Reading and Experiencing a Play Transculturally

Abstract

A transcultural poetics of reading is what makes a play go making it, in the process, go beyond its home base to circulate out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin. (1) It is not merely about reaching out for the through negotiations in culture, civilizations, and concepts, but rather about judging and orienting one's peculiar nativity and cultural exclusiveness for more intense and intricate moves in cross-cultural negotiations of meaning. An effective life of a play exists in a vital combination generated through the duality of the work's existence both inside and outside its culture. Reading, performing, and experiencing a play, thus, is like living between cultures, different constellations of beliefs, manners, and languages; it is about finding the unpeace amidst contesting territories of power, domination, obscurity, obfuscation, and elision. This unpeace, at once the site of conjuncture and misjuncture, vitalizes our reading and viewing. Inhabiting and exploring this locus of uncertainty render strangeness to our transgeneric perception of a play both as a text and as a performance. Such meditative and performative acts of living on the borders of cultures and traditions help monitor and effectuate the cross-cultural traffic leading to wider horizons of experience. However, there exists something that stays undocumented and quaintly fragmentary, avoiding hardened historicist embeddings and historical efficacy. (2) This is the politics of in the transcultural that induces a separate order of defamiliarization where identity and difference work at the same instant to transit beyond habitual ways of apprehension. There is a remarkable estrangement in that trans introduces a strangeness a liminality, the familiarity with which comes in varying versions of shock, enticement, and freshness. With trans comes the cognitive shift, conceptual inflections, the linguistic transfers and the unease of profit and loss in cultural translation. Transcultural spaces, thus, inform our experiences--literary, aesthetic, and cultural--with affect, a different set of sentiments and interpretive values. These spaces, generative of an unpeace, challenge the organicist notion of culture and the tendencies to return to the security of the universals of the human condition and specific cultural codifications. Transcultural encounters creatively destabilize our received understanding of cultural formations and unsettle easy syncretic and synthetic tendencies in the construction of socio-literary significances. The trans in transcultural poetics, in other words, is about going global, not just in additive ways but in a coadunative combination replete with the peculiar modes of substraction and inwardness, where cultural specificities and exemplarities are honestly kept in play, where the Archimedean point and the panopticon are difficult to locate and achieve in such mondializations. Indeed, in such substractions, in cultural specificities and porosities, the potentiality of going global is astutely realized. Appropriating Rabindranath Tagore, this phenomenon can be meaningfully illustrated as the river that while flowing down the mountain knows its water is somewhere connected to the ocean. Being global is not finding one's texture in bland cosmopolitanization; rather, it is in moving beyond such formations to increase the foreignness that is not alienation but studious curiosity, a critical inclusiveness, to challenge the limitations of thought and augment potentialities for connection. Such critical inclusiveness has a strong tendency to fight the conceptual hegemony that certain languages in their predominant circulation and overwhelming number of users create, or rather inflict, on our understanding. There is, instead, exchange and play, borrowing and bartering, trade and profit, deficit and loss. Transcultural poetics influences the planetization of literature (of drama), in profound ways, affecting policed and legislated ways of reception. …