Organizer and Chair: Carol A. Breckenridge, University of Chicago
The work of the imagination has been assumed to be critical in recent scholarship. But seldom have we paused to reflect on its comparative cultural logics. How, for example, have different cultural traditions imagined (and imaged) the imagination? Is the Romantic link between the work of art and the faculty of the imagination viable in a world of spectral commodies and prosthetic mediations? Do particular regimes of image-production correspond to specific traditions that cultivate the value of the imagination? Are imagined communities somehow tied to more general techniques of representation, expression and creativity? Are there ways to represent the eruption of the imagination into everyday life that go beyond stock Freudian, Marxian and other epistemologies of suspicion? And is the imagination as a repository of utopian possibilities any more than a special, self-indulgent moment in the history of the West?
Asian practices of the imagination are pursued in this panel to explore the concept of the image and the imaginary as an aspect of the modern. We will examine imagining technologies as diverse as photography, the memoir, puppetry, poetry, and the clock. And we will focus on the conjuncture of time and space through such vantage points as the nation-city and the senses.
The Asian Nation-City: Violence and the Remaking of Urban Space
Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago
A phenomenon of world-wide scope is the growth of mega-cities, whose politics are tied up with crime, ethnic violence, informal economies, intense demographic pressure and new debates about civic space. Asia is home to many such cities-Bombay, Manila, Bangkok and Shanghai among them-where critical issues of national citizenship and identity are replayed in implosive, microscopic, local fears and phantasms. Bombay is the scene of one such drama, where the city is being re-imagined as a threatened site of national geography. Through a variety of techniques-riots, editorials, speeches and new forms of public ritual-the Hindu right in Bombay is engaged in pushing Muslims out of the city and its public spheres by recoding urban space as national space. These techniques for nationalizing urban space are a violent inversion of the political imaginary that previously linked the values of cities and citizenship in liberal social theory.
Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
Homi Bhabba, University of Chicago
My talk attempts to re-think the "global imaginary" from the perspective of the Dalit movement, focusing on the conceptual terms and the rhetorical tropes through which it addresses itself to a larger, international history of marginalisation and exclusion. A nice complication arises when we consider what it is that comes to be mobilized under the sign of the "dalit" in the enunciative moment of the transnational-and transcultural-dialogue. This raises fascinating issues concerned with the representational form of Dalit agency arising from the Dalit resistance to a positioning within a national-nationalist genealogy (which, in the Indian context, is seen as being inevitably caste-based), while refusing, in the post-Ambedkarite phase, the consolations of an essentialist, authenticating pre-Aryan origin. Quite apart from leading to a diminishing of Dalit identity, this post-ontological stance has empowered Dalit thinkers and writers to engage in forms of transcultural affiliation and "translation" (the Dalit Panthers being the most obvious case) that provide a view of cosmopolitanism "from below," or as Julia Kristeva has named it, "a wounded cosmopolitanism." Such speculations (still tentative and tendentious) will inform my presentation.
Practices of Seeing: The Training of the Senses in Bengali Modernity
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
This paper will concentrate on a Bengali literary debate about modernism in the 1930s when the Bengali poet Tagore was accused by his younger contemporaries of lacking in realism. It gave rise to a debate about practices that allowed one to see the real, but more importantly the debate was also about what constituted the real itself. Younger writers saw Tagore as nostalgic and romantic and not historicist enough for their taste. Tagore, on the other hand, championed a practice of seeing which valued the epiphanic vision over the historicist gaze (without denying the utility of the latter). The paper traces this debate to explore the different practices of seeing that were mobilized in this moment of literary modernism in Bengal and develops an argument for reading in the cultural practices that make up the modern subject, earlier and embodied forms of subjectivities that cannot necessarily be historicized but which entail very specific kinds of cultural training of the senses.
Overcoming the Modern in the City of Darkness: The Photographic Images of Naitô
Masatoshi
Marilyn J. Ivy, University of Washington, Seattle
Tokyo has long been considered one of the premier cities of the modern and late modern world. As the capital of the newly instituted Meiji state, Tokyo came to epitomize the urban, cosmopolitan energies of modernity-energies that the Japanese state sought to contain by its regular appeals to agrarian virtues, archaic emperorship, and enduring folk traditions. The black-and-white photographs of Naitô Masatoshi seek to reveal not only the margins of this capital of the modern through his depictions of urban poverty, criminality, and sexual excess-and thus to disclose a certain antimodernity at the heart of the modern-but also to recuperate this antimodernity as a form of older, folkic premodernity. It is no accident that Naitô is also known for his penumbral photographs of the region of Tono, an area made famous in the writings of Yanagita Kunio (the founder of the discipline of folklore studies in Japan) for its tales of ghosts, ancestral spirits, monstrous beings, and deathly mountains. Naitô, in short, is obsessed with antimodern margins in Japan, both folkic and rural, contemporary and urban. This paper aims to use Naitô Masatoshi's works as a way to enter into the larger debates about the imagination of Japanese modernity since the early twentieth century.
Consuming Time: Narrative, Exorcism, Java
John Pemberton, University of Washington
This paper addresses issues of writing, voice, and representation reflected in the quasi-exorcistic Javanese practice of ruwatan. Performed for persons liable to misfortune, ruwatan practices stage a charged shadow-puppet wayang play, the "Murwakala," intended to release (ngruwat) potential victims from the clutches of Kala, the all-consuming demon of time. Unlike other wayang plays, the "Murwakala" is performed in daylight, rendering the shadow apparatus apparently superfluous; also anomalous is the manner in which ruwatan dramatize the reading of texts, displacing the presumed primacy of the voice in wayang performance. Such anomalies have troubled Javanological scholars who, like W. H. Rassers early on in the 1920s, have treated the ruwatan's "Murwakala" performance as merely a "hybrid ceremony," all the while acknowledging this ceremony's exemplary status as a practice of magical import. Drawing on ruwatan performances in modern Java, colonial-era Javanese manuscripts, and political rumors in late New Order times, the paper explores the ruwatan's powers to exceed conventional boundaries of representation, decenter the twin narrative authorities of voice and writing, and, in time, to dispel Kala. At stake is the dominant modern Indonesian political trope which imagines a master puppeteer necessarily located behind the screen of significant events, particularly in the twilight of the New Order regime.
Counting Down: The End of Imagining Hong Kong
Hung Wu, University of Chicago
A giant digital clock in Tiananmen Square is running backwards toward zero: the time of Hong Kong's reunification with China. It synchronizes the concepts of political geography with political time and frames a historic process while monumentalizing the enclosure. It sets up a vantage point for imagining Hong Kong; yet its negative movement implies an approaching "end." This paper analyzes this government imagination of Hong Kong from a number of angles. I will trace the roles of the public clock in Chinese society; explore the changing monumentality of Tiananmen Square after the 1989 democratic movement; examine the concept of historical time in post-colonial China, and contrast this imagination with a heightening anxiety on the part of those being imagined.