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In the Introduction, I observed that one way of the ways economic and political power functions is through a global West. Capitalism’s development in the ‘imperial present’, as Fernando Coronil puts it, has led to the West’s ‘invisible reterritorialisation in the elusive figure of the globe[, and this] … conceals [the] diffuse[d] transnational financial and political networks that integrate metropolitan and peripheral dominant social sectors’.1 The consequence is that ‘the image of a unified globe dispenses with the notion of an outside’.2 A number of East and Southeast Asian nations from the 1980s actually have benefited from the shift by the West into the globe — not only the capitalist mini-dragon Singapore, but also the not-quite-post-socialist Vietnam and, along with them and above all, post-World Trade Organisation China. They desire a continued or new part in the current global order. Such desires do not in themselves lead to a lessened sense of the present imperialist modality of domination — even if such ‘domination’ now also requires collusion from their ‘victims’. These countries of course relate to the ‘West’ dispersed into the globe in varied ways, and with varying levels of comfort, but common to all of them is a willingness, to a greater or lesser degree, to participate in the transnational financial and even political networks that connect metropole to semi-periphery. The economic and cultural dispersal of the West into the globe itself engenders new forms of cultural difference and production that can link various regional identities into what are (still) limited cosmopolitan versions of ‘Asia’ that attempt to contend with their subordinate positions within the global West, and also the cosmopolitan culture related with it. Western cosmopolitanism, it has been noted, ‘is local while denying its own local character’ — indeed, 6 Staging Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch and the Asian Lear Reterritorilisation 122 such cosmopolitanism serves ‘as a relay for the center’s values’.3 The values here naturally are the values of the Western metropole, urban centres with an intellectual and cultural predominance because of their wealth and imperialist history. The (now-defunct) East Asian Miracle gave some Asian urban centres the increased confidence that perhaps they could now be influentially cosmopolitan in the same way. The previous chapter discussed how at the state level, tiny Singapore during the 1980s–90s had been reterritorialised and re-ethnicised in the name of Asian values after a decade and a half of active cultural deterritorialisation. This state-led culturalism contributed towards such an alternative cosmopolitan identity of ‘East Asia’. This chapter will examine two Asian theatre practitioners — that is to say, two actors at the non-state level — who, to a significant extent as a reaction to the Singapore state, have created ‘limited cosmopolitan’ versions of regional Asia that are connected to but simultaneously contend with the global West and the People’s Action Party (PAP) state’s version of Asia. That is to say, the two attempted a counter-reterritorialisation and re-imagining of the entity Asia, along with the city-state’s place in it. They are Singapore’s theatre doyen, the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002), and the rising intercultural theatre director, Ong Keng Sen. Kuo’s play, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (1995), written both in Mandarin-Chinese and English, worked to extend Singaporean cultural memory in the face of culturally fragmenting economic development by envisaging a fractured, non-statist Singapore-Asian and, indeed, global humanism, even as the playwright depicts the inescapability of servitude to the state and global markets. Ong directed the English-language version of Descendants in 1995 and 1996, and thereafter proceeded to direct a hugely ambitious ‘intercultural’ Asian Lear project. In a way, Kuo’s Descendants and intellectual reflections and Ong’s self-conscious status as anAsian ‘modernised’ into speaking English as his native tongue enabled the Asian Lear that the Japan Foundation Asia Center (JFAC) produced in 1997 and 1999. JFAC financed its first play to the tune of US$1.2 million as a way of conceiving a ‘New Asia’ out of various traditional Asian components. This was not a recapturing of a pre-modern past, but imagined a ‘present moment of the past’4 and a ‘mind of Asia’ more problematic than even T. S. Eliot’s attempt at recuperating a war-fragmented ‘mind of Europe’. Producer Hata Yuki5 wanted ‘Asian artists to present a new direction for Asian theater’6 and Ong, hailing from modernised and multi-ethnic...

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