David said he was trying to gather together “a group of truly creative, hardworking, personable academics from various disciplines and geographical regions” in pursuing this project. I am honoured to be included in this group. What attracts me to the project and after some hesitation, said yes, is that I know a little about what Julie and Katherine are doing, and I am keen to have an opportunity to share ideas and concerns with them, and people they interact with. In the past few years, I have been learning about experiences of community currency, sustainable livelihood, local planning and people-to- people trade. [See Attachment 1: “Roundtable on Alternatives in Action”. The several Asian experiences are documented in Beyond the Financial Crisis: People’s Responses and Alternatives in Action, Hong Kong: ARENA, 1999.] I am starting to learn about participatory budget in Porto Alegre and Santo Andre, comparing this with the experience of people’s planning in Kerala. Hence I attended World Social Forum II in Porto Alegre six weeks ago, and had the pleasure of meeting with Ruben.
I hope to be able to see how these experiences may inform community development in China. I have written some essays on the people’s science movement and people’s planning in Kerala in several popular journals in China, and organized several exchange visits to facilitate dialogue between Chinese and Indian scholar-activists. One project I am pursuing is to document and interpret alternative practices in rural communities in China, opening up a discursive space for sustainable livelihood and local development, so that one does not succumb to the generally pessimistic prospect of assault of neo-liberalism and impact of China’s accession to the WTO on disadvantaged sectors, though it is of general apprehension that the impact could be very negative for peasants, agriculture and rural development. The essay I wrote for SID on a women’s collective in Jiangxi Province is part of this project. [See Attachment 2: “Pedagogical working on place: women’s economic activism in rural China”]
I mentioned that I had some hesitation in accepting the invitation to the Bellagio project, because I doubted if I had the time to be well prepared for the presentations and interactions. Yet, the question of inter-disciplinarity is, as Evan said, “an extraordinarily bright object”. I am now located in the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, and here, the programme is three years old, we have colleagues from different disciplines, still with the space to try to define what “cultural studies” in Hong Kong/China/Asia could implicate at this particular historical juncture. When I was asked by the university administration what my research interests and orientation of development were, I gave them a one-line reply: “Critical pedagogy in/and cultural studies, which would inform the learning processes of governmentality and transformative politics”. I do not know what they make out of this, and whether based on this they will agree to grant me a study leave of six months in the latter half of this year to work on a book manuscript on local governance in Kerala. But for me, this is how I sum up my reflections after a bitter fight in the Department of Translation before I transferred to the Department of Cultural Studies. The fight was inevitably interpreted by the university administration as personality clashes and trouble-making by “the radical”. The intellectual confrontation, as far as I am concerned, was on the design and operation of a programme of “translation”, whereby a few colleagues in the numerical minority, myself included, insisted that translation is an inter-disciplinary endeavour for crossing different cultures, and the majority insisted on delivering “practical translation skills” to students, which they claim to be necessary for the production of professional translators. For all practical purposes, this only serves to be a convenient excuse for foreclosing any further theoretical discussion of the question of translation. The so-called training for practical translation skills within a conventional tertiary pedagogical setting turns out to be training for examination, a deep-rooted conditioning of the Hong Kong education system. The way we, “the minority” with regard to our deviation from the normative claims of how to teach translation and what must be taught in translation, defended the Translation programme reflected more or less our understanding that translation is essentially a question of accountability to oneself and the other, wherein lies the question of the politics of translation. [See Attachment 3: “The Politics of Translation and Accountability: A Hong Kong Story”, Traces, 1: 241-267.]
Now that I am in the Department of Cultural Studies, I have more space to work on the question of relating intellectuals to transformative politics in social practice. Evan said he will never be a “research scholar”; I would add the phrase “as conventionally defined by the institution”, and place myself in the same category. I am often placed at the uneasy in-between of academia and social movement. For movement activists, I would appear too “academic”; in the academia, I would appear too involved in “social affairs” and not “serious academic research” with output in refereed journals. My involvement with Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA) and with People’s Plan for the 21st Century (PP21) for over a decade has taught me a lot and caused me to continuously rethink the question of critical scholarship and intellectual activism, and to explore the limitations and possibilities of academic work and social action. The relation between the two is usually uneasy, if not in opposition. However, I believe both would benefit by a more intimate relation. I feel that the question of representation is one of the appropriate relays to allow the two to cross paths.
I will now briefly give you an idea of my engagements in intellectual and activist work. Academically, I did my BA studies in Translation, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in the University of Hong Kong. The title of my Ph.D. thesis is Gendered Subaltern as Perspective in Reading Mo Yan, Wang Shuo and Zhang Jie. I looked at the works of three popular novelists in China, particularly their works from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. I have taught in Lingnan University in Hong Kong for 15 years, first on Translation, and now on Cultural Studies. The courses I teach include Global Culture and Citizenship, Literature and Cultural Studies, Negotiating Violence, The Cultural Politics of Reading, and Gender, Sexuality and Cultural Politics.
I am Academic Advisor to The Owl Academic Series, and member of the Editorial Boards of Cultural and Social Studies—Translation Series, Alternative Discourses, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
The Owl Academic Series is published by the People’s Literature Press, Beijing. I recommended the translation of Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, which is about partition of India in 1947, for which I wrote an introduction discussing the question of the enterprise of establishing a state and the price women paid for such an enterprise. I am currently editing the translation into Chinese of Selected Readings on Responses to the September 11 Event, which is compiled by some of us from ARENA.
The Cultural and Social Studies -- Translation Series is published in Chinese (both in mainland China and in Taiwan/Hong Kong by separate publishers). Editors from Hong Kong are mostly from the Cultural Studies Department, Lingnan University, such as Hui Po Keung and Chan Shun Hing. The published titles of this series include “I: Disciplines, Knowledge and Power”, “II: The Rhetoric of Social Sciences”, “III: Decolonization and Nationalism”, “IV: Illusions of Development”, V: Anti-Market Capitalism”, “VI: The Politics of Languages and Translation”. The ones about to be sent to the printer are “Feminism and Nationalism”, and “Subaltern Studies in India” (of which I am co chief editor and on which I should write an introduction -- and I am glad to learn that Tim has been working on Subaltern Studies). [Attachment 4: CSS Contents.]
Alternative Discourses is a journal, published irregularly, on cultural critique in Hong Kong, aiming to bring academics and activists into dialogue on issues of development, state, economy, culture and feminism. Most of the members of the editorial board are teachers and graduates of Lingnan University.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies is a cultural studies journal in Asia, published by Routledge. One of its objectives is to bridge the academia and the movements. I was involved in an attempt to facilitate dialogue among different journals from Asia. [Please visit www.inter-asia.org/journal ]
The above is more or less represented as “academic” work when I write my CV for the university administration. The “activist” work that is frowned on by some people in the senior management of my university includes the following:
I am member of the Executive Committee of CSD and Green Empowerment, Chair of the Council of Fellows of ARENA, and Chair of the Council of PP21.
The China Social Services and Development Research Centre (CSD) is a Hong Kong-based NGO, formed in 1993, involved in critique of development, and projects on health, livelihood and community development for rural women in mainland China. Green Empowerment is a sister organization handling the products of people-to-people trade between mainland China and Hong Kong/Taiwan.
Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA) is a 20-year old network of scholar-activists from different countries in Asia. The secretariat is based in Hong Kong. From 1994 to 2000, I was Chair of the Executive Board, and from 2000 to the present, Chair of the Council of Fellows and Co-Chair of the Executive Board. I am member of the Programme Team on the Asian Alternative Regional School, developing a module on local governance, looking at both conceptual issues and experiences in Kerala (India), Kud Chum (Thailand) and Porto Alegre (Brazil). I am also member of the Programme Team on Feminisms in Asia. [See Attachment 5: “Resurgent patriarchy and gender discourse in China”.] After the September 11 Event, ARENA convened discussions with movement groups in Asia on responses, out of which is an ongoing initiative of forming Asian Peace Alliance. It is also convening a roundtable discussion in early May primarily with academics on the role of “public intellectuals” in response to the current situation. [About ARENA, please visit www.arenaonline.org and www.asianexchange.org ]
People’s Plan for the 21st Century (PP21) is an alliance building process beginning in 1989 in Minamata, Japan. It aims to bring together movements across Asia for an Alliance of Hope. I was involved in the drafting of the Sagarmatha Declaration in 1996. [Please refer to Shaping Our Future: Asia Pacific Peoples’ Convergence.] Since 1996, I have been Chair of the Council. PP21 will convene a General Assembly in June, involving mostly grassroots groups and NGOs to discuss “Where to From Here – Review of PP21 and Prospects for Alliance Building”, which is a review of the challenges facing the movements in today’s juncture. I managed to finish some documents for organizing this meeting two days ago before I return to writing this note for Bellagio.
For the presentation in Bellagio, I will attempt to discuss economic representations in China and India with their largely rural setting. Being linked to these two places through my involvement with those engaged in experiments of transformative politics rooted in social practices of everyday life, I am often confronted with economic representations that infiltrate common sense. Our common-sensical picture of “reality” for the two places is that of a “developing” country. A tone of comparison is obvious here, and the Outside, which is not present in the representation “developing country”, is clearly playing a constitutive role in making such a projection a proper one in common sense. However, the question remains: how is this used in common sense?
I will mainly deal with appropriations made to serve purposes other than those intended by economists. Roughly speaking, there are two sides to this appropriation. On the one hand, they may be appropriated to serve purposes other than those made possible by their “proper” discourse. On the other hand, they may also be regarded as borrowings in the sense that in the appropriation of these terms, one unquestioningly subscribes to the “reality” constructed in and through the discourse that makes these terms meaningful. With regard to appropriations serving purposes of a different field, it is possible for these terms to be appropriated as critical instrument of different modes of resistance against the authority which is held to be responsible for the vices of social reality. The question of power relations is touched by these appropriations, and the case of Kerala can help us go further in our critical evaluation on these appropriations with regard to their limitations and possibilities for a transformative politics.