Heteroglossia and Polyphony: Can We Teach a National History in Tongues?

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By Dr. Farish A. Noor

A Note To Readers:

This paper was first given as the keynote address for the International Conference SPICES August 2008, Organised by CENPRIS, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang.

I. Writing the Nation: How many scripts became one.

“The desire to expunge contestability from the terms of political enquiry expresses a wish to escape politics.”¹ -William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse.

It has come to pass that practically every single postcolonial nation on the face of the earth is currently beset by the problem of identity politics in one form or another.

A cursory glance at the troubled landscape of Asia, from South to Southeast and East Asia, would bring to our attention the common plight of differentiated communities that are plural and complex, all of which demand that a national narrative that is inclusive and open is written whereby all the voices of the national body can be seen and heard. In response to these demands for the recognition of heteroglossia and polyphony, political elites all over Asia have been quick to dismiss them as so much ‘noise’ from the angry masses protesting outside the fenced compounds of Parliaments or the ivory towers of official mainstream academia. It is ironic and somewhat comical to note that the lament of the postcolonial elites of today echo that of the colonial elites of the past: that the restless natives are surrounding the near-sacred precinct of state power and banging away on their drums in the dead of night, somewhere out there in the heated swamps of the native vernacular imagination.

The postcolonial state, therefore, is as besieged today as the colonial state was in the past, and occasionally an arrow or two manages to penetrate the palisades of power and state authority. The vernacular cry for recognition and representation takes on forms not entirely unlike that of the cry of the colonial subject in the not too distant past: at times it may come in the form of the religious chant for a supra-state religio-political entity as in the case of the demands of the Pan-Islamists and their dreams of a transnational Caliphate; on other occasions primordial ethno-racial loyalties that transcend the frontiers of the state are plied by disparate diaspora communities in search of a political voice.²

The postcolonial state tries its best to accommodate some of these demands, and often obliges the subaltern by making the odd concession or two in the direction of heteroglossia and polyphony. But invariably, they retreat back to the safety and comfort of conventional modern governmentality where frontiers are fixed, the cacophony of politics is reduced to the monologue of governance, and where power resides firmly in the bosom of the state. All the while, however, the pretence and respect that is due to the democratic claims of these states are dutifully given, despite all evidence to the contrary.

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