Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

crossing and diasporic experience, losses incurred in migration, cultural and
linguistic translation and interpretation, amnesia or too much remembering,
the meaning of (reflexive) nostalgia and East-West relations. Through these
key themes the dialogue embraced other voices of feminist travellers and their
written witness from exile – exile not as a moralistic conceptual foundation and
pathos but, as Kundera would consider it, a lived experience of openness to all
the liberating possibilities of living Elsewhere .26 Today, thinking again about this
text from a certain distance, I manage to distinguish with a somewhat more
critical eye some aspects of my writing.
First of all, the reason why I placed the dialogue and the imaginary
walk in Budapest, a city where neither Eva nor I have lived, can be seen as
searching for a geographical Third place, a symbolic one because equidistant
from both, almost neutral. However, it is also a city that binds us to our common
central European Austro-Hungarian past and where even being foreign
would not make us feel alien. It would not assume any cultural, linguistic or
any other kind of domination that we may have felt imposed on our Selves.
For our imaginary stroll Budapest was a perfect geographical representation of
‘in-between-space’ in Homi Bhabha’s sense. 27 On the other hand, it is a city
with a Socialist past, close to both of us despite our very different experiences
of socialism. Perhaps this geographic mapping with the intentional search for a
space of mediated experiences, of the urbanity that at the same time is familial
and alien, mirrors my need to inhabit a comfortable space.
Once we (Eva and I) have ‘recognised’ each other, we tried to succeed
in our attempt to reconstitute the archives of memories across the borderlines.
In this attempt, our imaginary ‘we’ was guided by the less imaginary
question: How can we preserve the critical insight that otherness can be
experienced in and through a self-reflexive use of one’s own language without
erasing the specificity of cultures and the heterogeneity of belongings? 28 And
how to forge new, non-territorial alliances, bearing in mind that every
identity and each life is understood only in terms of its larger history?
26
Milan Kundera, “L’esilio, lungo viaggio liberatore”, in Sagarana, no. 22, January 2006,
http:/ /www.Sagarana.net .
27
Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and narration (London-New York: Routledge, 1990), 34.
28
Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University press, 2001), 91. The
original text says: “How can we preserve the critical insight that otherness can be experienced in and through a selfreflexive
use of one’s own language without erasing the specificity of cultures and the heterogeneity of non-national
literatures?”.
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