Interculturalism and its discriminations: Shifting the agendas of the national, the multicultural and the global

Third Text

Volumn 13, Issue 46, 1999, Pages 3-23

  Bharucha, Rustom ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61149527696     PISSN: 09528822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09528829908576776     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Tellingly, one of the earliest theorists of 'intercultural theatre', Richard Schechner, acknowledges that he started using the word 'interculturalism' in the early '70s as "a contrast to 'internationalism'" (Richard Schechner, 'Interculturalism and the Culture of Choice', The Intercultural Performance Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p 42). Associating the "international" with "official exchanges and artificial kinds of boundaries", Schechner posited a different kind of "exchange among cultures, something which could be done by individuals or by non-official groupings, and which doesn't obey national boundaries" (ibid). While there is undeniably a blurring of national and cultural boundaries, not just in postcolonial societies but in so-called developed countries as well, as Schechner correctly emphasises, the 'national' cannot be erased in any exchange of cultures, either across national boundaries (as in intercultural exchanges), or within national boundaries (as in multicultural or intracultural exchanges attempting to work across different communities, ethnic groups and regional constituencies). The erasure of the 'national', as I will discuss later in the essay, could be one of the most deceptive illusions of intercultural theory
2. See Vandana Shiva and Radha Holla-Bhar, 'Piracy by Patent: The Case of the Neem Tree', in The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Towards the Local, (eds) Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, Sierra Club Books, 1996
3. Quoted in James Boyle, Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996, p 193
4. Joost Smiers, 'Threats and Resistance', typewritten proposal on "the consequences of economic globalisation" and "strategies to promote conditions by which artistic cultures can flourish on both local and regional levels", 1997, p 3
5. John Frow, 'Information as Gift and Commodity', New Left Review, no 219, 1996, p 98
6. Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000, Cambridge, 1988, p 3
7. Emergent debates around 'authorship' have extended both to the avant-garde and popular sectors of contemporary cultural practice in India. For instance, in the 're-mixing' phenomenon of Hindi pop music, old hit songs from early Hindi movies are receiving electronically transformed renditions, with no acknowledgement whatsoever to their original sources (see Subhash K Jha, 'Just "Beat" it', The Telegraph, April 10,1998, for a sharp journalistic account of these commercially legitimised modes of plagiarism). Significantly, while the remixing maestro Bally Sagoo is obviously savvy enough to distinguish between a 'lift' and a 'cover version' of the same song, whether he is re-mixing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or the veteran Hindi film composer R D Burman, the idea of 'quotation' has yet to enter the vocabulary of pop music in India, following the more ironic and reflexive experiments in international pop
8. Geeta Kapur, 'Globalisation and Culture', Third Text, no 39, Summer 1997, p 30
9. Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, pp 205-208
10. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Penguin Books, 1967, p 120
11. Patrice Pavis, 'Introduction: Towards a theory of interculturalism in theatre?', in The Intercultural Performance Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, pp 6-7
12. See Bharucha, Theatre and the World, op cit, pp 13-87, for an extended analysis on the subject
13. Richard Schechner, 'Intercultural Performance', The Drama Review, vol 26 no 2 (T94), 1982 - quoted in Pavis, op cit, 1996, p 5
14. Benita Parry, 'Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse', Oxford Literary Review, vol 9 nos 1-2,1987, pp 27-58
15. Neil Lazarus, 'Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse', Research in African Literatures, vol 24 no 4, Winter 1993, pp 70-71
16. Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, Routledge, London and New York, 1992, p 179
17. Stuart Hall, 'Dialogue', The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ICA, London, and Bay Press, Seattle, 1996, p 42
18. Richard Schechner, The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance, PAJ Publications, New York, 1982, p 71
19. Kobena Mercer, 'Interculturality is ordinary', in Intercultural Arts Education and Municipal Policy, (ed) Ria Lavrijsen, Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 1997, p 42
20. Satya P Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998, p 17
21. A Sivanandan, 'RAT and the Degradation of Black Struggle', Race and Class, no 26, Spring 1985, p 6
22. Slavoj Zizek, 'Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism', New Left Review, no 225, September/October 1997, p 44
23. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, p 4
24. Charles Taylor, 'The Politics of Recognition', in Multiculturalism, (ed) Amy Gutmann, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994, p 71
25. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997, Vintage, 1997
26. It is disingenuous in this regard for critics like Richard Schechner to raise the charge of "reverse patriarchalism", whereby "the native can 'step up', but the Western 'developed' person ought not to 'step down'" (Schechner, 'Interculturalism and the Culture of Choice', op cit, p 45). Not only is the epistemology of this perspective problematic in its own right, it becomes even more unconvindng in Schechner's use of Zubin Mehta as an example of an Indian who is highly successful in the western music world, as opposed to "a western master of the sitar", whose very existence is a source of sceptidsm (ibid). For a start, Zubin Mehta exemplifies what needs to be avoided in any intercultural search for equity, namely, the cult of the maestro reinforced by exotic tokenisation. More critically, Schechner relativises (and in the process, conflates) two different musical systems - and classical ones at that too - which have very different modes of internal assessment, evaluation, and public accountability. In the world of intercultural theatre, one would be compelled to ask whether non-western directors share the same intercultural opportunities that have been made available to western directors like Schechner himself, who has recently worked on a Chinese opera adaptation of the Oresteia in Taiwan. One needs to question here the politics of expertise that enables an American director to direct a Greek classic in an unknown language and mode of representation when a reciprocal opportunity for a non-western director to work in a known language like English in one of the national repertory theatres in the UK or USA would be far less forthcoming. This is somewhat different from a German director wanting to direct an 'Indian' classic like Tagore's Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders) in Bengali without knowing the language. Without denying the complex dynamics of such intercultural processes, I would simply ask: Would the decision-makers ever consider the possibility of an Indian director doing Goethe or Brecht in German without knowing German? Indeed, even if we did know German, we would be expected to direct 'something Indian' - maybe a folk tale, or Shakuntala (regardless of whether or not we know a word of Sanskrit). So much for 'reverse patriarchalism'
27. The Inappropriate Other: "Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out... She is this Inappropriate Other/Same who moves about with always at least two/four gestures; that of affirming 'I am like you' while persisting in her difference; and that of reminding 'I am different' while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at" (Trinh T Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, Routledge, London and New York, 1991, p 74)
28. Susan Wolf, 'Two Levels of Pluralism', Ethics, no 102, July 1992, pp 786-790
29. In Bhikhu Parekh's reflections on "being British" in the multicultural context of Britain today, there is an interesting tension on what constitutes "the cultural language" of the nation. While this language is posited as an entity, it is also undergoing changes and incorporating a wide spectrum of "different though mutually intelligible accents and idioms" (Bikhu Parekh, 'Britain and the Social Logic of Pluralism', Britain: A Plural Society, Commission for Racial Equality, London, 1990, p 75). "Being British" is not about generalities like sharing "values" or a "common view of British history", still less about "obeying laws" and "loving" British society; it is specifically related to a "conceptual competence" in being able "to understand and handle the prevailing variety of accents" (ibid, emphases in original). Unfortunately, Parekh does not even begin to suggest how one goes about developing a cognizance of these "pluralised" accents. Instead, he falls back on liberal urbanity by invoking "a new spirit of partnership, a spirit of what the Romans called civic friendship" (ibid). This prelapsarian mode of utopianising the multiculturalism of our times is yet another implicit regression, reminiscent of Taylor's endorsement of a "fusion of horizons"
30. Susan Wolf, 'Comment', in Multiculturalism, (ed) Amy Gutmann, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994
31. Schechner, 'Interculturalism and the Culture of Choice', op cit, p 49
32. In economic terms, the privilege of interculturalism can only be deconstructed by those who control the capital that makes its practice possible. This involves much more than a liberalisation of existing funding policies, which continue to be based on moribund humanitarian and philanthropic premises that were formulated during the Cold War to promote the privatisation of cultural capital. Today, a radical shift in the paradigms of funding is urgently needed, but this is not possible without an infiltration of new ideologies like the 'new abolitionist project' in white studies, which is based on the repudiation of the "lie of whiteness" and the privileges attached to it (Howard Winant, 'Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Polities', New Left Review, no 225, September/October 1997). This 'new abolitionism' is considered by its proponents as "the precondition for the establishment of substantive racial equality and social justice" (ibid, p 85). Following the motto "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity", it exhorts whites to become "race traitors" (ibid). While this position is not without its blind spots - not least, as Howard Winant points out, the inscription of "non-white elements" within existing notions of whiteness - the 'new abolitionist project' is an appropriate challenge, in my view, to the tacit liberal support of prevailing racial and social injustices. Significantly, as the new funding policies around 'cultural diversity' programmes in the US indicate, there can be no meaningful mobilisation of cultural diversity without an acknowledgement of continuing racial discrimination. Finally, one is compelled to add that the implicit privileges of whiteness continue to underlie the very formulation of the funding policies themselves, which refuse to acknowledge their own racial underpinnings
33. Linda Weiss, 'Globalisation and the Myth of the Powerless State', New Left Review, no 225, September/October 1997
34. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1997
35. Rustom Bharucha, 'The Shifting Sites of Secularism: Cultural Politics and Activism in India Today', Economic and Political Weekly, vol XXXIII no 4,1998
36. Partha Chatterjee, 'Beyond the Nation? Or Within?', Economic and Political Weekly, January 4-11, 1997