Panel: Posing and Composing Selves
Copanelists: Maile Gresham and Barbara Zabel
Multicultural biography—especially of Asian American authorship—attained a momentum of widespread popularity in the 1980s–1990s due to the way in which the biographical form of culturally expressing first-person subjectivity was considered authoritative. But in the aftermath of the multiculturalist dispensation, the expectation of truth from literary conceptions for translating a cultural “self” has been put into question. One such inquiry derives from performance theory and the argument that identification becomes unstable when viewers engage in staged representations of the “self,” since even the embodied subject of “race” confronts a host of preconceived notions that concern cultural translation as much as self and other paradigms. In view of the unfixable nature of identity itself, this paper undertakes an analysis of biographical reiterations in rapport with bodilyoriented video expressions. The equivocal nature of visual and textual portrayals of a given “self” can either contradict or substantiate the power of the “statement” in the practice of self-naming. In this way, artists have introduced the elusive figure of the “self” as a compositional subject, one that thwarts the multicultural expectation for professing and substantiating an “authentic” cultural identity.
Jane Chin Davidson is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, Irvine. She is the 2008–2009 recipient of the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in association with the Cultural Theory Institute at the University of Manchester. Her research and publications (including journal articles in Textile, NC Media, and Signs) focus on contemporary bodily-oriented artworks and subjects of artistic globalization.