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Theater 31.1 (2001) 107-127



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Consumed In Singapore
The Intercultural Spectacle of Lear

Rustom Bharucha

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There are at least two provocations in selecting the Japan Foundation Asia Center's production of Lear, performed in Singapore, for my intercultural investigations in this essay. The first relates to the tension between the "global," which is associated with the economic hegemony of global capitalism and its cultural ancillaries in the world market, and the "intercultural," a fuzzier term for semi-autonomous, voluntarist cultural exchanges between individuals, and groups, from different parts of the world. As I have written earlier (Bharucha 1999, 2000), intercultural practice is unavoidably subsumed within the inequities of the global economy, but this does not mean it has to submit to the cultural demands of the market. Indeed, there is an oppositional component within interculturalism that cannot be separated from a larger critique of capital.

This pristine formulation, however, is challenged by the minuscule city-state of Singapore, whose very survival, if not phenomenal economic "success," was facilitated by its embrace of global capital at the outset of its formation as a nation. The task of discriminating the "intercultural" from the "global" is obviously harder within the First World context of Singapore than it would be in the Third World context of other non-Western nations like India, on the margins of the global economy. However, the tension between the "intercultural" and the "global" should not be dissolved in the Singaporean context through a conflation of categories. Such conflations are ubiquitous in Singapore's political scene, where it is almost impossible to distinguish, for example, the control of the state and the government from the dominance of the People's Action Party (PAP). Without elaborating on the political expediency of such slippages, I would emphasize that it is necessary to uphold a contrapuntal relationship between these terms, if only to retain a critical view of those enterprises in which the intercultural is part of a global agenda. [End Page 107]

The second provocation concerns the assumptions of liberal democracy underlying almost any articulation of interculturalism. In the context of the "unapologetically anti-liberal" (Chua 1995: 185) policies of the PAP government, it must be stressed that interculturalism is mediated--and, indeed, made possible--by individuals and groups not necessarily controlled by the strictures of communities or states. The state has no claim to the narrative on interculturalism, even though state agencies can facilitate (or impede) its production.

Yet in Singapore the state has indeed authored (and implemented) the undeniably vexed narratives of multiracialism and multiculturalism against which interculturalism can be offered as a tentative alternative. 1 I say "tentative" because the practice of interculturalism in Singapore is as yet emergent, and fraught with its own traps and self-deceptions. Through my analysis of an ambitious intercultural production of Lear, directed by Ong Keng Sen of TheatreWorks (Singapore), I hope to tease out some troubling questions that cut across the domains of intercultural practice and multiracial/ multicultural politics.

To what extent, for instance, is it productive to speak of "Asian" models of interculturalism? Do such experiments counter Eurocentrist models, or do they succumb to a "reverse orientalism," or, more invisibly, to a form of "self-orientalism" (Tan 1997: 270)? Does the inscription of "Asia" in cultural practice unconsciously echo the advocacy of "Asian values" by ASEAN politicians? To what extent does interculturalism circumvent the investigation of the "local" through a refusal to engage with cultural and class differences at home? Can there be a politically engaged intercultural practice? Or do these recent Asian experiments merely enhance the global prospects of cultural tourism, exhibiting a specious concern for other cultures that, in actuality, masks the boredom of an excessively mechanized metropolitan existence?

These are questions that I would like to engage not just polemically but with some critical empathy. I may not be an insider to Singapore's cultural scene, but I am not entirely a foreigner. I choose to speak in this interstitial space, drawing some encouragement from sociologist Chua Beng-Huat's candid acknowledgment that "outsiders don't seem to have...

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