Towards a Lexicon of Inclinations

This article sketches out the implications of certain terms from the field of Southeast Asian discourse that refer in different ways to the notion of the “international.” These include “developmental,” “regionality/regionalist,” “reality/realism,” “Asian-African,” and “exploding galaxy.” These terms enable the local to incline outward or to widen its latitude. A discussion of these terms may lead to a fuller understanding of the relationship between the local and the global, the Euro-American and the post-colony. This reflection on terms also affords an opportunity to initiate play on words, probing the paradoxes involved in the production of phrases. A constellation of words and phrases proposes a methodology of translating other art histories and other histories of art histories. It indexes a particular way of knowing and a study of the world, one that may be able to surmount notions of hybridity and the limits of the negation of the Western norm

Aesthetics · Art · Constellation · Epistemology · Ethnology · Hybridity · Lexicon · Linguistics · Negation · Realism · Sociology · Southeast asia · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · History · Philosophy · Socioeconomic Development in Asia