The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (review)

Intercultural critic, director, and dramaturge Rustom Bharucha's ambitious book "is concerned with emergent cultural practices that resist the larger forces of globalization and communalism" (1). The book's discursive center is "culturalism" as a contested and conflicted field. He is mainly interested in "inter-culturalism," "intraculturalism," "multiculturalism," and "secularism," with a particular concern as to "how meanings mutate and metabolize in the course of their transportation, translation, and specific uses in other cultures" (2).

A major theme is the issue of location, and Bharucha begins with an analysis of Peter Brook's The Ik (1975). The Ik, for him, is a theatrical example of a now-familiar criticism of colonial-era assumptions undergirding the discipline of anthropology: Brook's play "will surely go down in intercultural theatre history as a paradigmatic example of primordializing the Other as an anthropological object" (2). For Brook, visceral and located existence is not as important as the "'using' [of] techniques of other cultures for the articulation of 'different' energies and body-behaviours" (201) in the Western metropole.

The Politics of Cultural Practice is less a systematic treatise on the genealogy of ideas than a practicing artist's intellectual account of how concepts are reworked to suit the specific uses of other (less metropolitan) cultures. Encounters in the realm of theatrical practice become the central means for thinking about the ethics of intercultural theatrical representation, with its sometimes metropolitan and cosmopolitan assumptions.

Bharucha rejects the idea that his return to India from the U.S. represents the "Return of the Native," so that-as Patrice Pavis has suggested-he can "confront his own traditional cultures" (10). Bharucha observes that he is aware of his own privileged socio-educational status within India. Indeed, this book documents Bharucha's attempts in his theatre practice to challenge his own cosmopolitan and secular outlook on the world.

India's diversity of cultural practice makes intraculturalism important: "the 'intra' denotes the possible relationships between different cultures at regional levels" (11). This perspective disrupts state rhetoric about an easy multiculturalism and enables an examination of caste and economic inequalities hiding under the valorization of "regional" Indian culture.

In other parts of The Politics of Cultural Practice, recent transnational and less recent postcolonial cultural theories come under critical examination; these critiques form an essential part of Bharucha's meditation on the challenges globalization poses. Cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996) is paid particular attention. To Bharucha, Appadurai's dismissal of the state as "a redundancy in a state of 'terminal' crisis" reveals his status as a First-World diasporic intellectual: "Within the fractious contradictions of political society in India, post-nationalism is at best a utopic construction" (173).¹ Bharucha cannot entirely accept Appadurai's influential proposal that the global cultural economy is "a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot well be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models" (1996:33).

Bharucha feels this is too large a generalization: the "realities of global capitalism in India reveal that it is a lot more organized [...] and hegemonistic than earlier modes of capitalism" (174). While not a naïve nationalist, he remains unwilling to dispense with popular nationalist movements as a potential liberating force that may save the state from capitulating to the market. His position is in sync with the position of important activists critical of unregulated capitalism, such as economist Walden Bello of the Bangkok-based NGO, Focus on the Global South.

Regarding postcolonial theory, Homi Bhabha's notion of "hybridity" comes under fire-as it has, increasingly, since the early 1990s-for pushing "the boundaries of cultural undecidability to such an extent that he totally fails to sustain any dialectical tension between 'cultural diversity' and 'cultural difference'" (82). If all considerations of diversity at social, political, and economic levels are rejected, Bharucha argues, then engagement with the diversities of specific communities as seen in...