The Cold War Dividend and its Discontent: Re-visiting the intellectual situation and practices of the post-war Inter-Asia modern theatre

Principle Investigator：Ko-Lun Chen

This project re-examines how the Cold War mindset has been implanted in the Inter-Asia modern theatre and has been intellectually and practically influential until now. Along with different stages of globalisation, from the late 19th century via the imperial invasions, the colonial occupations, and the Wars, to the late 20th century, the local concepts and practices of the theatre in different Inter-Asia regions have been challenged or so-called modernised several times. Accompanying the residues of colonial modernity, the Cultural Cold War had brought about another wave of modernisation that fostered specific kinds of theatrical knowledge and practice in the Inter-Asia regions. Similar to the colonial implantation, the facts and the concepts of "Institutional Imbrications" and "Epistemic Communities," raised by Balme and Szymanski-Düll (2017), are arguably familiar to the circle of the Inter-Asia modern theatre. The institutions and projects of the funding, training and education have introduced the consensual recognition of modern theatre's very meaning and practices. Nevertheless, though surrounded by the proclaimed ideological dichotomy, the local self-explanations and possible transformations would have brought another side to the institutional distributions and epistemic implantation where it reveals a problematic nexus of the Cold War and its cultural, intellectual and artistic deployments. The complex geo-political distributions deployed through decades have arguably conducted the material structure and conditions of the Inter-Asia modern theatre. This project focuses on how a particular modus operandi of intellectual logistics has been promoting or even regulating specific kinds of theatrical knowledge and practices in different historical stages and regions in the Inter-Asia societies. On the other hand, the project also analyses how some inspiring reflections on different local thoughts and practices in the theatre have struggled against the intellectual inequality pre-occupied by the dominant discourses of the last Cold War's theatrical legacy.