As pointed out earlier, rather than being confined to "big" issues, postcolonialism concentrates on the politics of everyday life. Universal ideas and their unproblematic implementation globally are eschewed. While acknowledging the relationship of complicity between the production of explanations and the violence and injustices associated with the structures of imperialism and capitalism, a deconstructive scenario of the kind emphasized by postcolonial theorists like Spivak involves paying attention to critics' complicity with the object of critique, a "disclosure of complicity" (1988, 180). Elsewhere, Spivak suggests two methods to confront the situation- overtly marking one's positionality as an investigating subject and laying bare one's inescapable institutional interests (1993, 56). This kind of self-reflexivity is absent from mainstream IR.
Darby surmises that the contrast between the mobile and variegated nature of the postcolonial discourse and the conservative character of mainstream IR reflects a general situation that exists between established disciplines and new formations of knowledge (1997, 13). I find this contentious. While there is no doubt that new disciplines informed by feminism and cultural and postcolonial theories are more radical, the surmise seems to suggest that it is only a matter of time before the disciplinary establishment would blunt their critical edge. As a corollary, one may also take the implication that when IR was a new formation of knowledge it was radical. Certainly this does not seem to be the case.
A basic difference exists between the established disciplinary knowledge formations such as IR and some of the new ones, a difference that cannot be accounted for by temporal factors only. It is not a question of academic incorporation or assimilation but of metatheoretical differences. Self- reflexivity regarding theoretical stances and empirical agendas was not a prominent feature of older disciplines even when they were new. Claims were not made on behalf of the unprivileged. Justification for disciplinary endeavors was given in the name of methodological correctness. Right from its inception, IR has, on the whole, been a status quoist discipline with limited debate over strategies of maintaining a good international order. On the other hand, many new hybridized disciplines have adopted a critical and oppositional stance vis-a-vis the established discursive and material structures. Not only do they involve a critiquing of the existing norms and structures but they also promote a constant questioning of their own shifting positionalities. While the older disciplines like IR were informed by a heady confidence in the Enlightenment ideas of Progress, Reason, and Emancipation, the new knowledge formations' attitudes to these ideas vary from skepticism to outright rejection. The latter argue that the Enlightenment ideas have sought to universalize particularistic, ethnocentric, and masculinist notions. Unlike older disciplines, which emerged to carve out an exclusive niche for themselves, the new ones seek to challenge disciplinary compartmentalization and circumvent it, and they are often antidisciplinary. While IR emerged as a corollary to the study of politics, Postcolonial Theory's emergence within humanities and social sciences has come as a challenge to various disciplinary boundaries. Its challenging nature offers interesting opportunities for the adoption of a postcolonial approach to world politics, in alliance with critical IR.
Critical IR, Postcolonial IR
Given the potential critical edge in the discourse of postcolonial-ism, it is surprising that even the more radical endeavors in the field of IR, with the exception of feminism, [18] have generally ignored it. For instance, in the pioneering postmodern work International/ Intertextual Relations (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989), the long bibliography does not include works that move beyond the confines of the "West." Even when the term "postcolonialism" is used in IR, for instance in Clapham's work on Africa and the international system (1996), it is devoid of postcoloniality (that is, a postcolonial criticality) and is used in the simplistic periodizing sense of post-colonial times. "[E]ven works embarking from professedly critical postmodern and poststructural perspectives often replicate the Eurocentric ecumene of 'world politics'" (Krishna 1999, xxix).
Why this lack of engagement of critical international theories with a potential ally (postcolonial theory)? Krishna brought attention to this as early as 1993 when he highlighted the fact that some postmodern theorists commence from a remarkably self-contained and self-referential view of the West and are often oblivious to "the intimate dialogue between 'Western' and 'non-Western' economies, societies, and philosophies that underwrite the disenchantment with modernity that characterizes the present epoch" (Krishna 1993, 388). Cautioning against a blanket critique of subjectivity and agency, which he alleges to be a feature of some postmodernist works, Krishna prefers a postcolonial perspective that entails sensitivity to hierarchical relations between races, genders, and classes while also challenging the ethnocentricity of IR.
While I agree that the critical insurgencies in general and post-modern/poststructuralist writing in particular have tended to ignore the concerns of the non-West, I do not accept Krishna's caricature of postmodern writings in IR as depoliticizing. For not only do these endeavors create space for imagining alternatives (a fact Krishna recognizes) but they also accept the need to formulate ironic, provisional, and yet politically enabling essentializing of subjectivity (something that Krishna accuses them of ignoring). What critical theories like critical social constructivism, feminism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism have exposed is International Relations as a discursive process, a process that constitutes the world we live in. Conceptualizing the international as discursive allows for contestation and recognition of different possibilities of being international.
In his critique, Darby claims that both postmodern and conventional IR share a sense of remoteness from the phenomena under analysis; both look at an essentially depeopled landscape where ethics and intentions do not rate highly (admittedly from very different perspectives) and do not pursue consequences in human terms (1997, 15-17). This comparison underemphasizes the politicizing potentialities of postmodern IR (for instance, Campbell 1998a, 1998b; Shapiro 1988; Walker 1993). Darby also critiques the postmodern influence within Postcolonial Theory as depoliticizing and rejects the concept of "strategic essentialism" for lacking a cutting edge and for inscribing the secondary status of the third world in the thinking of the first world. In contrast, he argues that we need to give much more weight to the problems of the third world, rather than continuing to tailor our approach to the issues in hand in line with the requirements of an often resistant body of theory (1997, 15-17). These arguments not only repeat the positivist fallacy of making a distinction between theory and practice but they also contrast material structures with discursive practices as if they do not perform a mutually constitutive role. Darby ignores the fact that the constitutive paradox of essentialism and antiessentialism is irreducible. Spivakian strategic essentialism-"a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest" (in Landry and MacLean 1996, 214) [19]-still seems to be the best way forward for it enables while at the same time it is humbling (a characteristic noticeably absent from the often arrogant pronouncements of mainstream IR).
IR's third debate has seriously charged the discipline of IR with promoting the status quo and a lack of self-consciousness and re-flexivity. The "truths" of IR have been revealed as effects of regimes of truth, knowledge as complicit with power, pursuit of objectivity as a chimera, hitherto universal concepts as ethnocentric and particularistic. Let me then recapitulate some of the commonalities that can provide a contingent ground for conversations between existing critical international theories and postcolonialism in order to come up with a postcolonial IR that seeks to deparochialize the discipline of IR. Both endeavors seek to provide a critique of dominant discourses for being the typical products of Western modernity. They reveal the silences of the disciplines by exposing philosophical closures and the underlying power-knowledge nexus. Both are marked by constitutive paradoxes. Challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity goes along with an assertion of subjectivity.
Resurgence of identity accompanies the deconstruction of identity as constructed and processual. The universalistic pretensions of the mainstream are revealed as particularistic and ethnocentric. Emphasis on the local and particular go hand in hand with attempts at more inclusive understandings. The strategy involved includes rereading [20] and rewriting the canonical texts, as well as constructing an alternative and different archive. Reality is no longer seen as an objective fact but as a series of representations.
WORLD POLITICS AS THE POLITICS OF IMAGINATION
Social and cultural identities by their very nature have always been discursively constructed. What is new and peculiar to modernity is the desire and ability to construct a bounded identity based on a fixed and autonomous idea of self. This has been paralleled by the power of representations to construct identity and by highly unequal access to discursive and representational resources at a global level. Representational practices feed the dominant knowledge regimes and structures and shape the very identities they seek to represent. The best-known example of this is the ideational construct of Orientalism, which reflects the close connection between particular modes of cultural representations, anthropology, and European imperialism (see Said 1978). In the process it also creates the categories of "Oriental" and "Occidental" people.
Representation and Critical IR
Within IR, it is important to look at Western cultural representations of non-Western people. This is so for various reasons. Representations populate the world with specific subject positions within which concretized individuals are then interpellated (see Weldes 1999). Identity claims of various non -Western communities thus operate within power relations put in place by the West. This does not deny non-Westerners their agency, for there is always space for resistance and accommodation. But it emphasizes differential access to the creation and molding of discursive (both material and nonmaterial) resources. It offers ways of challenging and denaturalizing modes of representation that abet domination by "making it acceptable and coherent within the dominant ethos that constructs domestic selves and exotic Others" (Shapiro 1988, 122-23). Recognition of the productive dimension of representation implies that the very basis of world politics-identity-is challenged. The recognition of the salience of Western representations of the non-West in world politics also questions the conventional view of international studies as a social "science" that has little to do with culture, morality, society, and the like. It underlines the importance of culture as a factor in molding, sustaining, and questioning political practices. It recognizes world politics as a process of cultural interactions in which the identities of actors (including their values and visions) are not given prior to or apart from these interactions. Instead, they are shaped and constituted in the complexes of social practices that make up world politics. Rather than denying the importance of actors in enacting and reshaping the social practices in which they are embedded, it focuses our attention also on the social construction of actors. Thus, representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry.
"A whole range of analyses in IR have taken this [Said's] idea up and mapped the different ways in which the West constructs the non-western world" (Diken and Laustsen 2001, 768). This comment is surprising given that IR, including critical IR, with few exceptions (see Biswas 2001; Doty 1996b; Gusterson 1999) has more or less ignored the questions raised by Orientalism critique. The question of representation has historically been excluded from the academic study of international relations and the "price that international relations scholarship pays for its inattention to the issue of representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and deferral of its responsibility and complicity in dominant representations" (Doty 1996b, 171).
The focus on representation within critical IR has been mainly on the constitutive function of representation in generating and sustaining particular policy regimes (see Doty 1996b) and on the identity politics of the representer. For instance, Campbell argues that the inscription of otherness was linked to American foreign policy and the enframing of American identity:
At one time or another, European and American discourse has inscribed women, the working class, Eastern Europeans, Jews, blacks, criminals, coloreds, mulattos, Africans, drug addicts, Arabs, the insane, Asians, the Orient, the Third World, terrorists, and others through tropes that have written their identity as inferior, often in terms of their being a mob or horde (sometimes passive and sometimes threatening) that is without culture, devoid of morals, infected with disease, lacking in industry, incapable of achievement, prone to be unruly, inspired by emotion, given to passion, indebted to tradition, or… whatever "we" are not. (1998b, 89)
In Weldes (1999) as well as Weldes et al. (1999), representation is analyzed as a central concept of international relations and foreign policy. As in Campbell, it is the foreign policy regime sustained by particular representational practices and the identity of the repre-senter (the United States) that is under investigation. Doty (1993, 1996a, 1996b) provides effective analysis of representation as foreign political practice. Similarly, Neumann studies the "use of 'the East' as the other" (1999; emphasis added) as a general practice in the identity formation of Europe; Klein examines NATO "as a set of [representational] practice by which the West has constituted itself as a political and cultural identity" (1990, 313); and Dalby (1988) analyzes how the Soviet Union was constructed as a dangerous Other in order to produce an ideological rationale for the U.S. national security state.
In all these studies of Western representation of the Other, the focus is on either its rationalizing role in some foreign policy regime or on its productive effect on dominant identity discourses within the West. These works have not dealt with the poetics and politics of Western representations of the non-West from the vantage point of the latter. The focus has remained largely on a critique of Western practices, not on its productive and restrictive impact on the non-West. This is at best an incomplete step in the right direction. While recognizing the significance of representation of the Other for the representer, we must identify and analyze the impact on the identity of the represented. Chapters 4-6 focus on the productive dimension of representations vis-a-vis the represented through the empirical study of the identity of Tibet and Tibetans. My emphasis is on the ways in which particular encounters between the West and the non-West have shaped the latter. Representations support not only particular politics of the representer toward the represented but, significantly, they construct the very identities of the actors involved, especially the Other. Representations are productively linked with identity discourses of all kinds. The conventional idea that representation draws upon a pregiven identity is turned on its head, for it is identity that is fashioned out of particularized representations. In the case of Exotica Tibet, then, representational discourses are not reflective of, but actually productive of, Tibetan identity. Within critical IR, the paucity of serious consideration of the "how," "why," and "what impact" questions of Western representations of/on non-Western communities shows that the task of provincializing the West has only just begun.
Theorizing Representation
Constructionist theories (Hall 1997b, 15-74) are best suited for a contextualized understanding of social and political concepts like representation and identity. They do not argue that the material world does not exist but that it acquires meaning only through the mediation of language and discursive systems. Though such a discursive approach characterizes the work of many scholars, no one has been more prominent than Foucault (1970, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1986) in shaping it. Foucault is concerned with the production of knowledge and meaning not through language but through discourse. Discursive practices have their own inclusionary and exclusionary aspects.
Discursive practices are characterised by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaborati
on of concepts and theories. Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate its exclusions and choices. (Foucault 1986, 199)
Foucault's reformulation of discourse also calls for recognition of the explicit linkage between knowledge, truth, and power. Identification of the knowledge-power (pouvoir/savoir) nexus reveals the linkage of truth claims with systems of power:
Truth isn't outside power, or lacking of power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of the world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. (Foucault 1980, 291)
The recognition of the constructed character of truth facilitates a critical political positioning. Nothing is sacrosanct. However, this does not undermine the impact of truth claims on the lives of people.
All knowledge, once applied in the "real" world, has real effects and in that sense becomes true. [21] This Foucauldian identification and exploration of the link between power, knowledge, and truth is radical in its implication. It shifts the terrain of inquiry from the question "What is truth?" to the question "How do discursive practices constitute truth claims?" In terms of representation, we may see the implication as a shift in the focus from some core reality beneath/behind representations to the modalities of their functioning. The question is no longer whether a representation is true or false but what discursive practices operate to render it true or false. It is not about how representations reflect some subjects but, more crucially, how subjectivity itself is constructed within discursive practices, how representational regimes are productive of subjectivity. Discourses then are "practices which form the objects of which they speak" (Foucault 1972, 49). Adopting this approach to Tibetan identity, the pertinent question shifts from "How far do representations (both Western and self-) of Tibetans reflect their identity?" to "How do representational regimes affect the discursive production of Tibetanness?" This helps us look at Tibetanness as a politicized identification process, instead of some pregiven, es-sentialized, fixed object.
Geopolitical Exotica Page 3