The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalisation

Book: The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalisation
Written by: Rustom Bharucha
Published by: Wesleyan University Press (2000)

In ‘The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalisation’, author Rustom Bharucha tries to engage with emergent cultural practices, which have contested the impact of globalisation and communalism. Disproving the idea that the West is pervasive, Bharucha engages with the cultures of secular struggle in contemporary India, to address global issues such as intellectual property rights, cultural tourism, and the oppression of the marginalised.The author is interested in the discourse around ‘culturalism’ and critically examines the ‘intercultural’, the ‘intracultural’ and the ‘multicultural’ with a particular interest as to ‘how meanings mutate and metabolise in the course of their transportation, translation, and specific uses in other cultures.’(p.11)

In this book, Bharucha is apprehensive about the politics of discourse around multiculturalism as it stands as an ‘over-inscribed catch-word of seeming change in the polities of the developed world.’ (p. 10) The author acknowledges that he has cultural and critical affinities to the study of inter/intra cultural dialogues — “The ‘intra’ is useful precisely because it has the potential to debunk such organicist notions of culture by highlighting the deeply fragmented and divided society of India that the multicultural rhetoric of the state refuses to acknowledge. If it is a force to reckon with, it is because its agencies are linked to cultures of struggle that are almost inevitably pitted against the culture of the state. While the agencies of the state have the power, and, indeed, the onus to order differences – and minoritarian ones in particular — within the prescribed norms of citizenship, the agencies of intraculturalism are more concerned with mobilizing a consciousness of differences among its participants.” (p.9)