A Life Beyond Boundaries (19 page)

Nothing like this existed in East Asia, nor even South Asia. In East Asia, China and Japan both set up their geographical and cultural boundaries and often attempted to shut out the ‘barbaric' outside world with drastic closed-door policies. The necessity of competition with other countries over politics, economics, technology and culture was only scarcely felt. Southeast Asia was probably the closest parallel to Europe. It was diverse in terms of culture, language, ethnicity and religion. Its diversity
was further magnified by the historical lack of a region-wide empire (which was associated with frequent political turmoil), and later by the colonial rule of various Western powers. It also resembled Europe in its openness to the outside world through trade.

Because Europe, after Rome, never experienced a single stable master, it remained an arena of conflict, cooperation, commerce and intellectual exchange between many medium-sized and small states, and became the logical place for the birth of linguistic/ethnic nationalism, typically directed from below against despotic dynastic regimes. Though European nationalism adopted key ideas from the Creole nationalism of the Americas, it was deeply affected by early-nineteenth-century Romanticism, which was foreign to its Creole predecessors. It had huge appeal for outstanding poets, novelists, dramatists, composers and painters. It was also quite aware of, and felt solidarity with (though not always, of course), other popular nationalisms as fellow movements for the emancipation of the people from despotic dynasties – a solidarity later expressed institutionally in the League of Nations, the United Nations, and many other forms.

After the world wars of the twentieth century, however, many young nationalisms typically got married to greybeard states. Today, nationalism has become a powerful tool of the state and the institutions attached to it: the military, the media, schools and universities, religious establishments, and so on. I emphasize tools because the basic logic of the state's being remains that of
raison d'état
– ensuring its own survival and power, especially over its
own subjects.
*
Hence contemporary nationalism is easily harnessed by repressive and conservative forces, which, unlike earlier anti-dynastic nationalisms, have little interest in cross-national solidarities. The consequences are visible in many countries. One has only to think of state-sponsored myths about the national histories of China, Burma, both Koreas, Siam, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Vietnam or Sri Lanka for Asian examples. The intended effect is an unexamined, hypersensitive provinciality and narrow-mindedness. The signs are usually the presence of taboos (don't write about this!, don't talk about that!) and the censorship to enforce them.

For a long time, different forms of socialism – anarchist, Leninist, New Leftist, social-democratic – provided a ‘global' framework in which a progressive, emancipationist nationalism could flourish. Since the fall of ‘communism' there has been a global vacuum, partially filled by feminism, environmentalism, neo-anarchism and various other ‘isms', fighting in different and not always cooperative ways against the barrenness of neoliberalism and hypocritical ‘human rights' interventionism. But a lot of work, over a long period of time, will be needed to fill the vacuum. To explore what can be done and to carry out its findings is a task to which young scholars can make vital contributions.

Hegemonic powers tend to posit ‘human rights' as a universal, abstract and global value to be invoked at their liking. In contrast, civil rights movements which seek equal rights for the citizens of a nation cannot easily be denied by the state, and they have indeed succeeded in expanding political and socio-economic rights, as seen in the US in relation to Blacks and women, even though it has taken many years to bring about genuinely emancipatory changes. In this regard ‘nation' and ‘nationalism' still hold many possibilities.

From this angle one can also see the value of ‘area studies', provided they are not too urgently steered by the state (rebellious Indonesians like to call the state the
siluman
– a scary spectre), which, when faced with political or economic difficulties, is prone to fan nationalism and a sense of crisis among its people. The fact that young Japanese are learning Burmese, young Thais Vietnamese, young Filipinos Korean, and young Indonesians Thai is a good omen. They are learning to escape from the coconut half-shell, and beginning to see a huge sky above them. Therein lies the possibility of parting with egotism or narcissism. It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.

When I arrived at Cornell in 1958 I had to learn in a hurry how to type my seminar papers, with four fingers, on a
manual typewriter. For distribution to other students, we typed on a kind of green gelatin paper, which allowed us to erase small errors with white paint, and then run off the corrected final text on a simple mimeograph machine. Changing anything was a slow and painful matter, so we had to think carefully before typing. Often we worked from long-hand drafts. Today, working on a computer, we can change anything and move anything in a matter of seconds. The decline in sheer pain is a blessing, but it is worth remembering that the pearl is produced by an oyster in pain, not a happy oyster with a laptop. I am not sure that today's seminar papers show any stylistic improvement over the products of forty years ago.

In those days libraries were still sacred places. One went into the ‘stacks', dusted off the old books one needed to read, treasured their covers, sniffed their bindings, and smiled by their sometimes strange, outdated spellings. Then came the best part, randomly lifting out books on the same shelf out of pure curiosity, and finding the most unexpected things. We were informally trained how to think about sources, how to evaluate them, compare them, dismiss them, enjoy them. Chance was built into the learning process. Surprise too.

Today, libraries are trying monomaniacally to digitalize everything, perhaps in the expectation that eventually books will become obsolete. Everything will be findable ‘online'. Randomness is perhaps disappearing, along with luck. Google is an extraordinary ‘research engine', says Google, without irony in its use of the word ‘engine', which in Old English meant ‘trickery' (as is reflected in the
verb ‘to engineer') or even ‘an engine of torture'. Neither Google nor the students who trust it realize that late-nineteenth-century books feel this way in one's hands, while early-twentieth-century books feel that way. Japanese books are bound one way, Burmese books another. Online, everything is to become a democratically egalitarian ‘entry'. There is no surprise, no affection, no scepticism. The faith students have in Google is almost religious. Critical evaluation of Google? We do not yet teach it. Many students have no idea that even though Google ‘makes everything available', it works according to a program.

One effect of ‘easy access to everything' is the acceleration of a trend that I had already noticed long before Google was born:
there is no reason to remember anything, because we can retrieve ‘anything' by other means
. When I was a graduate student, I used to enjoy decorating my seminar papers with quotations from poems that I had either been taught to learn by heart, or which I had fallen in love with in a random way. Without thinking much about it, I memorized poems I liked, and often recited them to myself in the shower, on the bus, in the aeroplane or whenever I could not get to sleep. Memorized this way, the poems were lodged deep in my consciousness, not the meaning so much as the sound, the cadences, the rhymes. My fellow students were amazed and pitying. ‘What's the point? You can just look them up!' They were right, but even Google will not give you the sheer ‘feel' of, say, Rimbaud's dizzying ‘Le Bateau ivre'.

Around 2007 I went to Leningrad to help with an advanced class on nationalism for young teachers at
various Russian provincial universities. Over the decades my spoken Russian had almost disappeared, except for ‘Good morning', ‘Thank you very much', and ‘I love you'. But to show some solidarity, I started to recite the final stanza of a beautiful poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, a radical who committed suicide under the early Stalinist regime. To my astonishment, all the students immediately recited along with me:

I was in tears by the end. Some of the students too. They were still part of an oral culture, which Google is helping to end. But there is at least one reservoir untouched – unknown hand-written letters kept in family attics or trunks, that sometimes live secretly for decades or even centuries.

Google is a symbol, maybe innocent, of something much more ominous: the global domination of a degraded (American) form of English. In the US itself, today, it is commonplace to read theoretical works for which the bibliographic foundations are all in American English and published in the United States. If there are foreign works
cited, the references are often to American translations made sometimes two decades after the original publication in Japanese, Portuguese, Korean or Arabic. It is as if they have no value till they are available in American. This is not entirely an American invention, as it has its roots in the UK's world domination between roughly 1820 and 1920. But the UK was still part of Europe, and references to books published in German, French and Italian were still completely normal. But today, more and more scholars feel that they have to publish in American. In itself this may be acceptable, even natural as long as it does not affect our consciousness. But the effect is that more and more scholars in different countries feel that unless they write in American they will not be recognized internationally, and at the same time American scholars become lazier about learning any foreign languages except those they have to acquire for the purposes of fieldwork. Here one sees the huge difference between dead Latin and live American. The émigré political scientist Karl Deutsch might be right: ‘Power means not having to listen!'

‘Globalization' of this kind is of course resisted too, and one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle is nationalism. There are thousands of excellent scholars in many countries, politically opposed to American hegemony, who, as a matter of principle, write only in their mother-tongues either solely for their compatriots or, if their languages have a wider readership (e.g. Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, French, Arabic and a few others), for a limited transnational public. Many others write in their mother-language for apolitical reasons: they can express
themselves best in the language, or they are too lazy to master another. There is nothing terribly wrong with any of this, and much that is good. But it does risk the obvious perils of not being exposed to the views of good foreign readers, or of falling into narrow-minded nationalism.

Nationalism and globalization do have the tendency to circumscribe our outlook and simplify matters. This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism. Hence, in the spirit of Walt Kelly as well as Karl Marx in a good mood, I suggest the following slogan for young scholars:

Frogs in their fight for emancipation will only lose by crouching in their murky coconut half-shells.

Frogs of the world unite!

A Life Beyond Boundaries
is set in Monotype Fournier, a typeface based on the designs of the eighteenth-century printer and typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier. He in turn was influenced by the constructed type designs of the Romain du Roi, commissioned by Louis XIV in 1692, which eschewed the calligraphic influence of prior typefaces in favour of scientific precision and adherence to a grid.

With its vertical axis, pronounced contrast and unbracketed serifs, the Fournier face is an archetype of the ‘transitional' style in the evolution of Latin printing types – situated between the ‘old style' fonts such as Bembo and Garamond and the ‘modern' faces of Bodoni and Didot. Other distinguishing features include the proportionally low height of the capitals and the lowercase ‘f', with its tapered and declining crossbar.

The italics, which were designed independently, have an exaggerated slope with sharp terminals that retain the squared serifs in the descenders.

The Fournier design was commissioned as part of the
Monotype Corporation's type revival programme under the supervision of Stanley Morison in the 1920s. Two designs were cut based on the ‘St Augustin Ordinaire' design shown in Fournier's
Manuel Typographique
. In Morison's absence, the wrong design was approved, resulting in the typeface now known as Fournier.

Abel, Ben
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Anderson, Perry (Rory)
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n
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Ba Maw
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Benson, Stella
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Bergman, Ingmar
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Bigham, John
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Bigham, Trevor
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Birley, Sir Robert
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Bloom, Allan
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Bunnell, Fred
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California
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Coedès, George
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Cohen, Jerome A.
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Colorado
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Debussy, Claude
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Prince Diponegoro
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Queen Elizabeth II
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Echols, John
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England
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Endo Chiho
vii–ix

Europe
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Furnivall, John
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Germany
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Golay, Frank
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Hall, Stuart
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Hirohito
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Ho Chi Minh
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Holt, Claire
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Hok Ham, Ong
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I Gusti Njoman Aryana
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India
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Italy
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Japan
viii
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Jenkins, David
85–6

Kahin, George
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Kato Tsuyoshi
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Kelly, Walt
187
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Kennaway, Richard
23

Kent, Rockwell
29

Keynes, John Maynard
19

Kodrat, Pak
70

Korea
45

Kriangsak Chomanan
95

Kunming
1
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10

Kurniawan, Eka
180–1

Kurosawa Akira
20

Kwee Thiam Tjing (aka Tjamboek Berdoeri)
171–6

Laos
57
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Lev, Dan
60
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London
5
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McVey, Ruth
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Maeda Tadeshi
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Malaysia
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Marcos, Ferdinand
97–8

Marx, Karl
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Mizoguchi, Kenji
20

Moertono, Soemarsaid
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Mountbatten, Louis
36
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Nagazumi Akira
55

Nairn, Tom
121
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Nemenzo, Francisco
97
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Netherlands
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Nu, U
48
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Ocampo, Ambeth
101

O'Gorman, Major Purcell
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Ozu, Yasujir
ō
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Pelzer, Karl
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Penang
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Phibunsongkhram, Plaek
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Philippines
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Pigeaud, Theodoor
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Pipit Rochijat Kartawidjaja
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Poerbatjaraka, R. M. Ng.
68–9

Pramoedya Ananta Toer
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Pramoj, Kukrit
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Rizal, José
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Rocamora, Joel
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Schrieke, Bep
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Scott, James
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Sharp, Lauriston
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Shigetada, Nishijima
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Shiraishi Aiko
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Shiraishi Takashi
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Sihanouk, Norodom
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Skinner, G. William
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Smail, John
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Soemardjan, Selo
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Soviet Union
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Spain
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Tettyo, Suehiro
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Thompson, Edward
119–20

Ti-hai
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Tomlin, Frances
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Waley, Arthur
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Weerasethakul, Apichatpong
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Wolters, Oliver
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