The Range of Essays in Asia and the Historical Imagination Is As Wide- Ranging in Subject Interests As in Perspectives
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CODA The range of essays in Asia and the Historical Imagination is as wide- ranging in subject interests as in perspectives. Even though they only begin to scratch the surface of other modes of inquiry that can be applied to the study of historical fiction, their authors’ introspection has raised important observations about what more can be done, both in terms of cross-inter- disciplinary approaches to research and teaching, and in terms of the more theoretical and practical limitations scholars face in rethinking the links between historical inquiry and the study of literature. The editorial limita- tions of this volume have, in part, already responded to this issue. Asia and the Historical Imagination is itself an ambitious title; geographically, Asia is the largest and most populous of the seven continents; culturally, it is arguably the most diverse. This modest volume, which covers only eight countries and their multicultural peoples, is only a small sample of what the Asian continent represents. Nonetheless, by responding to this volume’s scaled-down vision of Asia, the contributors have also addressed concerns about the academic community’s vulnerability in simplifying historical nar- ratives in this part of the world. In noting the shared histories of colonial and anti-colonial experiences in many Asian countries, Wang Gungwu cau- tioned that colonial powers like the British, Dutch, and French all had very different ideas of nationhood: “Under the circumstances, attempts to find common ground for Southeast Asian nations were limited to broad gener- alizations about overcoming colonialism and building nation-states on more or less Western models,” and more importantly, “[w]henever the © The Author(s) 2018 201 J. Y. C. Wong (ed.), Asia and the Historical Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1 202 CODA specifics of each country were examined more closely, what stood out were the sharp differences in the basic elements that each new nation had to work with from the start.”1 The essays in Asia and the Historical Fiction all recognize the broader intellectual and theoretical assumptions that are associated with “Asia,” but they also demonstrate discernment in addressing Asia not only as a geographical entity but a cultural concept that in many cases struggles to conform to rigid ideas of geographical boundaries, political loyalties, lin- guistic inheritance, migrant movement, and ethnic categorization. The volume’s imperative is to call attention to the tensions between the gen- eral and the particular, and to acknowledge the roles they play in (re)creat- ing meaningful narratives of the past that have remained underrepresented and unrecorded in conventional histories. Our approach to and emphasis on interconnectedness is one way of achieving this goal. Inter-Asia studies are still not widely available in the humanities; studies on historical fiction in the region are typically country-specific.2 Historical fiction, thus, is inte- gral in formulating the seemingly contradictory notion of Asia as a region with interconnected networks of interwoven histories and cultures, but also as countries and cultures with distinct and unique legacies even within the larger rubric of “Asia.” The term “Asian values,” and concerns about what exactly those values entail, encapsulate the difficulty of envisioning Asia as a region that has much in common, but also one that is diverse and fragmented as well. For Lee Kuan Yew, Asia was that which was not the “West,” and his views on Asian values, which were also interpreted as Confucian values, were clear if not perceived as contradictory at times. “In the East,” he maintained in a famous interview with Foreign Affairs, “the main object is to have a well- ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.” The West, as opposed to the East, is perceived as a corrupting force: “Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government, which we in the East never believed.”3 The longest serving former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Dr Mathathir bin Mohamad, also adopted a “Look East” campaign in the 1980s, rejecting “Western” values. This East–West rhetoric, which emphasizes the state before the individual, is in part a response rooted in the process of decolonization, but it is sometimes perceived as a means to legitimize the agendas of authoritarian regimes.4 Even more obvious to those living in Asia, the CODA 203 notion of “Asian values” is somewhat of an imagined concept, much like ones described in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). Asia is not a “coherent cultural entity”: “It is difficult to prove that Chinese values are the same as Malaysian or Korean values. The fact that these values are often related with diligence and discipline do not represent the sum total of any Asian religion or culture.”5 Recognizing the diversities in Asia is, however, not an attempt to reject Asia as a “coherent cultural entity”; in fact, the essays in this volume bal- ance the two. The guiding principle behind Asia and the Historical Imagination takes a page from S. Rajaratnam’s skeptical way of looking at “Asian values” as an ideological framework for the region: I have very serious doubts as to whether such a thing as “Asian values” really exists … If it has any meaning at all it is merely a convenient way of describ- ing the heterogeneous, conflicting and complex network of beliefs, preju- dices and values developed in the countries which for geographical purposes have been grouped as being in Asia.6 It is a delicate task to think and write about Asia in such a way: to do so is to contend with the various assumptions and contradictions that come with the study of the region, its peoples, and their cultures. And yet, there is perhaps no other genre that comes closer to the pulse of what “Asia” was and is: Historical discourse wages everything on the true, while fictional discourse is interested in the real—which it approaches by way of an effort to fill out the domain of the possible or imaginable. A simply true account of the world based on what the documentary record permits one to talk about what happened in it at particular times, and places can provide knowledge of only a very small portion of what “reality” consists of.7 In making a distinction between the “true” and the “real,” Hayden White underscores the nuances of historical realities. The essays in Asia and the Historical Imagination reflect on these realities and their authors have demonstrated that historical imagination serves as a practical supplement for historical inquiry. A historian in Indonesian history, Anthony Reid has expressed that, aside from Taufik Abdullah’s work, he knows “no other professional historian, Indonesian or foreign, who set out to tell the story of independent Indonesia as a totality, except as part of semi-official projects such as the national history or fiftieth anniversary celebrations.”8 For him, 204 CODA these gaps in historical inquiry are largely rooted in historical discontinuities in revolutionary events. Because of the difference in disciplinary approaches, historical fiction may not satisfactorily fill these gaps, but it can potentially open up new avenues of inquiry and form tangential narratives that can bet- ter our understanding of the discontinuities of historical development and history-in-the-making. New migrant and refugee crises like that one unfold- ing in Rakhine, Myanmar, and plans to open up new economic corridors in the development of China’s Belt and Road initiative, will no doubt recon- figure power networks within and beyond Asia’s political and cultural land- scapes. How these developments will be interpreted and documented in historical discourses are questions only academic historians can answer, but for historical novelists and literary critics, the past is an ongoing dialogue with the future and a springboard to human understanding. History tells a story about the past; fiction lets us think about that past. NOTES 1. Wang Guangwu, “Contemporary and National History: A Double Challenge,” in Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories, ed. Wang Gungwu (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), 3. 2. See David Der-wei Wang, The Monster that Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Ma Sheng-mei, The Last Isle: Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan (London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015); and Ann Sherif,Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 3. Lee Kuan Yew, interviewed by Fareed Zakaria, “Culture is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73.2 (Mar./Apr., 1994): 111–12. On the political implications of the East–West divide, particularly having to do with foreign policy, see Daniel Wei Boon Chua’s “Revisiting Lee Kuan Yew’s 1965–66 Anti-Americanism,” Asian Studies Review 38.3 (2014). 4. For an overview of this topic, see Michael Barr, Cultural Politics and Asian Values (London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), esp. Chapter 11, “‘Asian values’ Revisited,” 177–87. 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Hoon Chang Yau, “Revisiting the Asian Values Argument Used by Asian Political Leaders and Its Validity,” Indonesian Quarterly 32.2 (2004): 161. For an overview of “Asian values,” see Josiane Cauquelin, Paul Lim, and Brigit Mayer-Konig, eds., Asian CODA 205 Values: Encounter with Diversity (London: Curzon, 1998), and Barr, Cultural Politics. 6. S. Rajaratnam, qtd. in Barr, Cultural Politics, 31. 7.