Abstract
This essay examines changes in attitudes toward the question of cultural identity over the last three decades, with particular reference to the quest for an East Asian identity. The question of cultural identity is bound up with the history of EuroAmerican colonialism, which denied to other societies a historical presence of their own. The radical national liberation movements of the 1960s sought to overcome the opposition between “the past” and “the West” by resting their hopes on revolutionary struggles that would create new cultures in the process of the struggle out of present-day realities in which “the past” and “the West” were intertwined inextricably. By contrast, there has been a retreat in recent years into native “traditions,” which once again focus on this opposition. The retreat into traditionalism nourishes ethnic and national particularism. The essay proceeds to examine, albeit sketchily, the recent “Confucian revival” in East Asia, and the quest for East Asian or Asian values. It argues that these developments are part of a resurgence of ethnicity that has accompanied globalization, and in many ways are its products. It is the irony of contemporary anti-Eurocentric movements that they themselves are entrapped in the history and geography of Orientalism. In other words, the very effort to counteract Eurocentrism is bound by the categories of a Eurocentric Orientalism. This is further demonstrated by the fact that EuroAmerican theorists have played a crucial part in the articulation of Asian values in their most recent appearance. These have been problems all along, it suggests, in national as well as regional and continental self-definitions in Asia to the extent that Eurocentric assumptions have been internalized in Asian ideas of Asia and Europe. The essay offers a sketchy overview of the history of these ideas by way of illustrating this argument. One of the basic problems that the essay seeks to bring out is the relationship of various approaches to the question of Asian identity to political and social interests. While the Confucian revival and the quest for Asian values have attracted the greatest attention, it suggests, there have been other efforts to approach the question from the bottom up, not in terms of categories of nation, region, and continent, but in terms of the everyday lives of the people in Asia, in which “the past” and “the West” are ever copresent. These efforts, which could be described as efforts within Asian contexts at “globalization from below,” have a kinship with earlier national liberation efforts to overcome distinction of Europe and Asia, East and West, or modernity and tradition. They oppose the reification of cultures along inherited spatial or temporal categories, but insist instead on the historicity of cultures. History, employed not to reify culture in the interests of power, but in the complexity of everyday life, may yet offer, the essay suggests, a way to overcome the sharpening ethnic, national or divisions of our day. It is important for the same reason to recall the approaches to the question of cultural identity of an earlier day, while also recognizing that changing times present new problems.