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Another Asia , well researched and lucidly written, is a remarkable achievement. It undertakes an original project as much in forging new ground in its critical engagement with friendship between "two luminaries of Asia," "break(ing) earlier myths of inter-Asian unity" (p. xv), as in delineating the political pressures on artists during times of global crises, as during World Wars I and II. Lessons of the past are represented for readers in our post-9/11 era.
Another Asia makes significant contributions to the fields of Asian studies (linking South and East Asia) and area studies, where Bharucha rethinks national and linguistic boundaries by deploying contemporary theories on postcolonialism and globalization. Bharucha is an established scholar with several pathbreaking books on theater and seminal essays on intercultural performance. His progressive politics never lose sight of his base in Calcutta, India.
Another Asia remains critical of "Eurocentric discourse and practice of interculturalism, marked by appropriation, decontextualization, and cultural tourism" (p. xv). Bharucha is invested in the political dimensions of interculturalism. He does not substitute "Asiacentricity" for "Eurocentricity." Interculturalism figures in this text "through the inter-Asian affinities (and differences)" of Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore (his volume of poems, Gitanjali , won the prize in 1913) and of Okakura Tenshin. Bharucha aims "to draw an intellectual history out of their affinities to Asia, complicated by the politics of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship" (p. xv). In Tagore's "Asian universe," Bharucha discovers Tenshin, who "could be said to have catalyzed the very idea of Asia for Tagore" (p. xix).
Another...