Staging the Asian modern: Cultural fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 771-799

  Wee, C J W L ^a,b  

^a NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY   (Singapore)

^b National University of Singapore   (Singapore)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846637939     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/423772     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Fernando Coronil, "Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism's Nature," Public Culture 12 (Spring 2000): 368, 369; hereafter abbreviated as "TC."
2. Timothy Brennan, "Cosmo-Theory," South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (Summer 2001): 660, 661.
3. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays (New York, 1950), pp. 11, 6.
4. Quoted in Kawashima Rondo, "Exploring New Horizons in Asian Theater: Experimental Play 'Lear,'" Fukuoka Arts and Cultural Information (Mar. 1999): 26.
5. The following accusation was made public: KUO PAO KUN, 37, was born in China and was arrested on March 17, 1976. At the time of his arrest, he was an Assistant Secretary of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce .... His conversion to communist ideology was by self-indoctrination from the books he read in Australia .... He returned to Singapore in 1965 and set up a Performing Arts Studio to propagate leftist dance and drama .... He was inducted into the MPLL in August 1974, four months ahead of his wife, GOH LAY KUAN. ["The Faces of Subversion," Straits Times (Singapore), 28 May 1976, p. 30]
6. See Yu Yun, "The Soil of Life and the Tree of Art: A Study of Kuo Pao Kun's Cultural Individuality through His Playwriting," trans. Kuo Jian Heng, in Kuo Pao Kun, Images at the Margins: A Collection of Kuo Pao Kun's Plays (Singapore, 2000).
7. For analyses of Kuo's earlier work, see Quah Sy Ren, "Evolving Multilingual Theatre in Singapore: The Case of Kuo Pao Kun," in Ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore, 2002)
8. and C. J. W.-L. Wee and Lee Chee Keng, "Introduction: Breaking through Walls and Visioning Beyond -Kuo Pao Kun beyond the Margins," in Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun: "Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral" and "The Spirits Play," ed. Wee and Lee Chee Keng (Singapore, 2003).
9. See Kuo Pao Kun, "The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole" - And Other Plays (Singapore, 1990) and Images at the Margins.
10. Quoted in Mathieu O'Neil, "The End of the Exotic," http://happening.com.sg/ performance/1998/features/november/kengsen
11. For one controversial discussion of this modernization, see Rem Koolhaas, "Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis... or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa," in Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL (Rotterdam, 1995), pp. 1008-89.
12. See Wee, "Capitalism and Ethnicity: Creating 'Local' Culture in Singapore," Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1 (Apr. 2000): 129-43.
13. See Lim Min Min, "Remembering through Theatre: Memories and Histories," (B.A. thesis, National University of Singapore, 1998).
14. See also Wee, "Creating High Culture in the Globalized 'Cultural Desert' of Singapore," Drama Review 47 (Winter 2004): 84-97.
15. Kuo Pao Kun, "Uprooted and Searching," in Drama, Culture, and Empowerment: The IDEA Dialogues, ed. John O'Toole and Kate Donelan (Brisbane, 1996), p. 167; hereafter abbreviated "US."
16. Kuo Pao Kun, "Contemplating an Open Culture: Transcending Multiracialism," in Singapore: Re-Engineering Success, ed. Arun Mahizhnan and Lee Tsao Yuan (Singapore, 1998), p. 61; hereafter abbreviated as "CO."
17. Rustom Bharucha is critical of Kuo's "Open Culture," the ideal implicitly advanced in Descendants: Instead of concentrating on the dynamics of creation, which is the area of his expertise, Kuo feels obliged to envisage a new genealogy for Singapore itself .... The illusion of this task, which is more a conceptual burden, rests on assumptions of organicity, so that it is assumed that "other cultures are naturally rewarding for the body, mind, and spirit"; and more problematically, that it is the "natural trait of creative humankind" to draw energy from new resources. [Rustom Bharucha, Consumed in Singapore: The Intercultural Spectacle of "Lear" (Singapore, 2000), p. 13
18. hereafter abbreviated CS] Kuo's position on cultural identity formation is also in striking contrast to Partha Chatterjee's response to the same difficulty: "Now the task [for postcolonial societies] is to trace in their mutually conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appeared, on the one hand, in the domain defined by the hegemonic project of nationalist modernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project" (Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton, N.J., 1993], p. 13).
19. It indicates that there should be no single or definite article to the following entity: "the postcolonial nation-state." Instead, what we have are what Jean and John L. Comaroff have called "a labile historical formation, a polythetic class of polities-in-motion" (Jean and John L. Comaroff, "Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State," HAGAR1, no. 1 [2000]: 12). In this regard, differing historical and local specificities are important.
20. Fredric Jameson famously writes, "Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which 'culture' has become a veritable 'second nature'" (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham, N.C., 1991], p. ix). But how does one describe a society such as Singapore, then, when culture is not commodified with the same characteristics as the U.S. culture industry?
21. Elizabeth A. Kalden, "All the World's a Stage Now," Straits Times, 21 Apr. 1998, "Life!" supplement, p. 2.
22. Ong Keng Sen, "A Talk with Director Ong Keng Sen," interview with Mok Wai Yin, in TheatreWorks (Singapore) program for Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral - A Meditation, Victoria Theatre, Singapore, 3-5 Jun. 1995.
23. There are signs that Ong maybe broadening his scope. He finished, in June 2002, an intercultural workshop and festival experiment called "In Transit: Transforming the Arts" at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. He is trying to expand beyond the intercultural staging of the New Asia; Ong says cocurator Johannes Odenthal and he want "Germans to engage with The Other, The Outsider, and the different biographical, ethnic and political backgrounds of their art production" (http://www.in-transit.de/). This statement also carries the implication that the final destination of the New Asia is the journey into the old colonial heartland itself.
24. Bruce Robbins, "Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism," in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Robbins (Minneapolis, 1998), p. 3. For a critique of cosmopolitanism as it appears in recent cultural theorizing, see Brennan, "Cosmo-Theory."
25. Kuo Pao Kun, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, in Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun, p. 34; hereafter abbreviated D.
26. The Zheng He character functions in critical contrast to the (apparently happy) hybrid, diasporic subject of some postcolonial theorizing; this subject is unrooted and seemingly unbound by the limitations of locality. See Cheah, "Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism, " in Cosmopolitics, pp. 290-328, for a critique of how metropolitan migrancy is treated within postcolonial cultural criticism.
27. Kuo Pao Kun, The Evening Climb, in Images at the Margins, p. 334.
28. Recalling precolonial trading systems and the possibilities of precolonial cross-border identities and cosmopolitan transactions for some years has been a thematic in what might loosely be called Asian fiction in English; see Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London, 1992)
29. and Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh (London, 1995).
30. Kuo Pao Kun, "Playwright's Message," in program for Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral.
31. "First, and most important of all, Asia is not one, but many Asias .... Some may argue that Europe is also made up of many different countries, but looking at religion for instance, we see immediately that Asia is much more heterogeneous" (Ong, "Worlds Apart: Europe Still Not Ready for New Asia," Straits Times, 3 May 1998, p. 49).
32. The following discussion is drawn from the notes that I made during the conference. For Ong's earlier position on the need for cultural memory practice in the theatre, see Ong, "A Theatre of Memory: Reconnection, Regeneration, Rediscovery through Experimentation with Traditional Arts," paper presented at the Singapore Heritage Society's conference "Our Place in Time: Heritage in Singapore," Singapore, 17-18 Sept. 1994.
33. See Koh Tai Ann, "Culture and the Arts," in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley (Boulder, Colo., 1990), pp. 710-48.
34. "Shenhou zhi ren shi shei? " (Rio Kishida, "Lear: A Production of the Japan Foundation Asia Center. January and February, 1999. Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta and Perth," unpublished script). The script uses five languages, with Japanese and English appearing all the time, mediating in this version of Asia.
35. This is Lee Weng Choy's position, as discussed in CS, p. 24.
36. Ong, quoted in Suzanne Lim, "Director's Cut: Not for Him the Bright Lights of New York. Theatre Works's Artistic Director Ong Keng Sen Chooses to Play It Close to Home," East (May 2000): 65.
37. See Yoichi Funabashi, "The Asianization of Asia," Foreign Affairs 72 (Nov.-Dec. 1993): 75-85.
38. Chua Beng Huat, Culture, Multiracialism, and National Identity in Singapore (Singapore, 1995). p. 22.
39. See Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, 1993).
40. See The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond, ed. Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (Cambridge, 1988).
41. See Walter Hatch and Kozo Yamamura, Asia in Japan's Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge, 1996).
42. See David Arase, "Japan in East Asia," in Japan in the Posthegemonic World, ed. Tsuneo Akaha and FrankLangdon (Boulder, Colo., 1993), pp. 113-36.
43. See J. Victor Koschmann, "Asianism's Ambivalent Legacy," in Network Power: Japan and Asia, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), pp. 83-110.
44. Shiraishi, "Japan and Southeast Asia," in Network Power, p. 185.
45. For one example of the exhibitions JFAC has undertaken, see Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, ed. Furuichi Yasuko and Nakamoto Kazumi (Tokyo, 1995);
46. for one example of the fora on Asian art JFAC has undertaken, see Symposium: Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered, ed. Furuichi and Hoashi Aki (Tokyo, 1998).
47. Japan Foundation Asia Center, The Japan Foundation Asia Center: Towards Mutual Understanding in Asia in the Twenty-First Century (Tokyo, n.d.), p. 1.
48. Quoted in Lee Chee Keng, "Intra-Asia Inter-Cultural Theatrical Productions: Looking at Japan Foundation's New Cultural Exchange Efforts," paper presented at the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on East Asia, Columbia University, New York, Feb. 2000, p. 3.
49. See, for example, Jenny de Reuck: "LEAR remains - for all its multicultural diversity, its celebration of inter-cultural difference - a fugue on the theme of Shakespeare's work. Here, I fear, cultural co-option is cross-dressed as cultural convergence" (Jenny de Reuck, "'The Mirror Shattered into Tiny Pieces': Reading Gender and Culture in the Japan Foundation Asia Centre's LEAR," Intersections) [Jan. 2000]: http://wwwsshe.murdoch. edu.au/intersections/issue3/ jenny3.html).
50. Ong, "LEAR: Linking Night and Day" (Director's Message), in JFAC Program for Lear, Kallang Theatre, Singapore, 28-31 Jan. 1999.
51. Yuki Hata, "Children Who Kill Their Fathers: The Creation of Lear" (Producer's Message), in JFAC Program for Lear.
52. Ong, "LEAR."
53. It is worthwhile citing Rey Chow at this juncture, though the quotation is taken out of its original context: "In an era in which the critique of the West has not only been possible but mandatory, where does this critique leave those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already 'Westernized'?" (Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity [Minneapolis, 1991], p. xi).
54. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi, 1983).