May CHEW (Queen's University)
“Forging Intimacies: Multicultural Hospitality and Haunted Interiors Within A Canadian Context”

Every intentional seizure of otherness, through material or imaginative enterprises seeking to sublimate difference in the service of bolstering a superlative self, paradoxically results in the other being coiled within the heart of subjectivity. Multiculturalist state mechanisms of hospitality are little different; they enact the forcible yet purportedly benevolent inclusion of the other within the dominant national landscape, ultimately making way for a national imaginary that configures its most intimate spheres as haunted by irreconcilable otherness. The preoccupation with haunted interiors riven by alterity, articulated in much of art and literature, signals a necessary turn inwards as the response to a deepening recognition of the ongoing withering of boundaries between self and other. As proponents of neoliberal, multiculturalist state policies have come to realise, it is no longer about keeping the other out; the issue now at hand is the specific manner in which the other must be kept within.

This paper explores the reconfiguration of intimate boundaries driven by the solicitudes of the so-called hospitable state, and its program of violence through inclusion, within the Canadian context. More specifically, it considers Iris Haussler’s installation, He Named Her Amber, as an especially vivid example of the anxieties resulting from the recognition that boundaries between self and other, are no longer drawn “out there” but instead relocated on more discreet topographies, within the home, upon the body. Staged in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange manor during 2008-2010, the installation is an intimate domestic narrative performed within the framework of the state institution. Anxieties concerning foreignness at large are here distilled into a singular narrative about the “discovery” of archaeological remnants of an otherness—presented as explicitly raced, gendered, and classed—that “haunts” the proverbial home. More hopefully, however, Haussler’s installation also hints toward the anarchic contaminants present within all colonial archives and even our most discreet interior landscapes.



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