I was watching the film Smoke Signals yesterday. I am embarrassed to admit that I have not seen it before. But somehow everytime it was screened at UO, I missed it. For someone like me, working on historical trauma, it is an extremely interesting film. For the protagonists of this film, colonialism and genocide are not things of the past but forces with which they have to deal in very concrete ways within their everyday lives. Sherman Alexie's screenplay succeeds to weave a complex net of material realities, traumatic histories and pop-cultural references and as we get within that net as spectators, we begin to realize that there is no respite anywhere for us. The colonialism is a historical-material fact, but it is also a highly textualized reality. In fact, within Smoke Signals, the materiality and the textuality are often inseparable. The film also reminded me a lot of Gerald Vizenor's concept of "survivance"--a combination of survival and resistance--which sums up the textual strategies of not only a lot of Native American writers and artists--but also writers and artists from different parts of the Third World. I know know, I am generalizing and we are all supposed to focus on "specificities" right now. And without losing track of my basic comittment to specific materialities and histories, I would also like to throw this out--maybe it's high time that we begin to look into colonization as a global process? Maybe it's high time that we begin to look comparatively into the different experiences of colonization rather than through exclusivist racial or national frames?
(comments closed, please comment directly at writer's blog)
