Geopolitical Exotica by Dibyesh Anand

Author:Dibyesh Anand [Anand, Dibyesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sci_politics

THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF TIBETANNESS

Since 1959 the Chinese, the Tibetan elite in exile, and their Western supporters and detractors have competed to legitimize their own representations of Tibetan history and current events. This "confrontation of 'representations'" (Goldstein 1997, 56) is about history and political status; at the same time it is intimately connected to cultural representations and identity. It is not possible to speak of Tibet or Tibetans without taking into account the constitution of these categories within representational practices and identity discourses. As argued in the previous chapter, the Tibet question is as much a political issue as it is connected to cultural politics of the modern world. Rather than take political identity as something given, we should see it as socially and politically constructed. In the words of Malkki: "Identity is always mobile and processual, partly self-construction, partly categorisation by others… [it] is a cre-olized aggregate composed through bricolage" (1992, 37). "Tibet" in this sense is an "imagining community." [57] A unified Tibetan nation currently exists only through the anticipated (re)construction of its parts: occupied country, dispersed communities, and a globally networked politico- cultural support system of Tibet support groups (Venturino 1997, 103). Thus Tibetan national imagination is a product/process of strategic essentialism oriented toward the goal of reclaiming the Tibetan homeland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.