Geopolitical Exotica Read online

  Geopolitical Exotica

  Dibyesh Anand

  Geopolitical Exotica examines exoticized Western representations of Tibet and Tibetans and the debate over that land’s status with regard to China. Concentrating on specific cultural images of the twentieth century-promulgated by novels, popular films, travelogues, and memoirs-Dibyesh Anand lays bare the strategies by which “Exotica Tibet” and “Tibetanness” have been constructed, and he investigates the impact these constructions have had on those who are being represented.

  Although images of Tibet have excited the popular imagination in the West for many years, Geopolitical Exotica is the first book to explore representational practices within the study of international relations. Anand challenges the parochial practices of current mainstream international relations theory and practice, claiming that the discipline remains mostly Western in its orientation. His analysis of Tibet’s status with regard to China scrutinizes the vocabulary afforded by conventional international relations theory and considers issues that until now have been undertheorized in relation to Tibet, including imperialism, history, diaspora, representation, and identity.

  In this masterfully synthetic work, Anand establishes that postcoloniality provides new insights into themes of representation and identity and demonstrates how IR as a discipline can meaningfully expand its focus beyond the West.

  Dibyesh Anand is a reader in international relations at the University of Westminster, London.

  Dibyesh Anand

  Geopolitical Exotica

  Tibet in Western Imagination

  Translated by W. Y. EVA NS-WENTZ, MODERN POLITICAL PAPERS

  Wherever the wind blows from

  Its rage always falls upon me.

  O, please, my dear flagstaff, do excuse me

  I the poor flag must pray for leave

  Tibetan verse

  Acknowledgments

  Writing this book has been an intimate experience for me.

  It would not have been possible without the generous support received from the University of Bristol Postgraduate Scholarship, Overseas Research Scholarship Award Scheme, Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme, British International Studies Research Award; British Academy Society for South Asian Studies Travel Grant, University of Bath Centre for Public Economics Grant, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Library Grant, and British Academy Small Research Grant.

  The Tibetan government-in-exile's Department of Information and International Relations at Dharamsala provided valuable information during my fieldwork. St. Stephen's College (Delhi) and especially its inspiring history lecturers (including David Baker, Aditya Pratap Deo, Sangeeta-Luthra Sharma, Upinder Singh, and Tasneem Suhrawardy) instilled an academic curiosity in me that changed the direction of my life.

  I thank Jutta Weldes for her encouragement, support, guidance, and patience during my doctoral research. She is the best supervisor and colleague one can have. I also express appreciation to the Department of Politics at the University of Bristol for supporting me and setting a high standard-thanks to Richard Little, Vernon Hewitt, Andrew Wyatt, Liz Grundy, Anne Jewell, and, especially, Judith Squires. I met Juha Jokela and Johanna Kantola while we were doing our PhDs in the department and we remain friends. Thanks to Rob Walker and Richard Little for the valuable comments on my project in their role as PhD examiners.

  The shift from Bristol to Bath at the postdoctoral stage could not have been smoother. Geof Wood, as a good mentor, ensured I built on my existing strengths and expanded to new areas. Thanks to John Sessions, Andy McKay, Allister McGregor, and many others for continuing support. Without the timely grant from the department's Centre for Public Economics, the book would have been incomplete; thanks to Colin Lawson for this. Stefan Wolff is a model senior academic colleague who never failed to help. My gratitude to my students for maintaining my illusion that they find my frequent use of Tibet examples as fascinating as I do.

  The intellectual journey of which this book is a product has been enriched by comments and encouragement at various stages by more people than I can recall. My appreciation to Robbie Barnett, Costas Constantinou, Philip Darby, Clare Harris, Barry Hindess, Nitasha Kaul, Christiaan Klieger, Mark Laffey, Jan Magnusson, Martin Mills, Dawa Norbu, Barry Sautman, Tsering Shakya, Michael J. Shapiro, and several other discussants of my conference papers. If I forgot someone, my apologies! Christiaan made me feel at home in the community of Tibetan studies and is a true friend. Mike Shapiro's encouragement helped give me direction at crucial times.

  The editorial staff at the University of Minnesota Press has been fantastic in their support. Thanks to Mike Shapiro and David Campbell for editing a series, Borderlines, that new multidisciplinary academics could look to and aspire to be part of. William Callahan provided extremely useful and helpful comments and supported me in more than one way. I remain indebted to him.

  My parents, Runa Jha and Namo Nath Jha, always made me believe in myself; I never felt the need to conform. I could not have asked for more understanding parents. The list of family members is long, and it feels odd to "thank" them for what we in any case expect to do in a family: be there for each other without having to ask.

  How do I even begin to verbalize my dependence on one person who has made this journey worthwhile? I can say she was always there for me, to support me, to nurture me. But I would be wrong- she was always ahead of me, never letting me rest in illusory professional successes, reminding me not to confuse professional with intellectual. I would like to dedicate this book with love to Nitasha Kaul, my intellectual and life companion, for traveling together with me, for being different, for being herself.

  Introduction

  I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules.

  – GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK,

  A CRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL REASON

  Though critical international theories have questioned mainstream International Relations (IR) on epistemological, ontological, and methodological grounds, they remain largely focused on the "West." I contend that the parochial character of IR can be effectively challenged by a postcolonial IR based on conversations between critical international theories and postcolonialism. Adopting a historical analytical perspective, I examine "Exotica Tibet" (henceforth used as a shorthand for Western exoticized representations of Tibet and Tibetans) and its constitutive significance for the "Tibet question." [1] Exotica Tibet is interrogated in terms of its poetics (how Tibet is represented) and its politics (what impact these representational regimes have on the identity discourses of the represented). While Tibet excites the popular imagination in the West, it has been treated cursorily within political studies. I contextualize the empirical study of the Tibet question to put forward more general arguments that may apply to other parts of the postcolonial world and provide new insights into themes of representation and identity.

  GEOPOLITICAL EXOTICA: IR, POSTCOLONIALITY, AND THE TIBET QUESTION

  Mainstream IR remains preoccupied with the "big" issues of war and order, power and security. In the process, it ignores, marginalizes, and trivializes issues that affect the everyday lives of a majority of the world's population living mostly, though not exclusively, in the so-called third world. This has status quoist implications. In the spirit of the Western Enlightenment, IR's parochialism takes on the garb of universalistic pretensions. However, thanks to the various critical international theories, it is no longer possible to speak with confidence of a single discipline called IR. Voices of authority are now continuously engaged by the voices of dissent. While various strands of the "third debate" (see Lapid 1989) have critiqued the conventional theories and widened the self-definition of IR, it still remains mainly "Western" in or
ientation. Insularity in the guise of universalism remains strong. Reconceptualizing IR away from its moorings in realist and liberal paradigms involves questioning its ontological, epistemological, and methodological concerns while at the same time combating conspicuous elements of its geographical parochialism. In order to go "beyond the dominant rituals of International Relations theory and practice" (George 1996, 70), we must foreground political concerns from "beyond" the West while at the same time recognizing the West's contested and constitutive role in shaping that which lies beyond it. This can be done through adoption of postcoloniality (a postcolonial critical attitude) that involves inter- as well as antidisciplinarity.

  IR should no longer be seen as merely the study of particular kinds of political relations because it also involves intercultural and inter-subjective relations. A postcolonial international theory based on conversations of critical IR with antidisciplinary intellectual endeavors like postcolonialism will make this possible. How exactly such conversations take place would differ according to the themes and contexts involved. I do not provide a blueprint for such a dialogue. Instead, the focus is on the themes of representation and identity, especially those involving the West-non-West dynamics. Postcoloniality offers a means to talk about world politics without "political evacuation and disciplinary incorporation" (Weber 1999, 435).

  But the task is not only to look at concerns and issues affecting people in the non-Western world. It also entails examining old themes of state, power, war, and peace from new and different perspectives. For example, within the rubric of conventional IR Tibet is mostly considered in terms of its role in Sino-Western relations or Sino-Indian border disputes (see Lamb 1986), thus effectively denying subjectivity to the Tibetans themselves. This resonates with the early-twentieth-century British preoccupation with Tibet's role in the "Great Game"-the imperialist rivalry between the British and the Russians in Central Asia. The analysis of the Tibet question using postcolonial IR theory entails scrutinizing the vocabulary afforded by conventional IR and considering hitherto undertheorized issues such as imperialism, history, diaspora, representation, and identity.

  Postcoloniality politicizes culture and encultures politics. In this work, the case for a postcolonial IR is made by looking at the general theme of representation (and its productive relation with identity) and the specific issue of Western representations and Tibetan identity discourses. What Doty writes about representation of the South (the non-West) by the North (the West) reflects my use of the term "representation" here:

  By representation I mean the ways in which the South has been discursively represented by policy makers, scholars, journalists, and others in the North. This does not refer to the "truth" and "knowledge" that the North has discovered and accumulated about the South, but rather to the ways in which regimes of "truth" and "knowledge" have been produced. (1996b, 2)

  Even though the issues raised by the Tibet question are international in scope and there is an increasing recognition that it remains one of the unsolved problems in world politics, Tibet rarely figures in the international politics literature. When it does come up, it is either as a footnote to the Cold War (see Conboy and Morrison 2002; Knaus 1999; Shakya 1999), or as a pawn in Sino-Western (see Sautman 1999; Xu Guangui 1997) or Sino-Indian relations (see Addy 1984; Ghosh 1977; Ginsburgs i960; Mehra 1979, 2005; Norbu 1997). This neglect reflects a web of strategic interests of major Western and regional powers, IR's focus on relations between states, and, finally, its ethnocentrism. [2] All this was clearly evident after 1959, when China acquired complete control over Tibet, giving up the uneasy accommodation with the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan government that had lasted for less than a decade. Despite the international condemnation of Chinese action in both strongly worded representations such as those of the International Commission of Jurists and feeble statements in the United Nations General Assembly, [3] the states of the world accepted the Tibet question as an "internal" Chinese matter.

  Realist and liberal strands of IR theory seem incapable of engaging with the complexity of the Tibet question, though the emergence of critical schools within the field suggests the potential for a better understanding. The Tibetan issue can be studied in terms of sovereignty/suzerainty, imperialism, human rights, representation, identity, nationalism, diaspora, and transnationalism. An approach that highlights the interlinkages between these and also emphasizes the need for some sort of dialogue between critical IR and postcolonial-ism better addresses the complexity surrounding it. Critical international theories provide sophisticated investigations of some of these themes, notably sovereignty, representation, and nationalism. But themes of imperialism, diaspora, Western representational practices, and transnational identity require insights from postcolonial theory.

  Thus, within the wider argument for a postcolonial approach to IR, I seek to theorize Western cultural representations of Tibet and their constitutive (both enabling and constraining) and performative roles in two crucial elements of the Tibet question-the framing of the debate over political status of Tibet and Tibetan identity discourses. If we are to redefine IR as a discourse of world politics that appreciates the importance of issues of power in a postcolonial world, we have to take on board concerns such as the ones expressed here. After all, Tibetanness is a typical postcolonial/post-colonial narrative of identity politics combining processes of migration with the human desire for fixity.

  A critical engagement with "Exotica Tibet and world politics" presents its own problems in disciplinary terms. IR has not dealt with postcolonialism and the Tibet question sufficiently; post-colonial studies has ignored IR as well as Tibet; and, although Tibetan studies has some encounter with postcolonial theory (see Bishop 1989, 1993; Korom 1997a, 1997b; Lopez 1998), it has had little contact with IR theory. So, in borrowing from IR, postcolonial theory, and Tibetan studies, I move beyond all three to set up a theoretical framework within which to understand the poetics and politics of Exotica Tibet. Not only does this framework entail recognizing the cultural underpinnings of world politics, but it also politicizes our understandings of culture. In the spirit enunciated by the first collection of poststructuralist writings in IR, here is a book "that is theoretical (but not methodological), that is empirical (but not empiricist), that problematizes (but does not problem-solve) world politics" (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989, xi).

  CHAPTER OUTLINE

  Chapter 1 highlights the ethnocentrism of IR and outlines a critical approach to the international informed by postcoloniality. It then focuses on representation of the Other as an international political practice. After examining the treatment of representation within critical IR, its limitations are highlighted and the stage is set for analysis of the poetics and politics of Exotica Tibet in the subsequent chapters.

  Cultural representation of the non-Western Other lies at the core of Western colonial and neocolonial discourses. A critical political analysis of the Western imagination of the Other involves a recognition at two levels-the practices of essentializing and stereotyping that provide the backbone as well as various strategies (such as infantilization, eroticization, debasement, idealization, and self-affirmation) that put flesh on the imagined Other. The strategies are not fixed ahistorically but nevertheless remain stable over a period of time. In chapter 2 I identify significant rhetorical strategies that characterize Western representations of the (non-Western) Other, focusing mainly on Western colonial representations, and substantiate the argument through the empirical study of Exotica Tibet.

  In chapter 3 I further delve into the poetics through an in-depth analysis of a selection of prominent cultural sites within which Exotica Tibet has operated in the twentieth century. This includes novels, travelogues, memoirs, films, and images. The idea is not to provide an exhaustive list of the cultural sites that have contributed to the creation of the imagin-o-scape of Exotica Tibet but to lay bare the representational strategies operating within them.

  After this encounter with poetics, in the ne
xt three chapters I shift attention to the politics of Exotica Tibet-examining the impact of the representational regimes on the identity of Tibet as well as Tibetan identity. Exoticized representation has had a very significant effect on identity discourses among the Tibetans. Tibet is not some prediscursive geographical entity but a place that is discursively constructed through the imaginative practices of the various actors involved. [4] Similarly, Tibetanness is not some essence of Tibetan life but is the politicized articulation of themes of identity and difference, of commonality and distinctiveness. And indeed the representational regimes, even though productive, tend to restrict and contain the options available for self-expression. This productive-cum-restrictive impact of Western representations on the identity of Tibet as well as on Tibetan identity reflects a trait of modern representational regimes in general.

  Through a historical analysis of the crucial role played by British imperialism in the framing of the Tibet question in terms of sovereignty, suzerainty, autonomy, and independence, chapter 4 explores how sovereignty relates to the conjunction of international relations, imperialism, and Orientalism. This provides a sound basis for understanding contemporary political problems contextually and challenging the prevailing view of political problems of international standing as intractable nationalist and long-standing historical conflicts. I bring to relief the destructive/constructive role of imperialism in shaping the contemporary world (thus challenging the historical amnesia or a simplistic use of history that characterizes much of the IR scholarship).