What Is Alternative Modernity? Decolonizing Culture as Hybridity in the Asian Turn

Abstract

I am sitting here at what is a 2-day workshop on the ‘Asian turn’ in the Enchanted City.1The conversations, one after another, turn to Asia, the Asia that is the source of revival. The celebratory rhetoric of the workshop makes visible the carnivalesque spirit around the ‘return’ of Asia. Here, to turn is to ‘re-turn’. What imaginaries of Asia are we returning to is a question that I am left wondering, uncomfortable with the wave of de-westernization that seems all too oblivious to the vast underbelly of the globalization politics within Asia that is dialectically intertwined with the story of the Asian re-turn. The stories of revivalism, Silk Roads and Asian maritime flows are euphemistically placed alongside the contemporary story of capital, seeing in these maps of the past the possibilities for the future. (Enchanted City, field notes from the ‘Asian turn’ panel and dates removed to protect confidentiality)