Response to Prasenjit Duara, “Asia Redux”

Summary

In his provocative paper, Prasenjit Duara argues that prior to the nineteenth century, the web of maritime trade networks infused the ill-defined area we call “Asia” with a genuine coherence, providing a conduit for cultural flows that readily permitted interactive relationships and the mutual adoption of new beliefs and practices. By the late nineteenth century, however, the imperial powers sought to ensure their global dominance by creating regional blocs consisting of territories that were economically subservient to the metropole. The consequent focus on the establishment of territorial boundaries encouraged a “nationalist congruence between state and culture” that gathered pace over the next hundred years. Only now are we beginning to see an Asia where interdependence and increasing cultural contact, carrying echoes of past connectivities, have opened up new opportunities by which a “transnational consciousness” can and should be encouraged.

While Duara's paper will certainly generate a range of reactions, most scholars would probably agree that a preoccupation with nationalism and the nation state has tended to divide Asia, and that pan-Asianism is one of the many “isms” now fading from our vocabulary. Nonetheless, in the early twentieth century, the notion of a unified Asia did have a powerful hold on elites in Japan, China, India, and Southeast Asia, undoubtedly encouraged by Japan's celebrated victory over Russia in 1904. Accordingly, “Asia Redux” draws our attention to the “cultural movement” of pan-Asianism, exemplified in the writings of Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913) and in those of his contemporaries, the Chinese intellectual Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936) and his Bengali counterpart Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). These three men all thought in terms of a community linked by a shared civilization and spiritual values, where the “Asiatic races” formed, as Okakura put it, “a single mighty web.” From this perspective, Asian affinities encompassed even religious differences, as Islam could be imagined as “Confucianism on horseback.”