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INTERNATIONALISM OLU OGUIBE iscourse around alternatives to modernist strategies of presentation, narration, and negotiation today deserve greater practicality and a concrete sense of urgency than in the past Considering the great gulf between the abstractions of intellectual talkshops and the realities of those cultural producers and cultures who should rightfully occupy such discourses, there is an urgent need to set to work, and not to theorise endlessly but to initiate concrete changes in our attitudes, predilections and inclinations , in our prejudices T o polemicise is our right of course, but to polemicise endlessly has a cost The discourse of disparities in international art historical practice has known enough wooly rhetoric and polemics, and international cultural practice especially in the twilight of modernist totalitarianism, seems to suffer as much from the excesses of self-indulgent intellectualism, as from intransigencies of structures of international art establishments It is essential that we move from the escapist and inevitably dangerous labyrinths of abstract polemicism designed for American professorial tenures, to more clear-headed practice of criticism; from self-indulgent intellectual masturbation to a critical corollary of what Ruby Rich has called "a prophetic aesthetics" We require more appropriate prefixes , more precise analyses We need to name, not allude; confront, not apologise, and much as we may not need to polarise to polemicise, to paraphrase Homi Bhabha, we must find the courage and integrity to polarise where necessary It would be wrong to expect that the disparities and inconsistencies in international culture brokering, especially as practiced in the West, would disappear because the very spaces and institutions which perpetrate and perpetuate them, simulate situations of dialogue There are deeper questions, more disturbing than discourse has named so far, which underlie inconsistencies in the presentation and appreciation of cultural products in the West's international arena These in turn erect and feed structures of reference which, in their turn, sustain the very prejudices which created them Thus is a cycle established which disadvantages and disparages some while it projects and centres others And this cycle will require more than talkshops and papers in elite journals and volumes, to weaken or dismantle The project of interrogating Western internationalism must carry through to practicalities, and on to evidences of change Those evidences are still very wanting indeed It is possible to see in the discourse of new internationalism , as has emerged lately in alternative spaces of dialogue in the West, an initiative of openness in international cultural practice But, in truth, what we are witnessing is a repeat of situations which in the past showed equal, even greater promise, but eventually failed to overwhelm the deep-seated and firm structures which we interrogate The mirages of cultural tolerance which surface ahead of all such dialogue , like most cultural phenomena in the West, seem to follow the same thirty-year cycle as fashion and music, within which they speedily fade away, only to reappear In Britain, for instance, there was a period of great excitement in the area of cross-cultural exchanges and initiatives from the 1950s to the early 1970s Not only was the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) established, several other, even more effective projects were led by young cultural practitioners and theoriticians which would eventually define the nature and specificities of cultural production in Britain This, liberal historians have documented and made tireless reference to Thirty years on, however, these historical landmarks are erased in establishment narrations of cultural practice in Britain Memory being short, therefore, it is conceivable that the new generation of practitioners and theoriticians who did not witness that moment in history, perceive themselves as pioneers in cultural dialogue and tolerance O n one occasion an increasingly influential young British critic and culture broker, when reminded of this past struggle and achievement, retorted that she was hardly born in the 1960s From this it seems as if such preoccupations are overshadowed by a destiny of futility A discriminate sense of history can only result in ellipses and deliberate forgetfulness, and a forgetful history is bound to find itself in a cycle of repetition Repetitiveness creates ludicrity and absurdity, a feeling which is not entirely wanting in the present discourse In a sense, certain...

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