Asia in the Mirror

Spivak points out how bizarre our conventional definition of Asia must look like: Asia is the continent where exotic dreams and fantasies have been cast for centuries. Its extreme borders are, however, occupied by two “absurdities,” she remarks, namely, Israel and Japan: “Japan has stepped into the Asia-Pacific for me. Israel sticks like a thorn in the side of other Asias” (11). A continent consisting of so many countries that hardly bear any resemblance to each other, and whose extreme borders are, rightly or wrongly, perceived as closer to the Global North than to other Asian countries, is still identified as a single, albeit differentiated, signifier. The origins of this signifier must be traced back to the history of empire-building, as Amitav Acharya points out: “Asia in many ways was an invention of colonialism” (Acharya 2010, 32). Such an invention goes back to ancient Greece’s confrontations with its eastern rivals. On the other hand, Prasenjit Duara remarks that between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, alternative, competing ideas of Asia as a more or less unitarian cultural and political space were part of the struggle undertaken by Asian nations against European colonial powers, with intellectuals like Okakura Tenshin, Rabindranath Tagore, and Zhang Taiyan working to advocate the emancipation of Asian culture(s), and foregrounding the unity of Asia as an essential practical and epistemological instrument to achieve this goal (2010, 969).

The investigative process that Spivak develops in her essays originates in the idea of “othering” meant not simply as a synonym for plurality, but as an investment in epistemic discontinuity. This not only implies mobilizing multiple perspectives on that patchwork of countries, languages, and cultures that we still call Asia—in the singular. It also requires us to reflect on the gaps that our apparatuses of knowledge can neither fill nor bridge in their attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of the whole continent as a single epistemic object. These gaps are quite diverse: many Asias require just as many—and even contrasting or contradictory—approaches and methodologies. Many Asias also require multiple and diversified perspectives that question the supremacy of the Western apparatuses of knowledge and of their ability to provide interpretive and methodological grids for their objects. Finally, many Asias also pose a challenge to the privileged Western eye/I and its claims to universalism. There can no longer be a Western sovereign subject that looks at Asia and tries to provide it with its own rationale. First, because the West itself has discovered its inner contradictions, fractures, and lacerations that prevent any univocal and unidirectional gaze from being exerted upon any presumed object of knowledge. Second, because the numerous Asias that the Western gaze has for centuries tried to merge into one single object have, in turn, gazed upon the observing subject each and every time, questioning its authority and its alleged universal stance. And finally, because these many Asias have also been looking at each other for centuries, their territories and cultures have continuously come into contact, and their maps have frequently overlapped.

Accordingly, the end of Western epistemic supremacy over the rest of the world has long been debated. In his introduction to the 2004 edition of the volume titled Europe and Asia Beyond East and West, Gerard Delanty reasons that the very idea of the West is now inadequate. In his view, “with the spread of Western civilization throughout the world, that civilization has ceased to be Western, but has become globalized” (Delanty 2004, 1). For Delanty, who approached these issues from the point of view of European Studies, “there is an unavoidable recognition that neither self nor other are easily defined” (2), which led him to pursue a kind of research that “addresses the possibility of a European–Asian cosmopolitanism that is not constrained by the dangers of Eurocentric ‘Orientalism’ or anti-European ‘Occidentalism’” (2). Cosmopolitanism, however, risks reproducing the limits of old multiculturalism, implying the existence of a privileged subject of knowledge whose authority is grounded in a well-defined social and cultural background, someone who is usually white and upper-middle class, educated, and who possesses adequate financial and cultural capital.

This book originates from a project conducted at the University of Cagliari and a conference hosted in Cagliari in March 2024. Both the research and the conference intended to explore representations of Self and Other in specific contexts related to different areas of Asia. Our aim was to analyze the cultural, literary, and linguistic manifestations along with the conflicting dynamics occurring in the construction of complex identities, working from three different perspectives: how Asia represents itself, how it narrates the other, and how it is perceived as the Other. In doing so, the essays presented in this book and the project which has facilitated their composition and consolidation into a collective narrative share Delanty’s plea for a new approach to Asia, Europe, and global cultural and political entanglements. Such an approach takes cognizance of both the need for a philologically grounded study of cultures in their national dimension and the transnational outlook that can enable a deeper understanding of their interactions and reciprocal influences. In conducting our project, we were well aware that our roots in European academia cannot but influence our scholarly approaches and our outlooks. While putting Asia at the center of our concerns, we have tried to avoid the risk of essentializing its nature both in the present and in the past. In dealing with these debates, we have thus constantly tried to observe and question our unavoidable familiarity with, and dependence on, Western scholarly methodologies. As Dipesh Chakrabarty states in his seminal work Provincializing Europe, “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought—which is now everybody’s heritage and which affect us all—may be renewed from and for the margins” (Chakrabarty 2000, 16). The subject matter of this book is accordingly a fertile breeding ground for fostering further reflections in this area.

A way out of the many contradictions we were grappling with while putting together this book was the use of the mirror as the metaphor for our research and, more broadly, for the numerous and conflicting perspectives with which this book aims to engage. For these many reasons we agreed that the mirror was the metaphor that best suited our efforts. The mirror has often functioned as a metaphor for new possible epistemic approaches, and not simply because it supplies a perfect replica of the “real” world. In fact, when we look at ourselves in the mirror, someone else is looming in the reflected image, both observing us in our self-discovery exercise and modifying the reflected picture of ourselves that others may apprehend. The mirror, thus, is the open field in which multiple gazes, coming from different and even distant subjects, converge and cross each other. When Asias look at themselves in the mirror, their reflected images also include other subjects that undermine that very Eurocentrism which for cen­turies has significantly affected our epistemic practices as both scholars and human beings acting in the world. Thus, the mirror denies the existence of an original Asia: any allegedly pure object of knowledge already finds itself marred by the very gazes that have produced it as an object of knowledge, bearing on its surface the traces of multiple projections, doubts, and inquiries. In Sade Fourier Loyola, Roland Barthes refers to the mirror as the instrument that the West has traditionally used to nurture its narcissism and strengthen its power position (Barthes 1976, 138). Yet, as Willard McCarty put it with reference to the use of this device in classical culture, “like metaphor itself, mirroring both identifies and separates” (1989, 162). The mirror, therefore, elicits interpretations but also questions the authority of any such interpretation. It creates connections and foregrounds distance at the same time. However, in line with the identities that they show and duplicate, the meanings and the effects of mirroring should not themselves be essentialized. Focusing on Kierkegaard and Rorty vs. Zhuangzi and Xunzi, two classics of ancient Chinese philosophy, Erin M. Cline has underlined the different meanings of the mirror metaphors in Western and Chinese thought, inviting scholars to avoid forcefully assimilating cultural trends that may reflect contrasting traditions and perspectives. According to Cline (2008, 317–18), while both traditions make use of the mirror as a metaphor, they do so in ways that call for a heightened awareness of divergences in the sense and connotations that metaphors can acquire and engender.

Accordingly, mirrors reflect our objects of analysis reminding us of their differences and distance and of the technologies of (epistemic) power and sovereignty that have for centuries framed the images of the East that we have elaborated on and idealized as pure and original. This intersection of multiple gazes, we hope, could question the authoritativeness of the Western eye, in which what was once called the “third world” is still sometimes caught as an object of scrutiny. The mirrors that reflect the many Asias of our book, conversely, wish to “reduce the objectifying gaze that reconfirms the sovereignty” of the Western subject, triggering and encouraging “a process that is simultaneously provocative and pedagogical” (Chambers 2017, 92).

The use of the mirror as a metaphor for the relationships between the (Western) eye/I and its more or less objectified (Eastern) other is not new. Among the scholars who have pointed out how misleading such an approach could be, the significant words that Homi Bhabha wrote in the essay “Interrogating Identity” have repeatedly resonated with us at every stage of this project. In fact, Bhabha extensively comments on the position of postmodern thought with regard to the othering of Asia. He argues:

What is profoundly unresolved, even erased, in the discourses of poststructuralism is that perspective of depth through which the authenticity of identity comes to be reflected in the glassy metaphorics of the mirror and its mimetic or realist narratives. Shifting the frame of identity from the field of vision to the space of writing interrogates the third dimension that gives profundity to the representation of Self and Other—that depth of perspective that cineastes call the forth wall. (Bhabha 1994, 48)

What we can define as the trouble with postcoloniality—whose complicity with poststructuralism Bhabha implicitly denounces—is the erasure of the language of the self. For instance, when I see the image of the Other reflected in the mirror I tend to ignore the context that the frame encasing it is my frame, and that the form in which the image of the other is reflected derives from, and still depends on, my epistemic grids. Bhabha’s words encourage us to wonder about this crucial issue: whose mirror are we using to look at the reflected images of Asia or Asias? The awareness that we are inevitably translating what we call the real into our own language is, at the same time, the limit and the strength of the mirror as a metaphor for our epistemic effort. When we look at the numerous Asias we see reflected in the mirror we are also forced to look at the precariousness of our epistemic instruments, and, as a consequence, reminded of the partiality of any attempt to fully grasp our supposed objects of knowledge. We are thus reminded also of the precariousness of our position as subjects whose knowledge is grounded in the north of the world and in the legacy of European tradition. While we cannot simply reject our situatedness as subjects and pretend that it simply does not matter, we can accept its partiality as an instrument that allows us to appreciate the pluriversal nature of the present world. In fact, a world that is tentatively understood as pluriversal rather than simply—and simplistically—global requires multiple perspectives to address the same objects and even to question and undermine itself. Any inquiry must bear the traces of the provisionality of its conclusions.