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Introduction: The Pursuit of Otherness for the Investigation of Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Brian Singleton
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Extract

In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said lays to rest my fears of political incorrectness and of being orientalist in my teaching and research of Asian as well as European theatre practices and proto-theatrical forms. Said empowers me by locating my nationality (Irish) and the locus of my vision of the Orient in the very realm of the Orient: amongst the colonized peoples of the world. Theatre historians in recent years have embraced Said's modernist dichotomies of Orientalism, and mistakenly divided the theatrical manifestation of culture into West/East, first world/third world, bad/good, colonizers/colonized. The simplicity of such binary opposites consequently denounces and sanctifies. The politics of culture, however, is a much more complex affair. Modern Irish theatre, for example, contemporaneous with social struggle and revolution, is lauded by Said as a strategy of resistance against cultural imperialism. In Asia the resurrection of pre-colonial dance forms and folk traditions is similarly seen as a cultural assertion of independence. Conversely fin de siècle European theatre divorced from its formalist, societal and religious origins has looked to the oriental theatres for inspiration. In the same mistaken paradigm à la Said, this is branded as eclectic purloining of the surface of foreign cultures of the third world, a colonial plundering disguised as aesthetic pursuit.

Type
Introduction
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 93 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1997

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References

Notes

1. Said, Edward, Culture & Imperialism (London: Vantage, 1993).Google Scholar

2. Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).Google Scholar

3. Bharucha, Rustom, ‘Somebody's Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of Our Times’, in Pavis, Patrice, ed., The Intercultural Performance Reader (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 196–212 (206).Google Scholar

4. One of India's leading post-Independence directors, Habib Tanvir, while sourcing the folk traditions of his own Madya Pradesh, found Brecht's dramaturgy as inspiration for his social and political narratives. See Dalmia-Lüderitz, Vasudha, ‘To Be More Brechtian is to Be More Indian: On the Theatre of Habib Tanvir’ in Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Riley, Josephine & Wissenwehrer, Michael, eds., The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign (Tübingen: Günter Narr Verlag, 1990), pp. 221–35.Google Scholar

5. For further explanation of this concept see Singleton, Brian, ‘Body Politic(s): The Actor as Mask in the Théâtre du Soleil's Les Atrides and La Ville Parjure’, Modern Drama, 39, 4, (1996), pp. 618–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Said, Edward, Culture & Imperialism, p. xiii.Google Scholar

7. Said, , Culture & Imperialism, p. 284.Google Scholar

8. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, ‘Staging the Foreign as Cultural Transformation’ in Erika Fischer-Lichte et al., eds., The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, pp. 277–87 (283).Google Scholar

9. For a discussion of pre-modern Asian theatres and the globalization of culture, see Gunawardana, A. J., ‘Is It the End of History for Asian's Modern Theatres’, Theatre Research International, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1997 Supplement), pp. 73–80.Google Scholar

10. Kiernander, Adrian, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

11. British colonials had divested the Brahmins of judicial power. The Brahmins' post-colonial practice was one of reappropriation by preferment of Sanskrit which did not ban certain cultural practices but favoured a specific hierarchy of cultures, as well as accepting the naturalization of English as part of the post-colonial experience.

12. Breckenridge, Carol A. and van der Veer, Peter, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 17.Google Scholar

13. Pavis, , p. 49.Google Scholar

14. Pavis, , p. 14.Google Scholar

15. Said, , Culture & Imperialism, p. xiv.Google Scholar