To Reject Playing the Other: The Mythical Work of Marigold Santos

[En anglais]

Artist Marigold Santos interprets the word “haunted” to mean “inhabited or frequented by ghosts; preoccupied, as with an emotion, memory, or idea; obsessed.”1 1  - Marigold Santos, statement on haunted / talisman, accessed January 28, 2012, http://marigoldsantos.com/MARIGOLD_SANTOS/h_t__statement.html. Resident diasporas in Canada, many of which fall under the term “visible minorities,” are often inhabited by ghosts of their past culture and ancestry when physically dislodged or unsettled. However, through Santos’s suggested language, would it not be appropriate to categorize the nation of Canada itself as being haunted? A nation preoccupied with guarding a national identity far more imagined than truthful, Canada clutches to the memory of what Canada ought to be, while neglecting the needs and demands of an ethnically diverse contemporary nation. Artists who question and contradict this haunted national identity — what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community,” one that creates and imagines its own nation where a nation does not exist and is “conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” despite exploitation and marginalization2 2  - Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 6 – 7; Ernest Gellner as quoted in Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. — are often ghettoized by being categorized as creating culturally specific work.

When work is segregated under a blanket term such as “culturally specific,” artists of visible or language minorities are typically encouraged and expected to create work that fits under this designation. (This can happen both intentionally and unintentionally.) How is an artist to provide a voice when consistently categorized as Other, as apart from the Western hegemonic culture? This is the postcolonial dilemma of culturally specific work that many immigrants and ethnically diverse artists attempt to divert (or even tackle directly).