Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia

5. Redrawing Centre-Periphery Relations: Theoretical Challenges in the Study of Southeast Asian Modernity

Redrawing Centre-Periphery Relations 79 5 Redrawing Centre-Periphery Relations: Theoretical Challenges in the Study of Southeast Asian Modernity Beng-Lan Goh The term modernity refers to a socio-historical transformative process which has its roots in the Western European experience from at least the 16th Century, marking a contrast to the medieval period. Implicit in this definition of modernity is the notion of historical progress that is based on a unilinear unfolding of time and experience whereby the Western mode of time and being is the norm against which all other experiences are judged. In recent years, this classical understanding of modernity has come under increasing critique with multiple formulations of the modern in the world that do not conform to the Western experience. The multiple formulations of modernity suggest that modernity is not necessarily only a Western phenomenon but that there are a variety of forms and meanings of the modern. In parallel to these developments, the conceptualization of modernity has undergone radical changes. More recently, the idea that a rethinking 80 Beng-Lan Goh of modernity can be positioned within or outside the West has increasingly given way to a conceptualization of modernity within the simultaneous processes of the global and the local and/or the East and the West. Traditional distinctions between the West and the non-West and the unfolding logic of modernity have been complicated. This paper explores displacements opened up by recent rethinking about both Western and non-Western experiences of the modern that provide ways out of the East-West binary and its associated unequal relations in the conceptualization of modernity. I will take up two sets of debates on modernity to make my point. First, I identify recent studies that have reconceptualized modernity from the margins—both within as well as outside the West—in order to unsettle the centre-periphery hierarchy and locate equal force to knowledge and practices of non-Western contexts in constituting the modern condition. Second, I discuss how the recent reconceptualization of modernity poses a challenge to understanding the modern imaginaries and transformations in Southeast Asian societies in autonomous terms rather than resorting to invidious or derivative distinctions from that of the West. Here, I explore the theoretical grounds opened up for the recognition of new meanings and categories of the modern provided by the Southeast Asian models of modernity that defy Western narratives. Unsettling the componential references of the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’ The interrogation of modernity appears to revolve around two interrelated questions, that is, first, how to dislodge the primacy of the category of the ‘West’, its history and culture, and second, how to understand the multiple formulations of modernity in their own terms and priorities without resorting to invidious comparisons. These questions have been tackled in differing ways across various disciplines. Historians, especially those studying economic and art history, are amongst those who have long taken up the critique of the authority of Western history. They have for a long time used empirical evidence of the longstanding interconnectedness of world history in terms of trade and material artefacts to point out the implicit errors in conventional thinking about history based on the idea of the superiority and priority of the West. A case in point is Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe Redrawing Centre-Periphery Relations 81 (1965). In this four-volume book, Lach meticulously documents how non-European/Asian elements have a place in the making of artistic and technological developments during the European Renaissance. He presents a complex story of how Renaissance ideas in Europe came not solely from the territorial and cultural boundaries of the West, but were equally informed by knowledge accumulated from Western encounters with Asian civilizations, in particular the Greater Eastern Traditions of China, Japan and India. Other historical studies have also focused on empirical evidence of trade, economics and material origins and innovations outside the West that have been ignored by Eurocentric writing of history. For instance, attempts at revising Eurocentric history are found in the works of Chaudhuri’s Asia Before Europe (1990) and Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony (1989). These studies show that there were various networks of trade and movement of people, material artefacts, and architecture operating in the non-Western regions of the world during the 13th and 14th centuries prior to the rise of the West. These, and subsequent studies, have highlighted the...