IN THE PAST TWO DECADES a common set of concerns about definitions and about relationality have emerged in art literature and cultural studies. I will speak from these, not from a specialized knowledge of art practice.
Geography of Definition
Most existing terms that bind cultural practices into regional clusters are beset with difficulties of definition, uncomfortable usage, or a selective provenance. Every region and culture related category functions as an interpretative grid, and those that refer to Asia are no exception. The term ‘South Asia’ can most probably be traced to area studies in American Universities; it straddles an uneasy ground between a Political academic classification, and Diaspora related identity marker for important groups. The term ‘colonial’ recalls a common history, but is an inconvenient umbrella: it can either construct colonialism as unidirectional and monolithic, or become a cover all for the discursive and visual practices of both the colonizers and the once colonized. The ‘common wealth’ of literature and art emerged directly from decolonisation but carried a somewhat artificial sense of ‘bonding’ a sibling unity of now independent countries, which could trace their political parentage and cultural inheritance to the British Empire. Hierarchies of colour and race, of settlers and natives continued inside the ‘common wealth’. The countries included in it did not relate to each other directly, but only through their connection to Britain.
A term with very different connotations also emerged from decolonisation: the ‘neo-colonial’. This signified the economic, and to a lesser extent, the Political, continuation of colonial domination and inequality, and posited a possible unity of ex colonial countries on that basis. The ‘third world,’ a cumbersome term which levelled the economic and social differences, rivalries, conflicts and inequalities among the countries that composed it, also carried and can still carry a similar anti imperialist edge. The Political charge of neo-colonialism and the third world has of course been diluted or neutralized by a bureaucratic language of development (also used for South Asia). UN type definitions of ‘regions’ of underdevelopment in the ‘south’ emerged primarily in relation to levels of literacy, health, development, ‘conflict’ and violence, and moved from there via ethnicity and religious identities into ‘culture’.
In the past decade three other terms have gained currency, the ‘postcolonial’, the Diasporic’, and the ‘multicultural’ or ‘intercultural’. Each of them responds to the massive migrations of the twentieth century, and is in different ways untethered from geographical regions. The postcolonial includes ex colonized countries and those who have emigrated from them, it indicates a state of being and a type of interpretation more than a region. The Diasporic, privileges conditions of exile, nomadism, liminal states of un-belonging poised between countries of origin and countries of residence, and seems to be favoured by expatriate elites. A more challenging usage of Diasporic has also emerged in relation to the transitional solidarity of people of African descent. Terms like colonial, neo-colonial and third world implied restricted mobility, except for the privileged few, and in the more politically radical usage of the terms, explained these restrictions in terms of governing inequalities between and within the countries. Postcolonial and Diasporic are mobile terms, in many senses of the word: they build more on the ‘promise’ of globalisation since actual mobility continues to be limited in a number of ways. Multiculturalism and inter culturalism are not region specific terms but names for forces (both governmental and non governmental) directed towards liberal accommodation of ‘others’ in Europe and America, or (usually structured and funded) interchange inside and between ‘southern’ countries; they posit second order ‘identities’ or function as managerial techniques.
What could an alternative definition of ‘Asia’ be drawn from? It would perhaps be premature to formulate one without much more research of the region. However, a provisional way of turning ‘Asia’ into a generous and generative term could be through a focus on interrelated histories, comparativism, and common contemporary concerns.
Connections: Old and New
The history of exchange is very old. There have been many cosmopolitan cultures in Asia in the past twenty-five centuries. There were several historical constellations within Asia linking Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia. Some of these took in southern Europe and North Africa as well. The mobility of Sanskrit, Buddhist and Persian configurations in Asia, the history of interaction and mutual reception (as opposed to the inertia of ‘influence’) deserves much more attention than it has received. Especially since the older connective history, and the formation of new Asian constellations, straggled into nineteenth century.
New connected histories took shape with European colonisation. The first was from ‘below’ and involved new types of voluntary or enforced labour related migration. The second was of the colonial typologies that came from ‘above’ and generated similar histories of enumeration, ethnology and anthropology, racial and national stereotypes. And the third a history from the ‘middle’ involved the creation of colonial elites who collaborated in orientalism, indigenism, the production of tradition, the mediation and the trans nationalization of culture across and beyond Asia.
Colonialism and capitalism also produced other connectives related to broad economic and political imperatives. In the economic sphere came palimpsests of capitalism on earlier modes of production, along with peculiarly hybrid forms of urbanization. Politically there were commonalities first in nationalist and anti imperialist struggles, and later in the floundering, inclusive yet sincere struggle of new nations to collect and connect with Bandung, Non Alignment and SAARC.
At present the spread of neo-liberalism in the guise of ‘globalisation’ and the attendant technologies of representation, have turned the media into a new connective, while the older connectives have intensified or acquired new shapes for example, labour markets for sex work domestic work, or tourism. New forms of racialization are emerging in consumer maps sketched by the beauty and fashion industry, in which physical/ facial ethnicities are re-described but used to signpost an ‘international’ body., An increasing number of Asian countries feel impelled to celebrate shallow national particularities, which is in fact a part of the culture specific integration of national economies with the world economic system, and one of the ways in which commodities are repackaged to increase consumption. These new connectivity’s are producing new common questions and renewing old questions. How much of cultural exchange is still filtered through the metropolis? How much indigenist assertion takes place at points of ‘decolonisation’ and ‘globalisation’? What is the relation of new transitional forms of the media and the market to cultural institutions?
There have been attempts at forging new international solidarities of which the most notable is that by Asian feminists in the last two decades. Feminism has looked for common ground both in its theory and its practice. Shedding Eurocentric and racist hierarchies, as well as sterile contrasts of tradition and modernity by critiquing the valorisation of both terms, feminism has turned into a contested rather than a static terrain. Working through histories of earlier left internationalism to build new networks, feminists have tried to make connections independently of metropolitan centres, and tried to bypass national chauvinisms. This has facilitated a greater exchange for Asian Literature, cinema theatre and art. And it has led to the investigation of trans-national movements of labour and bodies in female migration and sex work. Feminist efforts also carry the possibility enabling internationalisms in an era of crippling Tran nationalisms.
Mapping Asia
Certain kind of historical maps will help to build interregional relationships in the arts and to sustain a differential yet related understanding of our respective insertion into colonialism and capitalism. These could turn into a comparative atlas of cultural interchange, of narrative and visual forms, of the everyday and the urban popular. There would be of course also be more interrogation: interrogation of canons whether Eurocentric or’ alternative’, interrogations of what counts as art or as aesthetic and who makes the interpretative languages, especially in the trans-national market.
The question of relationships cannot of course be restricted to those between Asian countries. Art and literary practice in Asian countries, in common with what is known as the ‘third world’ have repeatedly been defined in relation to, or in opposition to, the so called ‘west’ and its modernity. This them and us language needs to be replaced by a related history of the pre colonial and the ‘modem’. After all, pre-colonial Europe as Jack Goody, R.I. Moore, and Martin Bernal have demonstrated was also a Euro-Asian and Euro African phenomenon. Here, three questions seem to me to be central. What were our respective agencies in generating or creating the ‘west’ as an ideological configuration, in forming this ‘alien’ field against which to measure and map our own cultural production? This concerns all Asian countries in which allegations of derivation and imitation of “Western” models have dogged cultural practice. Were Asian Modernism’s adulterated by colonisation in the first place? The history of the adjective ‘western’ as a definition of cultural practice, as a term of social castigation (especially of women), and as an objective of desire in Asia?
This leads into other theoretical issues that Asian countries have in common such as hybridity. Hybrid formation has been both theoretically and historically more articulated for the Latin American, Caribbean, and North African regions by Paul Glory and others, explicitly sets out to transcend racialised politics based on an originary nationalism. No comparable articulation has been made for Asia, even though hybridity is now privileged by postmodernism and, increasingly, by the market it is also grounded in our historical experience and carries a historical density or historical residues that still linger in structures of feeling. These two forms of hybridity market centered and historical have to be held apart and examined. One common concern would be how to deal with the accelerating speed of ‘change’ in novelty driven art and literary markets and how to retrieve the historical density of the Asian past in a way that resists the simplifications of the market.
Connections have to be made and explored through common concerns rather than through Eurocentric theories and paradigms. A shift in paradigms can only come about through the exploration of similarities and differences. National chauvinisms and some received ideas of ‘national’ characteristics may turn out to be trans Asian in formation.
Several common concerns are visible in the art practice from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka that is being displayed and discussed here today: The formation of symbols from state repression and the partition of 1947, the centrality of violence in political and economic conjectures at present, the themes of marriage, the body, reproduction and the excavation of patriarchal images of femininity. They point towards and internationalisation of cultural practice even as the nation State remains the site of political assertion and an object of critique. They also suggest a shared belief in the social agency of representational forms, and how this agency is both neutralized and aggravated by the ubiquitous market. ‘Asia’ then can be a term that relearns a shared pasts and aspires to a shared future, that struggles against the violence of states and civil societies, that understands the De politicisation of cultural production by the market, and invents new ways of politicising art and cultural practices.
KUMKUM SANGARI
Kumkum Sangari is a professorial Fellow, literary/feminist/cultural theory at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum, India.