Dibyesh Anand - Geopolitical Exotica

With the Sino-American rapprochement in the 1970s, little was heard about the destruction of traditional life within Tibet, which intensified during the Cultural Revolution. But considerable attention was paid to the Tibet question when other communist regimes fell in Eastern Europe and the discourse of human rights emerged on the international plane. The linkage of the Tibet question to the West's political interests may be unsurprising, but if we are to address the Tibet question effectively, we need to move beyond conventional international politics with its emphasis on realpolitik and sovereign statehood. For the existence of a "Tibet question" on the international plane is less political and more cultural fascination for Tibet in many parts of the world, and due to the personal appeal of the Dalai Lama (Sautman and Lo 1995, 1). The recent high international profile for the Tibet question is not a result of states "rediscovering" Tibet but rather of nonstate actors becoming international actors. It is connected with transnational movements that are seen as increasingly challenging the international system that solely privileges nation-states.

Contemporary international politics privileges sovereign statehood. Broadly speaking, there are two options available for those who are not already legally recognized members of the international society of sovereign nation- states. First is to present one's own histories and lived realities as a distinct historical reality that is in turn commensurate with the existing notion of the international. The second option is to challenge the given notion of the international as limited, unfair, and unhelpful and to push for alternative ways of being international that recognize the complexity of the world we live in. Diasporic Tibetans led by the Dalai Lama and their non -Tibetan sympathizers have experimented with both the options. They have used the dominant realist vocabulary of international relations- arguing for a historically independent quasi-national state of Tibet before the Chinese invasion in 1950. At the same time, they have also made use of more recent nonrealist concepts of human rights, trans-nationalism, environmentalism, and identity politics to challenge the Chinese control over Tibet. The nonrealist route has provided the Tibetan diaspora with means to foster a sense of Tibetanness and to acquire international publicity. In fact, the Tibet question as a problem of international politics would hardly have been noticed had it not been for high-profile support from nonstate actors. It is the uniqueness of Tibet that is seen as attracting global publicity for the "Free Tibet" or "Save Tibet" movement.

This uniqueness is a direct product of Exotica Tibet. While the strategy of mobilization of a unified Tibetan identity and support from the non-Tibetans has worked in terms of challenging the legitimacy of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet at the nonstate level, it has its own serious limitations. Lopez has put it bluntly: Tibetans are "prisoners of Shangri- la," captured within the Western images of Tibet and Tibetans as unique. Others have also criticized the focus on nonrealist tools such as human rights (Barnett 2001; Norbu 1998) as essentially depoliticizing and distracting from the main issue. The discourse of human rights and the image of Tibetans as uniquely religious allows for Western states to pay lip service to the call for protection of cultural and religious rights of Tibetans without questioning the broader issues of the Tibetan right to self-determination. Western state leaders who meet the Dalai Lama (for instance, the American president George W. Bush in May 2001; see CNN.com2001), go to great lengths to explain that it is a private meeting with a religious leader. The Dalai Lama, as a political leader, has a smaller audience in the West. In the West, it is common to come across legislative branches of the government passing resolutions condemning Chinese policies in Tibet (see Barnett 1991) but executive branches going out of the way to assure China of their recognition of Chinese sovereignty.

The realist route is seen as the only realistic and effective one by those rightly skeptical of the depoliticizing move of human rights discourse as mobilized by Western states. Yet, as the next chapter argues in greater detail, it is unfair to blame the Tibetan diaspora for making use of the limited and limiting vocabularies of political expression. And to dismiss human rights as idealistic or "to criticize those who engage in the human rights discourse for the unseemly politicization of a set of ideals (two sides of the same realist paradigm), is to deny political agency to people" (Mountcastle 2006, 100). Either Tibetans challenge Chinese claims to sovereignty with their own alternative claims of independence based on historical and international legal sources, or they accept the reality of Chinese sovereignty and work within it to modify it, or they do both. Tibetans in diaspora have no option but to keep making their claims using the dominant realist vocabulary of nationalism, statehood, sovereignty, and independence while at the same time exploring emerging non-realist norms of human rights to gain an international profile. In either case, the West as a political actor and even more crucially as a source of universalized ideas remains integral to the Tibet question.

Until the last decades of the twentieth century, the preoccupation with religion and history contributed to a relative neglect of the issues of contemporary Tibetan identity within social and political studies (see Shakya 1996). The signifier "Tibetan" is usually seen in terms of an ontological essentialism. [55]This often leads to a papering over of the socially constructed and politically contested nature of Tibetan cultural and political identity, or "Tibetanness," as it may conveniently be called (for different approaches, see Klieger 1994; Korom 1997a, 1997b; Nowak 1984). This chapter, along with the next, examines the articulations of Tibetanness in political and cultural spheres, argues for new ways of theorizing these identities, and interrogates the constitutive role played by Exotica Tibet in these identity discourses.

While acknowledging that the distinction between the cultural and the political may be construed as depoliticizing culture and un-culturing politics, I start by looking at cultural and political identities separately for analytical purposes. At the same time, I highlight the interlinkages between them. The study of cultural identity must be a concern of IR and not relegated to anthropology or cultural studies for at least two reasons. First, the distinction between cultural and political identity is blurred and at best problematic. Second, for Tibetans living under occupation and in displacement, every expression of a distinct culture is a political act in itself.

For the purpose of studying the political and cultural facets of Tibetanness, I experiment with two approaches. In this chapter, I bring out the various dynamics, including interaction with the West, that constitute Tibetanness as a national identity mainly, though not exclusively, in the diaspora. In the next chapter, I examine the cultural expressions of diasporic Tibetans, highlight the role of Exotica Tibet, and offer a new and innovative way of theorizing Tibetanness with an emphasis on postcolonial symbolic geography and cultural identity discourses.

Identity is not an essence but a performance, an articulation, a discourse. Tibetanness is as much a process as it is a product-it is a productive process. The performance of Tibetan identity does not take place in a vacuum but in a power-laden international political and cultural environment. This international context, in turn, is marked by asymmetries of structural and representational power in which the West remains dominant. Tibetanness has to be articulated within this asymmetrical context and hence Western representational practices play a crucial role. This role is not merely an embellishment; rather it is constitutive. At the same time, however, instead of looking at Tibetanness as merely a product of Western representations (Exotica Tibet) and Tibetans thus as "prisoners of Shangri-la" (see Lopez 1998), we ought to acknowledge Tibetan collective agency. This agency is not in opposition to, and autonomous from, representational discourses but very much a part of them. At the same time, agency is not exhausted by any one particular representational discourse but is produced out of creative negotiations with various discourses and interstitial spaces shared by them.