prolifer-ation of interpretive and discursive possibilities. Indeed, it arguably enacts what Ella Shohat has described as a ‘relational feminist approach [that]
demands moving beyond nation-bound and discipline-bound teaching, cu-rating and organizing’ in order to respond to the ‘cultural consequences of the worldwide movements and dislocations of people’ that currently define the transnational landscape.11 Cross-disciplinary, transnational, intersec-tional, and cross-genre, the transcultural feminist imagination therefore emerges as the very condition of twenty-first-century mobility, reclaimed as a source of creative potential rather than of disempowerment.
Like the ‘army of fierce women’ in Search, then, those who participate in the formation and traversal of the transcultural feminist imagination are above all those who mobilise when faced with the hostile landscape around them. It is this act of mobilisation – between women with lived experi-ence of forced migration and those without; between creative practitioners working across locations and genres; and between scholars, activists, and teachers working in the classroom, the library, and on the ground – that ul-timately produces the transcultural feminist imagination as a shared realm.
Mobile and mobilised as this transcultural feminism proves, though, the question remains: where might it lead us beyond these pages? The answer to this is surely to be found if we return to the source from which so many of these words have flowed – to the river walk with which this volume opened, conducted along the banks of the River Trent with members of the PAMOJA Women Together Group at Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum. In line with the many other creative transformations wit-nessed within this volume, PAMOJA’s river walk also came to assume the form of a collective poem – and in its lines, we encounter tributaries that guide us towards far-reaching paths that the transcultural feminist imagi-nation might enable us to follow.
In ‘Speaking With the River’, we hear PAMOJA members share the mem-ories and thoughts prompted by the act of shared walking along the River Trent. Drawn together as a protectively anonymous flow of conversational voices, the poem’s lines meander between recollections of the place where the White and Blue Nile meet in Sudan, and how women would meet for coffee by the river in Eritrea; between a lake and palms in Libya and of an economically precarious life of unemployment on the Amalfi Coast.12 In its evocation of such varied and unexpected locations, this poem therefore
invites us towards an expansive transcultural vision in which we must surely turn our sights to geographical locations beyond those more usually represented as sites of migratory ‘crisis’. Indeed, in its shift away from crisis- based migration streams, the PAMOJA women’s memories also remind us to recognise the varied forms that forced migration can take – inclusive of the traumatic paths followed by those who find themselves trafficked or subjected to forms of modern-day slavery.13 Just as altering our gazes in order to peer low along the banks of the river revealed hidden sights to those of us on the walk together, so must scholars of forced migration look beyond the obvious headlines of mainstream media coverage in order to recognise alternative modes of expression, creative forms, and articu-lations of agency invoked by women who have experienced forced migra-tion. In ‘Speaking With the River’, for instance, one participant shares a story about going to meet her new mother-in-law for the first time; another shares the qualifications she is currently taking in order to be able to move into teaching, while others speak of the PAMOJA group itself, and of how they ‘gather, like a family thing’ in order to resist the boredom of ‘looking at the four corners of the house on a daily basis’.14 Stories, memories, edu-cation, and community-building: all of these must be recognised as forms of creative mobilisation and as valuable forms of cultural knowledge wor-thy of academic recognition.
In this poem’s distinctive and unexpected location, ‘Speaking With the River’ also invites us to turn our sights to the creative and political signif-icance of environment for women experiencing forced migration – a con-cern that demands further scholarly investigation. Indeed, in this poem, the river itself surfaces as a source of powerful mobilisation and alliance.
In contrast with ‘the hostile environment’ that renders you ‘limited in so many things’, the river is described as ‘a kind place’ that ‘makes me feel more emotional…free and liberated’, with the ‘light bending’ over the water; ‘the sound of the white bird flying [that] reminded me of home’;
the ‘reeds that wave like salam alaikum to everybody’.15 In one sense, the PAMOJA group’s river walk therefore draws us towards an understanding of forced migrant women’s experiences and creativities as highly situated, and it invites us to turn our attentions away from geographically deter-mined boundaries towards the more intimate landscapes of sensory, emo-tional, and remembered experience. Equally, the poem’s vivid evocations of the river’s ecology and sociology – present in discussion of its reeds and waterfowl; its cleanliness and safety; its usage for cooking, bathing, and farming; and its potential scarcity – remind us of the powerful connection between environmental change and forced migration – a relationship that is in its own way nuanced by gender, given many women’s dependency on income from agrarian labour, and by pressure on the provision of sus-tenance for the family.16 The complex interrelationship between environ-ment, forced migration, and gender is one that must surely surface as the
subject of increasing interdisciplinary and transnational concern as climate change continues to have progressively devastating impacts on the global landscape.
The transcultural feminist imagination therefore proves not just mobile but also malleable, assuming forms that range from critique of neoco-lonial, imperialist and biopolitical governmentalities to acts of creative defiance, expressed on the page, on the screen, through sound, or on the ground; from activist protests to seemingly quotidian tasks such as walk-ing or converswalk-ing. While gender-consciousness lies at its heart, a trans-cultural feminist approach ultimately resonates across disciplines, spaces, and subject positions to demand a radically creative reassessment of how we can respond to forced migration. What, after all, would it mean to re-configure border-crossing practices according to a transcultural feminist ethos? How might the asylum system be overhauled if rendered not just gender-sensitive but operational according to the non-biopolitical mental-ity of a transcultural feminist discourse? And how might concepts such as hospitality and community find themselves profoundly altered if re-thought along the lines of a non-hierarchical, heterogeneous, open, and equal feminist society? By opening the door to questions such as this, the transcultural feminist imagination therefore invites a wealth of further scholarly exploration far beyond the specific examples charted within this volume.
When we mobilise creatively as transcultural feminists, then, we learn to move differently through the world. There are many directions in which we can choose to travel via the possibilities of the transcultural feminist imag-ination. But perhaps these alternative movements all ultimately lead us in the same direction: towards a world in which the act of journeying becomes an experience defined not by global disparity but by equality; not by pain but by joyful possibility.
Notes
1 Hayv Kahraman, Search, 2016, oil on linen, 96 × 73 inches (243.8 × 185.4 cm).
2 There are a number of critical explorations of the cultural hybridity at stake in Kahraman’s work. In particular, critics note the way in which Kahraman fuses references to ‘Persian miniatures, Japanese woodcuts, and Italian Renaissance paintings’ in a way that ‘creat[es] a discourse between Eastern “otherness” and Western concepts of beauty’. Rebecca McGrew, ‘Introduction – Hayv Kahraman:
Weaving as Mending’, in Rebecca McGrew, ed., Hayv Kahraman, Project Series 52 (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2018), pp.39–41; p.39.
3 Wassan Al-Khudhairi, ‘Acts of Reparation’, in Wassan Al-Khudhairi, ed., Acts of Reparation, Hayv Kahraman (St. Louis, MO: Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, 2017), pp.9–13; p.11.
4 Hayv Kahraman, ‘Gendering Memories of Iraq – A Collective Performance’, in Rebecca McGrew, ed., Hayv Kahraman, Project Series 52 (Claremont, CA:
Pomona College Museum of Art, 2018), pp.81–88; p.83.
5 Hayv Kahraman, ‘The Art of Mending’, in Acts of Reparation, pp.15–16; p.15.
6 Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, ‘New Directions for Feminist Research and Politics’, in Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, eds., Sites of Violence:
Gender and Conflict Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp.301–315; p.314.
7 Hayv Kahraman and Wassan Al-Khudhairi, ‘Wassan Al-Khudairi Interviews Hayv Kahraman, Excerpted from an Email Exchange, July 5, 2017’, in Hayv Kahraman, Hayv Kahraman (New York: Rizzoli Electra, 2018), pp.6–15; p.15.
8 Madalit Del Barco, ‘Iraqi American Artist Hayv Kahraman is Building “An Army of Fierce Women”’, NPR, 27th November 2019, https://www.npr.org/
2019/11/27/770452266/iraqi-american-artist-hayv-kahraman-is- building-an-army-of-fierce-women?t=1603115114208 (last accessed 19th October 2020).
9 Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed, ‘A Dialogic Approach to Identity: Implica-tions for Refugee Women’, in Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed, Nazilla Kanlou, and Helene Moussa, eds., Not Born a Refugee Woman: Contesting Identities, Rethinking Practices (New York: Berghan Books, 2008), pp.28–54; p.29.
10 Mohanty, ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited’, pp.236–251.
11 Ella Shohat, ‘Introduction’, in Ella Shohat, ed., Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p.1.
12 See PAMOJA Women Together, ‘Speaking With the River’, in Ball and Reeve, eds., The World Is for Everyone, pp.31–41.
13 For more on sex trafficking as a specifically gendered mode of experience that has generated a significant amount of literary representation, see Laura Bar-berán Reinares, Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature: Transnational Nar-ratives from Joyce to Bolaño (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). This work might be usefully extended to gendered and feminist scrutiny of other forms of traffick-ing and modern-day slavery, and to their cultural representation.
14 PAMOJA, ‘Speaking With the River’, p.34.
15 Ibid., pp.31–41.
16 See for instance Namrata Chindarkar, ‘Gender and Climate Change-Induced Migration: Proposing a Framework for Analysis’, Environmental Research Letters 7 (2012), pp.1–7.
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