Other Transnationals: An Introductory Essay

… for the embattled / there is no place / that cannot be / home / nor is.

—Audre Lorde, "School Note" (qtd. in Lubiano 206)

That is what style is, or rather the absence of style – asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode.

—Deleuze and Guattari (133)

The matter of fact is that there is no road on this earth. It is only when people walk, more and more people walk and keep walking, that roads are walked into being.

—Lu Xun (485)

"We are living through a revolution where everyone has a stake and no one has total control" ("Episode III"). So says the narrator in the PBS series, The Commanding Heights, based on Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's influential book on world economy of the twentieth-first century. This revolution, described in the book through a Keynesian-inflected discourse, is called "globalization," featuring the free flow of the capital that is redrawing the human geographies of the world.¹ Taking a measure of this "global change" on the terrain of political theory with an ethical impulse traceable to European revolutionary humanism à la Baruch Spinoza, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – authors of Empire, another notable book of the new century – arrive at a similar estimation of the revolutionary nature of the moment, with an attempt to articulate its emergent sovereignty – namely, "empire," which is "a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers" (xii). Such a rule "establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers"; it manages "hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command," all of which involves no less than a reproduction of humanity and social life itself (Hardt and Negri xii, xii–xiii). While remaining uninspired by Yergin and Stanis-law's resort to the still more or less nation-state-based Keynesian prescription to deal with the global deluge of unbridled capitalist motions, I accept their astute articulation of the real and potential catastrophes of the crisis-ridden present moment. Drawing on the imaginative energies of Hardt and Negri's effort to open theoretical horizons for enabling globally encompassing political consciousness, my work over the past decades on human performance in theatre and society in postmodern, postcolonial, and post-socialist contexts has led me to focus on the smaller questions of how, specifically, the meanings of this one dimension of globalization dictated by capital can be traced and contextualized through the various social formations of the human lives that it changes and interconnects and how those specific social beings actively inhabit the present global change that not only conditions their functions but also threatens to overdetermine the very constitution of their existence and signification.² Theatre, a humanly animated site where living community and live performance are mutually engendered and the lifeworld at large is writ small with human materiality, offers a most pertinent terrain, in my view, for us to trace and contextualize such meanings of global proportion, with specific bodies and bodily movements kept in our analytical foreground, both as cognitive loci for a "decentering and deterritorializing" era and as living dynamics indicative of its intricate conundrums as inherent possibilities. I am glad to find that these thoughts seem to be shared, in different and mediated ways, by colleagues whose intensive labor and nuanced works, posited on the terrain of theatre and live performance, constitute the body of this special issue of Modern Drama.

"Asian Diaspora" An Embodied Leverage

This chosen terrain is, of course, not innocent of the workings of social history and its shifting regimes of power relations. On the contrary, the human bodies inherent in the materiality of this terrain are always already marked by the operations of such regimes and, in the case of this special issue, through a geopolitical and geobiological category meaning-loaded by history: this is an issue on "Asian" diaspora. In British English, the adjective "Asian" began to...