There are creative tensions within Tibetan identity articulations and between these articulations and Exotica Tibet. How has Exotica Tibet affected Tibetanness? What is the politics of Western representations of Tibet in terms of its impact on Tibetan cultural and political identity? I raise these questions in this chapter and the next. While the emphasis will be on the various facets of contemporary identity articulations, the poetics of representation-Exotica Tibet as outlined in previous chapters-will always be present, sometimes lurking in the background, sometimes coming to the forefront.

Two qualifying and clarifying points need to be made before I move on. First, I do not intend to cover all aspects of Tibetanness as articulated by Tibetans everywhere. In fact, my focus is on identity discourses circulating mainly within the Tibetan diaspora. These constitute a very small percentage of the total Tibetan population, as most Tibetans still live inside Tibet. The rationale for choosing to study the diaspora is primarily practical: there are limitations on researching in Tibet due to the sensitivities of the Chinese state. Within the diaspora, there is a deliberate focus on elite discourses as it is largely the elite that shape how Tibetanness is articulated both within Tibetan communities and for the outside world. This is symptomatic of most "national" groups, but the predominance of the figure of the Dalai Lama as the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile makes it even more so in the Tibetan case. This does not mean that popular articulations are mere copies of the elite discourses or that the Tibetans living within Tibet imitate discourses prevalent in the diaspora. While Tibetanness is a project of creating sameness, it is in fact difference, dynamism, and disjuncture that characterize it most.

Second, a clarification with regard to semantics is necessary. Why use the term "diaspora" when the terms "exile" and "refugee" have wider currency among Tibetans and analysts? Within the international legal regime, most of the Tibetans living in South Asia and Western countries are refugees, and Tibetans often perceive themselves to be political refugees. Within the Tibetan governmental and intellectual community, exile is a more favored term. While these terms continue to be popular, Tibetanists as well as the Tibetan elite themselves are increasingly adopting "diaspora" to make sense of Tibetan identity (see also Baumann 1997).

Within the fields of political and social studies, a diaspora is widely conceived as any segment of a people living outside their homeland. For instance, emphasizing the need to look at the tri-adic networks of homeland (or trans-state organization), host country, and ethnic diaspora, Sheffer writes, "Modern diasporas are ethnic minority groups of migrant origins residing and acting in host countries but maintaining a strong sentimental and material link with their countries of origin-their homeland" (1986, 3; see also Cohen 1997). The recognition of diasporas as important international actors is a big step forward in the field of international politics (otherwise dominated by studies of nation-states), even though we have to avoid taking basic terms such as "homeland," "identity," and "host land" as unproblematic. This allows us to appreciate the crucial role played by the Tibetan diaspora in highlighting the case of Tibet as a problem of international politics. Though this has had little impact on the conduct of states vis-a-vis China-not surprising, given that the international community is precisely a community of recognized nation-states, a status denied to Tibet-the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan diaspora is considered, rightly or wrongly (see Barnett 2006) as the legitimate speaker for the entire Tibetan population in the international arena. The story of the creation of the Tibetan community-in-exile illustrates the successful strategies of the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan government to foster and maintain a distinctive Tibetan national identity with a mix of religious, cultural, and political elements.

A more nuanced understanding of diaspora (see Brah 1996; Tololyan 1991, 1996; Vertovec 1997) conceptualizes diaspora less as a subcategory of the migrant community and more as a subjective understanding of the experience of migration. The use of the term "diaspora" indicates the adoption of new ways of approaching and understanding questions of identity politics. Diasporic subjects are seen not as some anomaly to the norm but as distinct versions of a modern, transnational, intercultural experience. "The diaspora experience… is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity… Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference" (Hall 1990, 235).

The adoption of the term also reflects the keenness of the Tibetan intellectuals to appropriate any vocabulary that provides them an opportunity to express their identity to the external world. It enables us to theorize Tibetan diasporic identity in terms of contradictions and possibilities (see Anand 2003), a task that is undertaken in this chapter. These contradictions not only constrain and contain the possibilities for self-expression that are available but, more significantly, are productive of the very identities in question (see Venturino 1997). This approach also challenges the "victimisation paradigm" [56] so familiar in analyses of Tibetan identity.

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.

The issue of Tibetan national identity inevitably involves the question of whether Tibet is/was a nation. While Tibetans argue that theirs was a historical nation, China denies this. This rhetoric ignores that the need to present one's own community as a nation is a modern phenomenon. Nationalism is on the one hand an ideological movement toward the construction of a nation. On the other hand it is a product of heightened consciousness of national identity among a people. As Mayall (1990) points out, nationalism has become structurally embedded as the basis of the modern state everywhere. Given this scenario, it is hardly surprising that Tibetans have had to appropriate the language of nationalism in order to deal with both Chinese occupation and modernity. Tibetans claim that they have the right to determine the course of action that Tibet as a body politic, as a nation, should take. While the Tibetan issue is often discussed in terms of the preservation of a culture, the most important question concerns the right of people to self-determination. The Dalai Lama-led government-in-exile claims to speak for this right of all Tibetan people: "The whole of Tibet known as Cholka-Sum (U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo) should become a self-governing democratic political entity founded on law by agreement of the people for the common good and the protection of themselves and their environment, in association with the People's Republic of China" (His Holiness the Dalai Lama 1988).