Plural Loyalties

Abstract

In the context of the past few decades of globalization, cosmopolitanism is a contested notion. Major cities tend to be where protean and nascent forms of cosmopolitanism are practiced, due to their job opportunities, diverse communities, and a presumed and relatively open attitude towards otherness. Nation-state borders are often the presumed basis of loyalty; upon this setting, Jasmine’s thesis exhibition in conjunction with this supporting paper draws together critical theory, personal stories and found image close-readings; and manifests materially in forms of mixed media installations.

Found images share qualities with the immigrant psyche, which is marked by gestures of flattening and decontextualization, both external, through stereotypes and expectations casted upon them, and internal, through divorced identities, citizenships, and relational roles. The immigrant experience, in which one is uprooted from a previous and ghostly lingering life, while the new life abroad is this overwhelming situation: an “it” that one doesn’t know what it is nor how to be in it. Reciprocally, the immigrant figure has the same effect on nation-states; their in-between and partial adaptation/integration is an abject situation that constantly demands ongoing reassessments, confrontations, and conciliations of norms and tolerance.

Jasmine examines phantasmagoric images of “the good life”, interrogates the immigrant’s deterritorializing potentials, and teases out their psychic attachments to sites and strategies of being deliberately out of place. The project of the ordinary cosmopolite, or the transnational and conditionally mobile subjectivity, grapples with plurality, which is an inescapable means of survival. The tendency to do so will only grow over time, as the economy and globalization demand it. Wading through and navigating the multitude of affiliations and positionalities within power structures, plural loyalties is choosing to adapt to a complex model of identification, making our cruel and self-detrimental attachments to people, sites, objects, and promises survivable and sensible.