Page 16 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

10 CULTURAL STUDIES

But most important to almost all the community arts workers I interviewed is the
lack of self-confidence of those living in such marginalized communities. In
particular, to be marginalized is understood as the absence of the self-esteem
necessary for speech. The HIV/AIDS project worker said she believed that
people considering her project often thought:

why should anyone want to hear about what I’ve got to say, or even, not
even in a wider sense, but y’know, it’s a lot about people not really valuing
their experience, their life experience, and not thinking they’ve got
anything important to say.
Placing a ‘community’ in the spatiality of power thus allows community arts
workers to articulate the cost of such positioning: to be produced by power as
lacking is to be so deprived as to have nothing, so devalued as to be silenced, so
marginalized as to be nothing.
This particular mapping of ‘community’ occurs in the spaces of power’s
margins. ‘Community’ in this case is marginalized, constrained and bounded; the
Craigmillar video worker said, ‘it’s such a price on the bus to go into town
[laughs] you only end up stuck here all the time y’know, you end up stuck in
Craigmillar. Sometimes we go “we never get out of this place” [laughs]’. But
this boundary surrounds a place where the articulation of identity in the form of
confident self-expression seems to be almost impossible. It marks something
missing; it denotes a space in which identity is collective only through shared
lack, a ‘community’ at once pressingly there yet strangely absent. For
community arts workers, this is neither a bounded ‘community’ of authentic and
oppositional essential identity; nor is it an empowering communifying. But its
deployment does carry a critical edge. Its location in the spatiality of power
allows community arts workers to use the term ‘community’ as a form of
critique, as a way of naming that which is disempowered, as a way of arguing
that these ‘communities’ lack what they should have; yet this is a name which
refers only to absences. This ‘community’ of lack cannot therefore give form to
an essence.
Although this discourse of ‘community’ may lead to a generalized rhetoric
about ‘community’ which does not address issues about differences within itself,
I would argue that its valuable radical effect is its refusal to essentialize
difference. This refusal at least leaves open the possibility of alliances both
within and between identities and communities, and the next section explores
this question of alliance more fully.

The space of an other `community'

Some community arts workers advocate a politics of resistance which aims to
reverse the zonal, hierarchical and scalar polarities of power. However, this is