Great Clamour , livre ebook

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2014

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Full of unexpected ideas and fresh insights, A Great Clamour is an extraordinary account of contemporary Asia from one of our finest essayists. Journeying through China, Tibet, Mongolia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan, Mishra explores the contradictions and dynamism of modernday China, simultaneously drawing a vivid portrait of its neighbours, and the shadow the restless giant casts over its stage.
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Date de parution

01 septembre 2014

EAN13

9789351181903

Langue

English

Pankaj Mishra


A GREAT CLAMOUR
Encounters With China and Its Neighbours
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Author
Dedication
Looking East: An Introduction
PART 1: DRUMROLL TO MODERNITY
1. A Sentimental Education in Shanghai
2. The Hungry Years
3. Not a Dinner Party: Mao and the Maoists
4. In Tiananmen s Wake
PART 2: A DIN OF QUESTIONS
1. New Shanghai and the Shape of Things to Come
2. A Leftist s Critique of China
3. The Poet
4. The Importance of Being the Dalai Lama
5. Train to Tibet
6. The Bonfire of China s Vanities
PART 3: ECHOES FROM THE MAINLAND
1. Hong Kong: The Quest for Culture
2. Mongolia: Falling Out of History
3. Taipei: The Forgotten Chinese
4. Kuala Lumpur: Beyond the Melting Pot
5. Indonesia: Democracy Redefined
6. Japan: Life after Economic Growth
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
A GREAT CLAMOUR
Pankaj Mishra is the author of five other books, most recently From the Ruins of Empire . He writes for, among others, the New Yorker , the New York Review of Books and the Guardian .
Praise For the Author
‘The rare writer who is at ease as a historian, philosopher, traveller, and memoirist’—Pico Iyer
‘Mishra is an intellectual historian who can skilfully paint in background, simplify boldly to open up broad perspectives on the past, and popularise without condescension’— Observer
‘It is impossible in a short form to do justice to the density and complexity of his arguments, to his comprehensive illustrations, to his scathing demolition of the comfort zones of both East and West’—Hilary Mantel
‘The heir to Edward Said’— The Economist
‘His writings indicate the curiosity of an inquiring soul as much as they explain the sagacity of a world-wise mind’— The Hindu
‘Mishra brings out evocatively … a sort of longing, tinged with nostalgia, which makes you like the book’— Week
‘Mishra is an important Indian contributor to the cultural as well as political conversation of our times’— India Today
For MNM
Looking East: An Introduction
One afternoon in the summer of 1992, I was talking to my landlord and found myself asking him what lay beyond the snow-capped mountains I could see from my veranda. Tibbat, Mr Sharma said, pronouncing Tibet in the north Indian way. I was startled. Was it really that close? I had only recently moved to this small village in Himachal Pradesh to see if I could be a writer; the physical isolation seemed to constantly fuel my sense of inadequacy. Now, in my imagination, that vast territory stretching from Lhasa to Hokkaido and Surabaya, an Asia even then being imprinted by the politics and economy of China, suddenly reared up as an oppressive blank-another reminder of my ignorance about the world.
Mr Sharma, a scholar of Sanskrit, didn t share this debility. He spoke naturally of Tibbat as another crossroads within an expansive Indian cultural sphere, in which Indian religions and philosophies had travelled across mainland Asia and deep into the Pacific. I envied him his Tibbat, part of his private idea of Asia, one that must have clarified the larger world, relieved the ache of incomprehension, and anchored him to the earth.
I had no such Tibbat. My own Asia was yet to be populated by specific cultures, histories, and peoples. I had read the fiction of Lu Xun and some essays by Mao Zedong, but didn t know much more about China apart from that it had betrayed India in 1962, hastening Jawaharlal Nehru s death, and was, for this reason, not to be trusted. I knew of the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Japan was almost entirely embodied by Akio Morita, the purveyor of the Walkman as well as the blonde-wood encased Sony Trinitron (both much coveted in India s still austere early 1990s). No political and intellectual movements animated the East or Asia in my mind as they did India and the West.
It is easy to sneer, in our intricately interdependent world today, at the quasi-orientalist concepts of the East and Asia. Both came into the world conjoined with their domineering twin, the idea of Europe. Denoting the West s barbaric or inferior other, they were originally meant to quicken Western self-consciousness. In the late nineteenth century, however, a range of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian thinkers put East and Asia at their service, infusing these categories with particular values and traits such as respect for nature, communitarianism, simple contentment, and spiritual transcendence. This supposedly Asian tradition of anti-materialism was then counterposed to modern Western ideologies of individualism, conquest and economic growth. The idea of Asia became an expression of cultural defensiveness against conceited Westerners who claimed a monopoly on civilization and regarded people without its manifest signs-the nation-state, industrial capitalism and mechanistic science-as inferior.
This proposed cultural unity of Asia acquired a geopolitical edge during early postcolonial struggles for national wealth and power-an endeavour in which Indian, Chinese and Indonesian leaders self-consciously invoked solidarity with each other. Thus, the experience of domination and racial humiliation and the claims to freedom and dignity that once bound Rabindranath Tagore to Liang Qichao and Okakura Tenshin, came to link Jawaharlal Nehru to Mao Zedong and Sukarno. Contemplating the great turmoil and trauma of their societies, artists such as Satyajit Ray and Kurosawa Akira came to share a troubled humanism.
Such imagined communities have now fragmented, both at home and abroad, replaced by pragmatic economic associations such as ASEAN and cross-border networks of manufacture, finance, and trade. Authoritarian-minded leaders still invoke Asian Values, positing Asia s Confucius-sanctioned communal harmony against the West s evidently amoral and fissiparous individualism. They are little more than a rhetorical cover for regimes that enjoy harmonious relationships with local plutocrats while denying political rights to the majority.
The idea of Asia has acquired a different coherence today. What connects geographically disparate experiences-of rural migrants in Jakarta, factory workers in Manesar, tribals in Chhattisgarh, nomads in Tibet as well as the gated-communitarian patrons of Herm s and Jimmy Choo in Hangzhou and Gurgaon-is the late arrival of capitalism. The great shifts that convulsed nineteenth-century Europe can now be witnessed across Asia: the commodification of life and land, their valuation by supply and demand, the disintegration of communities into aggregates of self-seeking individuals, the scramble for personal wealth and status, the desperation and anxiety of the also-rans, and the resentful resistance and hectic improvisations of those left, or pushed, behind.
What gives Asia its provisional unity today, cutting across boundaries of ethnicity, religion, geography, class, and nationality, is the experience of an often bitterly paradoxical modernity: the promise of self-transformation and growth that is frequently realized through the destruction of familiar landmarks, an atmosphere of agitation and contradiction in which the betrayal and disintegration of old bonds goes necessarily together with renewal.
It took me many years after that awakening to Tibbat s proximity to see familiar fault lines, threats and possibilities in this new Asia-the setting of immense collective and individual strivings, violence, suffering, frustration, despair and optimism. My intellectual blindness was due largely to my intense desire to be a writer in English. To be born in an Anglophone culture was to not only be reflexively West-centric, and to reserve one s profoundest attention for Western literatures and philosophies. It was also to assume that the institutions (parliamentary democracy, nation-state), philosophical principles (secularism, liberalism), economic ideologies (socialism, followed by free-market capitalism) and aesthetic forms (the novel) introduced or adopted during the long decades of British rule belonged to the natural, indeed superior, order of things.
They would, one simply assumed, banish irrational religion, improve governance, expand private freedoms, enlarge our moral imagination, and bring prosperity and contentment to hundreds of millions of our less-privileged compatriots. The national well-being once promised by socialism came to be linked in recent decades with another set of ideas imported from Anglo-America: privatization, deregulation, and minimal governments.
Few people today will argue that events have vindicated these assumptions. The Indian nation state, which began its existence by extending adult franchise to an overwhelmingly poor and diverse population, is one of the world s most audacious experiments in democracy and political pluralism. It can claim some successes, particularly the politicization of long-underprivileged peoples. But this progress is far from being continuous and irreversible; it is accompanied by great losses, and, punctuated by points of stagnation; it generates powerful countervailing forces. It is easier to perceive the state of general crisis: insurgencies by ethnic and religious minorities in border states, which are now accompanied by more militant rebellions by the dispossessed in central Indian states; a slow-motion agrarian calamity signified by the suicides of hundreds of thousands of farmers; a rapidly enlarging urban population exposed to a dehumanized existence; and, finally, a fragmenting polity, presided over by men who, unrepentantly guilty of a staggering venality, seem further than ever from liberalism and secularism.
An increasingly Americanized Indian elite continues to look to its Western counterparts for self-affirmation and support. But the old masters of the universe, struggling with multiple economic crises, rising inequality, and political discontent, have lost sight of their model of universal prog

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