Other Asias, Other Renaissances

This paper begins by critiquing the too-extreme model of Orientalism, emphasizing in particular that the correlative notion generated by Said’s binary, that of Asia’s Occidentalism, is still an essentially Western concept, one that still implies or assumes a Western perspective on the West’s Asian Other. Acknowledging Bhabha’s “possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy,” the paper then briefly contrasts the Saidian self-other opposition with Ricoeur’s dialectic of self and other-than-self: unlike the “I” which is constructed or deconstructed as an autonomous subject that asserts itself, the self is implied reflexively in the operations, that is, in its relationship(s) with the other than self, to the degree that self even “passes over into” the other. The author then turns to a discussion of the recently-published book Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature (2006), in which she and other writers propose a new paradigm for cross-cultural and global literary studies, that of other (non-European, non- Western) “Renaissances.” Here the 15th-16th-century European Renaissance serves as a model only in a relative sense, for each of the several non-Western Renaissances (some older and some more recent) explored in the book can be seen as having come about in and of itself, outside the limits of any sort of colonial oppression, and thus to have been constitutive of (ethnic, cultural) selfhood as such. The paper concludes with a discussion of Spivak’s “many Asia’s” which looks at the positive side of this concept—this “possibility” of a commonality of many Asias each of which still retains its local identity—as well as at the limits of Spivak’s view, one which remains in many ways (as too with Said) an American academic’s perspective on the world.