Transcultural Mooning …( Joke)
But these [moon stories] are really lovely and evocative. Make me feel connected.
Mine is over Blackheath. There are pine trees filled with the midnight chatter of manic escaped budgies from Central London, the flat frosted ground ( where poor Richard decided not to kill the King in the peasants’ rebellion) has shadowed scampering urban foxes engaged in bad tempered mutually assertive chases with cats. None of the birds which rest there on their way from Russia through Egypt to Uganda ( along the Nile) are left. The moon is orange, streaked with plane traces.
(It used to be the illumination for spears and needles of driven snow flying over the frozen drifts of bottomless lake directly into my slitted eyes as I tended the sugar bush. It used to be dropping into the ground between jinns of swirling sand, wobbling in blinking sweated eyes as I walked to school to teach the night class.)
Rave 3 ( Why not)
Transcultural writing confronts cultural problematics, that is, the dissonances culture creates such as racism, sexism and class oppression. It develops narratives that play against ingrained associations as stereotypes and group myth. It projects images which challenge moral strictures. It is particularly concerned with exploring new ways of relating. It reacts against acculturated memory and social identity.
It is not a politics such as ‘multi-culturalism’ which proposes rules of interrelationship and reconciliation between people grouped culturally and based on adapting cultures to a common law. Nor is it the politics of ‘interculturalism’ which proposes exchanges of cultural enterprises towards a common market. The latter is characterised by the critical filtering of culturally acceptable objects and activities to a mainstream and dominant culture.
Where an ‘orientalist’ culture may be slightly superior to a genocidal one, whereas ‘post-colonialism’ may make more sense than ‘colonialism’ they are still not mindsets that connect humanely and with empathy. They still do not empower the imagination. Whereas the ‘International’ writer, the ‘exile writer’, or similar, who has written a ‘world literature’ book does gain access to an imperial mainstream and whereas the ‘commonwealth novelist of the year’ has been granted market access, these have nothing essentially to do with transcultural purpose or with transcultural competence .
There is nothing wrong with competence in adapting to the prevailing and dominant cultural institutions and market. Memoirs do it, genre fiction does it but they usually do it with a non-literary manufacture of authenticity. Nothing wrong with that either. It is entertainment like ‘traditional’ dancing.
Transcultural writing is not entertainment as such. It is an imaginative projection with purpose seeking an imaginative reader response to a confrontation with cultural problematics. It is competent and critical about the cultures, the stereotypes, the myths. It is competent and critical about the craft, the patterns and forms. It is then take it or leave it.
TransCultural Academy 