Dr Syed Jamil AHMED
arnab@agni.com
Professor
Department of Theatre, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Syed Jamil Ahmed (b. 1955) is a theatre practitioner based in Bangladesh and Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Dhaka. He has directed and designed in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and USA, and served as a visiting faculty at the Antioch College (USA), San Francisco City College (USA) and the King Alfred’s College (UK). His full-length publications in English are Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre and Bangladesh and is currently working on Against Orientalist Grain: Performance and Politics Entwined with a Buddhist Strain. His major areas of interest are Indigenous Theatre of South Asia and Theatre for Development.

Negotiating Globalization and Performing Counter-narratives of National Identity

This paper addresses the question whether or not it is possible to mobilize theatre for counteracting globalization. It employs Jan Aart Scholte’s exposition of five broad perceptions of 'globalization' as internationalization, liberalization, universalization, westernization or modernization and deterritorialization to argue that 'globalization' can act as a threat only so long as national identity is the principal structure of identity available to us. It is because the ‘nation’ remains a site of fervent passion (as in Tibet, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Palestine, Bosnia, to name a few), that globalization is frequently underwritten in a dismal monologue of power that each nation can mobilize within its own field of influence. It argues that the controlling interest of prevailing political power attempts forever to manage us, contain us and renders it obscureto us that ‘nationalism’ is a fluid construction — always in formation, always in flux, un-finished, reforming and re-formulating. If 'globalization' is to be counteracted, the notion of the nation needs to be reformulated if not abandoned. To this end, theatre activists need to work on performing “[c]ounter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries — both actual and conceptual — disturb those ideological maneuvers through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (Bhabha 1994: 149). They need to ceaselessly negotiate the treacherous terrain in which plurality and diversity are rendered invisible and subsumed into a homogeneous monoculture.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Syed Jamil Ahmed博士

Syed Jamil Ahmed博士是孟加拉的劇場導演，並為達卡大學戲劇研究系的教授。曾在英美大學教學，及出版與戲劇有關的英語著作。他的主要研究興趣是南亞本土戲劇及戲劇發展。

「以國家民族身分的表演論述與適應全球化」

筆者將會討論如何動員戲劇抗衡全球化。此處所指的全球化指國際化、自由化、統一化、西方化和去區域化。要抗衡全球化，就不可被主流政治權威主宰，而需不斷以「幻想建議的社區」來保存多元化。