Celebrations in Cities— where migration stops

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“It is beyond dispute that relations of inclusion and exclusion, and of implication and explication, obtain in practical space as in spatial practice. ‘Human beings’ do not stand before, or amidst, social space; they do not relate to the space of society as they might to a picture, a show, or a mirror. They know that they have a space and that they are in this space. They do not merely enjoy a vision, a contemplation, a spectacle—for they act and situate themselves in space as active participants”
(Lefevbre 1991, 294).

The location where this negotiation “takes place” is the place where the migration ends up. It is happening, for example, in every major city in the world. It happens in rural towns and districts as well, but here I will focus on urban contexts. This entire work is about the process of movement. The Higashi-kujo Madang is an expression of this movement. The movement represents what I have just been describing: the final arrival of a diasporic group to a new home.

The discursive space of this movement is centered on the demand that the social/cultural center grows large enough to accommodate diversity. The madang demands that Kyoto opens up its public sphere to those who are now locally marginalized by their heterogeneous place of birth or by physical differences. Their only options are to tolerate the limitations imposed on their lives locally, or to move elsewhere (i.e., out of Japan), or to change the locale where they live.

“...The street is a desiring machine. It creates desires it offers to diminish. It arouses excitement in order to quell it through commodity fetish exchange. It overcodes as it sells itself. It is a zero sum desiring machine.
The street is a panoptic machine. It watches for strangers, monitors their passing, silently wishing them on. It listens for disorder, for the window broken, for running steps.
It has a thousand eyes and ears. The office help depart. The apartment dwellers return. The street hails its own. It inscribes their pathways. They find food and drink, they enter back into its full body. The shops close. The traffic stops. In the darkness behind its walls the street is alive with private whisperings and squirmings.”
Deleuzions

This final option transforms a diasporic community from one organized by its movement in space to one organizing itself by a movement within a place and within a society: that is, from a immigrant group into a social movement. And here they share the streets with other social movements. At the same time that strangers-from-elsewhere are becoming more numerous in the streets of every major city, strangers-from-within are also more numerous: the boundaries of life-style behaviors are now productive sites not only of avant-garde expression, but also of diverse popular cultures.

Demands for public acceptance and public-sphere representations of alternative or multiple cultural expressions bring gay/lesbian activists and migrant community activists to the same field of cultural action. And the feminist struggle to unmark gender as an organizing feature of the public sphere adds both new theoretical insights and counter practices to the picture. Books and magazines bring these features of late modernity into discursive arenas centered mostly on university campuses and majority-minority neighborhoods (such as the Castro district in San Francisco). But at some point, it all comes down to the street.