After this encounter with poetics, in the next 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).
In chapters 5 and 6 the specific case of Tibetanness (Tibetan national identity) as articulated in the diaspora will be taken up to highlight the politics of representation and thus support the case for a postcolonial critical approach to world politics. As I will argue, Exotica Tibet is an important but not an exhaustive determining factor of Tibetanness. I will examine the articulations of Tibetanness in political (chapter 5) and cultural (chapter 6) spheres, argue for new ways of theorizing these identities, and interrogate the constitutive role of Western representations in these identity discourses. In chapter 5, I highlight various dynamics of political Tibetanness and foreground the crucial role played by the poetics of Exotica Tibet. In chapter 6, I offer new ways of theorizing cultural facets of Tibetanness through an innovative postcolonial analysis of the symbolic geography of Dharamsala (the seat of the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan government-in-exile). This retheorization exemplifies ways in which postcoloniality can challenge conventional disciplinary endeavors and offer new ways of doing IR. In this sense, my endeavor is as much antidisciplinary as it is interdisciplinary. While looking at cultural and political identities separately, the chapters emphasize the intermeshing between both, thus highlighting the need for en-culturing political analysis and politicizing cultural analysis.
The conclusion sums up the arguments made in the different chapters and underlines that postcolonial IR offers an effective means to appreciate the political and productive effect of Western representational practices, especially on non-Western people. The poetics and politics of Western representations are legitimate areas of enquiry for IR not only because these support particular foreign policy regimes (as highlighted by critical IR) but also because they have a productive effect on the identities of political actors. Post-colonial IR appreciates the importance of popular culture for our understanding of world politics.
1. Postcoloniality, Representation, and World Politics
Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalisation of its own arbitrariness.
PIERRE BOURDIELT, OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE
Whoever studies contemporary international relations cannot but hear, behind the clash of interests and ideologies, a kind of permanent dialogue between Rousseau and Kant.
– STANLEY HOFFMAN, THE STATE OF WAR: ESSAYS ON THE
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Non-Western peoples, and sometimes even states, have been ridden roughshod over both literally and figuratively in IR. One such people are the Tibetans. It is surprising that even as several critical theories have challenged the dominant IR paradigms on ontological, episte-mological, and methodological grounds in the last two decades, geographical parochialism has continued relatively unabated. My contention is that a postcolonial critical attitude, postcoloniality, offers an effective means of challenging this. The rejection of positivism (see Ashley and Walker 1990a, 1990b; Campbell 1998a, 1998b; Campbell and Dillon 1993; DerDerian and Shapiro 1989; George 1994; Lapid 1989; Shapiro 1988; Sjolander and Cox 1994; Smith et al. 1996; Walker 1993) and a reengagement with culture within IR (see Chay 1990; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Shapiro and Alker 1996; Weldes et al. 1999) has opened up space for a postcolonial IR endeavor. The encounter of postcolonialism with IR, that is, post-colonial international relations, is a new phenomenon [5] and remains neglected by most IR textbooks (for an exception, see Baylis and Smith 2005).
POSTCOLONIALIZING THE INTERNATIONAL IN IR THEORY
The engagement of critical IR with postcolonialism is partly an attempt to estrange the basics of IR, partly a call for dialogue and bridge building with critical discourses of IR, partly a critical review of existing critical discourses in (or at the edge of) IR, partly a call for appropriating the discursive space of IR for the play of hitherto silenced and marginalized voices, and partly an undoing of IR. It is through an interaction with non- Western context, material, and agents of knowledge that the dominant "Occidental" theories of interpretation can be challenged and redrawn (Spivak 1990, 8), and IR is no exception. This involves dealing not only with what has been spoken in IR but more importantly with what has not been said. For as Walker points out, power is often most persuasive and effective amid the silences of received wisdom (1993, 13).
Hoffman's quote from 1965 in the epigraph, which reduces IR to a debate between two white, privileged, European males, neatly reflects the parochial character of IR. In 1985 Holsti writes that hierarchy seems "to be a hallmark of international politics and theory," and since the domination of the United States and the United Kingdom is overwhelming, IR is "a British-American intellectual condominium" (102-3). Fifteen years on, Buzan and Little point out that "there is no doubt that IR has been studied from a very Eurocentric perspective with a concomitant failure to come to terms with how non-European 'others' understood international relations or organized their world" (2000, 21). A cursory look at the literature of IR shows that there are relatively few works on issues facing the third world.
This would not be a problem had IR recognized its own narrow character and not claimed to have universal applicability. [6] International Studies Quarterly, one of the most prestigious journals in the field of IR, claimed in 2002 that it publishes "the best work being done in the variety of intellectual traditions included under the rubric of international studies," and yet articles challenging the mainstream and addressing the concerns of third world peoples are rare in it. Mainstream IR theories are Western in terms of their origin, [7] inspiration, priorities, and political biases and yet they claim to be universal (see Ling 2002).
[4] Apart from Tibet and the West, the main actor involved is China. In this book, the focus of research is on Western representations and their impact on the identity of Tibet and Tibetans. This is done as an opening gesture without denying the importance of other aspects, including the Chinese representations. Analysis of Chinese representations of Tibet deserves more space than can be afforded within this study.
Knowledge production about Tibet, especially since the mid-twentieth century when the Chinese communists consolidated their political control, is no longer the preserve of Europeans. Very much in the tradition of Orientalist scholarship and British imperialist writings, the manufacturing of scholarly truths about Tibet within the Chinese academies is implicated in the service of the political regime. Chinese representations of Tibetans as essentially backward, primitive, and barbaric are witnessed not only at the popular level (Wei Jingsheng 1998) but more dangerously within state discourse too (see Heberer 2001; Hillman and Henfry 2006; Kolas 1998; Makley 1997, 1999; Shakya 2002; for Han Chinese representations of minorities in general, see Blum 2000, 2002; Dikotter 1992; Gladney 1994, 2004). Analysis of the Chinese representations of Tibet will show how Tibetans, like most of the non-Han Chinese, are seen as an exotic but backward people requiring Chinese leadership to help them progress. The notion of Tibet's lack of development due to "cultural backwardness" has been very strong in Chinese state policies since the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement (see Shan 2001; Zugui and Zuji 1996). Development as a rationale for Chinese control is also found in the writings of those sympathetic to the communist regime (see Gelder and Gelder 1964; Suyin 1977) and of many Chinese dissidents (see Xu Mingxu 2000) and creative intellectuals (for exceptions see Cao Changching and Seymour 1998; Yue 2004). Unfortunately this has resonance with the self-justificatory tone of the civilizing mission within Western imperialism. This patronizing tone is also evident in Wang Lixiong, who in the name of recognizing Tibetan agency tends to erase it by tracing the roots of the "intense religiosity" of the Tibetans to "the terrors of their natural environment" (2002, 91).
[5] For exceptions, see Agathangelou 2004; Chowdhry and Nair 2002; Darby 1997, 1998; Darby and Paolini 1994; Krishna 1993, 1999; Ling 2002; Muppidi 2004; Paolini 1999; Ramakrishnan 1999.
[6] Amin rightly argues that though Eurocentrism is anti-universalist, "it does present itself as universalist, for it claims that imitation of the Western model by all peoples is the only solution to the challenges of our time" (1988, vii).
[7] It is not surprising that Brown et al. (2002) in International Relations in Political Thought focus exclusively on the Western canon. The excuse they offer is symptomatic of IR in general. For instance, they argue that the relevant criteria for the canon can change on the basis of "current fashions" (such as the current criticism that the canon usually consists of white male Europeans), but this should not deny the "fact" that some "thinkers clearly have produced more significant work than others" (3) (not surprisingly, these are the same as the canonical thinkers). This seems to be a dismissive gesture of relegating those who challenge the Eurocentrism and misogyny of the Western canon as "current fashion."
Brown et al. go on to argue that the "modern global international order developed out of the European states-system, which emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth century CE from the wreckage of the medieval order which was constructed on the ruins of the Roman empire, in turn the product of the Roman republic and the inheritor of the thought of classical Greece" (14). This buys into the dominant autobiography of modern Western thinking. It misses the crucial constitutive role of the "rest of the world" in the change from the medieval to the modern period. Ironically, the editors stop at the gate of classical Greeks-once again ignoring the question of where the Greeks came from. In such stories, classical Greeks seem to have descended from "heaven," without "impure" influences of nearby cultures, especially the Egyptians (cf. Bernal 1987, 1991). My argument is not against a compilation of the writings of Western political thinkers but against passing it off as global/international thought.