Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER

Mr. Jen-Hao Walter HSU                                                    (Cornell University)                                                                                                                email: <jh798@cornell.edu>

"Beyond the East/West Binarism: Queer Temporalities and Ethics in Post Martial Law Theatres in Taiwan"

Ever since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, scholars of “non-Western” cultures and literatures cannot bypass the political questions of the East/West binarism. This binarism, a historical consequence of Euro-American colonial domination and cultural hegemony, is a double-bind concept that on the one hand helps to unveil the epistemic violence of modern world making and, on the other, subjugates “non-western” cultures to an impossible task of achieving self-determined authenticity. In this paper, I will revisit this East/West binarism and examine how such an epistemic double bind informs early historiographies of Chinese “modern” theatres. I will elucidate how this binarism is premised upon the temporality of modernity, a spatio-temporal scheme that the modern selfhood relies on. Early historiographies of “modern” Chinese theatre, caught in such an epistemic structure, always fall into a postcolonial trap of identity quest. Post-colonial recuperation of cultural identities, though an attempt to deconstruct this paradigm of modernity, is always cornered by an ethical impasse. In my view, this dilemma resonates with the East/West power dynamic problematics in exiting discussions about intercultural theatre. With an attempt to break away from identity-based discussions about intercultural theatre, I will look at queer theatres from Post-Martial Law Taiwan—Critical Point Theatre and The Creative Society—to showcase how these performances present queer temporalities and ethics that open the teleology of modernity and aestheticize moments of radical alterity, à la Levinas. These queer theatres, though an intercultural endeavor to mesh Western and Eastern theatrical forms and styles, go beyond the East/West binarism; their queer sensibilities are philosophical musings on the self/other ethical question qua the East/West problematic in the postcolonial world order.