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.

The criticism of ‘intercultural’ theatre in general, and Peter Brook's Mahabharata in particular, that was spearheaded by Rustom Bharucha in Theatre and the World, has taken firm hold in the Anglo-American academy and especially in Britain. Bharucha's critique of Eurocentric appropriation of non-western cultures (although the word ‘plundering’ might be more precise for his argument) is the mainstay of his attack on interculturalism, whether theorized by Richard Schechner or, in Bharucha's view, epitomized in performance by Brook's production. Schechner is understandably Bharucha's central reference, for he essentially gave the concept of interculturalism its particular twist in the early 1980s and has continued his crusade for it ever since. Scheduler's concept involves generic mixing within an anthropological framework, as occurs, for instance, when ‘western’ text-based theatre, usually situated in the domain of art and letters, merges with non-western ritual, one of the main areas of anthropological study.

The avant-garde theatre director Anne Bogart has made her name in the U.S. theatre community through her deconstructions of modern classics such as the musical South Pacific (1984), Cinderella/Cendrillon (1988) after Massenet's opera, Büchner's Danton's Death (1986), Gorki's Summerfolk (1989), William Inge's Picnic (1992), as well as through her idiosyncratic and original dance/theatre ‘compositions’ developed collabortively with her company, the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI). Prominent among such compositions have been 1951 (1986) on art and politics during the McCarthy era, No Plays, No Poetry (1988) on Brecht's theoretical writings, American Vaudeville (1991), and The Medium (1993) on the writings of the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Bogart has been acclaimed for her astute directing of the work by contemporary playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, Charles Mee Jr. and Eduardo Machado.

In his introduction to Orientalism, Edward Said defines the West's conceptualization of the East as a European invention which had been ‘since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’. He further posits that this conceptualization has formed a basis on which western civilizations build self-definition. The Orient, therefore, has shifted from the imaginary to the actual. This creation of a culture in opposition has enabled Europeans to construct an impression of their collective ‘Self’ as reflected by the oriental ‘Other’. In this regard, Said formulates the notion of the orientalization of the Orient. Europe, in creating the demarcation of the world into East and West, has sought to locate its own proper topological and cultural place within a global scheme. While setting up the parameters of ‘western civilization’, the West defines the East. Since the known world at the time of this demarcation consisted of Europe, Asia, and the northern extremities of Africa, everything outside these designated parameters becomes the ‘Other’. Philosophies and concepts disorienting to western thought become the Orient.

In the heart of the forest, Makak and his companions endeavour to come to terms with their blackness/Africanness before they can return to their Caribbean island purged of their sense of exile and alienation. The scene captures the psycho-physical pull which Africa exerts on most Caribbean peoples of African descent, an attraction which has coloured both the way of life and forms of cultural expression in the Caribbean. But more significantly, this play (and scene in particular) was my first contact with African-Caribbean theatre which I recognized as familiar, but also one mixed with a certain strangeness and foreignness. Here was a group of characters—black, of course—who spoke in a dialect of English that was very close to the pidgin of my Nigerian society, but who were very different from the Nigerian man in the street. Their racial anguish—the subject of much Caribbean literature and theatre—struck a responsive chord in me, but it definitely was not my anguish because the experience which had produced these characters was totally alien to me. However, beyond this mixture of strangeness and familiarity, was the strange familiarity of the form which Walcott employs in articulating this peculiar experience of slavery. Makak has embarked upon a journey home, albeit in his dream, with a group of other people to Africa. Symbolically, it is a rite of passage and a return to his origins and it is here that the curious mixture of foreignness and familiarity throws up a dramatic structure that is both African and Caribbean and which has led me on a search for the ‘own’ in the ‘foreign’.

As brochures for the January 1996 Sydney Festival blare out ‘Feel the Beat. Feel the Heat!’ to draw the crowds of summering Sydney folk to performances of the National Dance Company of Guinea (already appropriated and stamped with approval by reviewers in San Francisco and London, who are quoted on the same flyer), the chairman and former artistic director of Playbox Theatre in Melbourne, Carrillo Gartner, worries about the strength of popular Australian opposition to Australia's expanding links with Asia. In an article on the holding of the 14th annual Federation for Asian Cultural Promotion in Melbourne, Gartner fears that ‘there are people in this community […] thinking that […] it is the demise of all they believe in their British heritage’. The focus of the article, though, is not the promotion of Asian culture but how to overcome Asian indifference to Australia and the problem of bringing Australian artists to the notice of Asian impresarios and audiences. Australian cultural cringe wins out over Australian Asia-literate political correctness. In another corner of the continent the director and playwright Peter Copeman has been attempting to replace ‘the Euro-American hand-me-downs and imitations’ of mainstream Australian theatre with a theatre project which explores ‘attitudes of the dominant Anglo-Celtic and the Vietnamese minority cultures towards each other, using the intercultural dialectic as the basis of dramatic conflict’.

When Homi Bhabha discusses the problematics of signification and coding in intercultural interpretation, he questions the relationship between practices and the experience of culture. By questioning the power of codes and signifiers to fix cultural identity, Bhabha allows that the stable object of culture might be caught ‘in the disturbed artifice of its signification’, that is, ‘at the edge of experience’. This suggests to theatre and performance studies that the culturally inscribed body need not be viewed as a stable repository of displaced and deferred codes. The body may be intercepted in situations, or at moments, when signification dissolves and is reconfigured.

Indian theatre practice under British colonial rule was marked by differing strategies of resistance: agit-prop drama to promote social and political reform; the preservation of classical dance as cultural heritage; and the continuing practice of folk rituals in rural areas outwith the immediate control of the colonial authorities. Postindependence India, however, has witnessed those ‘deviant’ practices of resistance become the dominant ideological performance practices of modern India. Much actor training continued to be modelled on British drama schools such as RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); classical dances have survived to incorporate certain aspects of western ballet (for example, group sequences in Kathak); and the folk rituals have come increasingly under the microscope of western cultural tourists. Indian theatre practice, therefore, succumbs to the power of the dollar, as western academics and practitioners, with their financial and technological power, act as legitimizing agents for the global recognition of Asian culture. We are at a time when great currency is being attached to the notion of intercultural rejuvenation of home cultures by acts of productive reception with foreign cultures (a more positive definition of the practice by Erika Fischer-Lichte in direct response to Edward Said's charge of cultural colonialism which he terms orientalism). It is worthwhile taking note of how certain forms of modern Indian theatre are resisting intercultural practices, not by refusal or direct opposition, but by theatrical acts of intra-cultural rejuvenation, without the injection of the foreign culture as a serum.