Cultural Dynamics

Orientalism continues to manifest itself in the humanities and social sciences today in a way that is different from the 19th and early 20th century. This presents challenges of doing social theory. Orientalism defines the content of education in the schools and universities of the world in such a way that the origins of ideas and concepts and the question of alternative perspectives are not thematized. It is this lack of thematization that explains the neglect of non-European thinkers and ideas. They are rarely given the same attention as European and American social theorists such as Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Furthermore, it should be stressed that Orientalism is a thought-style that is not restricted to Europeans or Americans. The social sciences are taught in the Third World too in a Eurocentric manner, contributing to the alienation of social scientists there from local and regional scholarly traditions. At the same time, university education in these countries generally does not attempt to correct the Orientalist bias by introducing non-Western thinkers. It is as if no significant ideas emerged from outside of the Western areas during the formative period of the social sciences beginning in the 19th century. There is a need to universalize the canon. This is the topic of this article.

Can an Asian century provide conditions for a more equal, just, and convivial global future? This article suggests that before the future can be contemplated, it is first necessary to take stock of the current state-of-affairs in Asian societies. Using current precedents in Southeast Asian societies, this article considers the prospects of an Asian Century. When seen from this sub-region, the question of finding the right balance to capitalist growth appears to be a foremost challenge as existing frameworks are buckling under the weight of capitalist, environmental, and nationalist entropies. Nonetheless, out of impotence also grew new possibilities at the everyday and intellectual levels. Repulsed by the vileness and futility observed, ordinary people, especially the young, are counteracting against power and social norms and creating alternative political strategies and public spheres in the process. Likewise, a transnational “critical Asian Studies in Asia” movement has enabled scholars to consolidate efforts to disarm hegemonies and find solutions to the complex dilemmas of the region. While no clear futuristic paradigms have emerged, state, economy, and society are all forced into gradual transformations as long as ordinary people and experts keep alive the struggle against all kinds of oppression and exclusion.

The proposition that Singapore is a successful Asian model of urban culture and political economy is a discomforting one. I had thought this was a postcolonial problem of hybrid identity making and political practice. But in my attempts to study Singapore society, from street carnivals to popular religion, I have ended up facing the state’s knowing rationalizations in the discursive materials and material space itself. When I focus on the state and its archive, I end up looking at society and its culture transcribed, rationalized and spatialized. Our epistemic blind spot in Asian cultural studies is the coloniality of the state and its spatiality. Singapore is exceptional because the state took the urban logics of Asian developmentalism to its conclusion, flattening rich cultural lifeworlds to spaces of bare life so as to reconstruct society in the state’s own modern imaginary of the good life. The state continues to do this in spite of the deterritorialization of globalization. The Singapore model offers the promise of remaining colonial and territorializing. In response, we need new methods of decolonial spatiality involving the urban grassroots and the intellectual strike.

Contemporary discourses of “Asian Century” or “Chinese Century” lead to the belief that economic growth and participation of world politics of Asian nations are changing today’s world. However, we also wonder to what extent it will restructure our world, if today’s world and our common future are still conceptualized and imagined according to the foundation of knowledge that was and is still offered by the history of Western civilization and if we still remain as consumers of universal modernity within the language frame of development and modernization. This article offers some reflections on the decoloniality of knowledge in the Chinese context. To better understand the historic process as well as to open discussions to make possible changes from a broader perspective, we will look at two moments in Chinese academia: one is related to educational movements in the beginning of the last century and the second is in regard to some new trends in the current Chinese anthropological scene.

What does it mean to decolonize? At one level, decolonization refers to the attainment of political sovereignty. The transfer of power from colonial to regional and indigenous authorities, however, also involves a handover of political forms and institutions. This process leaves behind some of the narratives that accompany coloniality, even if refashioned versions of these. This enduring coloniality resides within and proliferates through the categories of political discourse. In India, we may find its continual hum in tirades against ‘corruption’ or in laments that Indians lack a ‘civic sense’. The decolonial project, having found expression in nationalist movements, in political and epistemic resistance, and in reform and revival, therefore continues to be undertaken in the language of coloniality, which obscures all that resides outside the colonial worldview.

Departing from the previous tripartite post-colonial/neocolonial geopolitical structure, contemporary world offers a different specter of possibilities and alliances which rearrange the former actors and their mutual relations and (in)dependencies in unexpected ways. The most striking of such shifts is the reemergence of Asia on a global scale within a dewesternizing model, which negotiates post-colonial and modernizing impulses at once. However, there are regions which have lost their ability (and right) to speak and think and were disqualified from the position of the honorary second world to that of the global South. Such are the Asian regions that used to be a colonial part of the Russian/Soviet empire. They went through a Soviet modernization which redoubled their colonial status due to a subalternized position of the Russian/Soviet empire itself, now going through its final demise. This article reflects on what options are left for the former Asian colonies of Russia/Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) which today are once again stereotyped through Orientalist or Progressivist lens, and left out by both rewesternizing and dewesternizing parties. A good option for them is a decolonial option grounded in restoring memories, local histories, and epistemologies in a complex and dynamic interplay with and a resistance to modernity. As a post-Soviet and decolonial Asian other, the author attempts a critical analysis of intersections between post-soviet and post-colonial dependencies and possible decolonizing projections that might help this other Asia eventually join the triumphant Asian century in the capacity of one of its rightful agents.

Su Shi, one of China’s greatest poets, has a simple but famous poem on viewing Mount Lu, presenting different images viewed from different perspectives. Reading this as an allegory of understanding China, this article examines the paradigmatic change of Sinology or China studies in the United States with regard to Paul Cohen’s “China-centered” approach, presents a critique of the dichotomous view of China as the reverse image of the West, and argues for the synthesis of different perspectives without privileging either the insider’s or the outsider’s view, hence the necessity to integrate Sinology with Chinese native scholarship, the desirability of a pluralistic view in cross-cultural hermeneutics.

Singapore is often lauded as a triumph of modernity—a prosperous city created from nothing—based on a logic perversely parallel to that of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. However, this brief essay argues that the nationalistic narrative of Singapore as pure, Man-made creation participates in a colonial historiography that not only hides but continues to enact forms of erasure and destruction.

After its defeat in the Opium Wars, China was drawn into the orbit of Western influence. Since then, dewesternization has always been one of the hotly debated topics among Chinese intellectuals and politicians. With the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, China’s economic take-off was almost instant due to its low-cost labor, rich resources, and the government’s firm resolution to modernize. The booming of a market economy with Chinese characteristics can be quoted as a success story of China’s dewesternization project. However, while enjoying the benefits of its attempts to modernize itself, China also begins to encounter the dark side of modernity. Problems like environmental deterioration, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and food safety are causing anxieties among Chinese people. In order to cope with the detrimental effects of the neo-liberal doctrines, harmony was put forward as a state strategy. Ostensibly disinterested, harmony aims at the well-being, happiness, and welfare of all. However, while harmony can serve as a national strategy to ameliorate the fermenting social discontent in China, it may also be a lofty ideal to attract, unite, and inspire people in other parts of the world. According to the spirit of harmony, different nations can pursue the well-being of their own people in their own ways which is in accordance with the notion of pluriversality as proposed by decolonial thinkers. Besides analyzing the social, economic, and political significance of harmony both within China and abroad, this essay also attempts to address the theoretical problems posed by harmony, if it is to be considered a productive ideal in this globalized world.