Post-Colonial Perils: Art and National Impossibilities

Abstract

This paper reflects on how art as an intimation of modernity generates discourse on representation, specifically on how it is able to figure a social condition and an aspiration that transcends it within a post-colonial history. In the context of Southeast Asia, this reflection locates art in the shifting categories of a post-colony and a developing nation-state that had required a level of modernity to claim freedom from colonialism, at the first instance, and to collect this freedom, in the long-term, under the auspices of a nation-state helmed by a military dictatorship in the time of the Cold War, as in the case of Indonesia and the Philippines. Where there was an absence of colonialism, as in Thailand, the nation had to be nevertheless contrived by the devices of statecraft availed of by the monarchy. Central in this process was the imperative of a democratic tradition, which was regarded as pre-conditional to a transition into a modern society of free trade, liberal government, and cosmopolitan pretensions. Nation-building constructed myths of a common identity, on the one hand, and revolution, on the other, fantasies that were frustrated by stirrings of an avant-garde. The nation thus becomes impossible, merely intimated, or longed for with intimacy, but never fully realized, prompting the theory of failed states or failed colonialisms within the Euro-American perspective.