Common culture: Asia rhetoric in the beginning of the 20th century

摘要

The essay analyses the history of geopolitical conceptualizations of Asia a century ago, found in the texts of Japanese Okakura Tenshin, Indian Rabindranath Tagore, and Chinese Sun Yatsen. They are not only classics in formulating new meanings for Asia, but they are also relevant nowadays in the light of contemporary attempts to advance Asian cooperation. During both periods, a crucial aspect of the discussion was conceptual: what to include and what to exclude from Asia, and on what grounds. In their own time all three authors appeared as innovative ideologists, who rhetorically redescribed the concept of Asia. That was necessary, because the whole geopolitical construction named Asia had thus far been dominated by European civilizational discourse, where Asia was seen as an aggregate of everything geographic, racial, and cultural that did not fit within Europe. It was a residual category, not containing anything that would make Asia into a common entity, except its essentialized non-Europeanness. Culture, in the sense of the existence of a high civilization different from the dominating European one, became the central concept on which the three authors began to build a new understanding of Asian commonality. Because they were early pioneers, they often had to proceed metaphorically, using imaginative leaps of thought to fill the empty places necessarily appearing in such a new endeavour. Occasionally they also run into conceptual problems, which are as interesting as their usually quoted slogans. The problems were caused by the fact that they were Western educated and had to base their thinking on Western concepts, while at the same time attempting to proceed with classical Buddhist and Confucian ideals. It is exactly these conceptual difficulties that are relevant nowadays, when there is again a need to create Asian commonalities, while Asian relations with the rest of the world make these common aspects relative and contextual.