Subaltern placiality in modern Tibet: Critical discourses in the works of Shogdong

Abstract

I attempt to write this article as a pathology of modernity in connection with how place, memory, and subalternity are expressed by urban Tibetans in China. The literary works of Shogdong, a contemporary Tibetan writer and cultural critic, are the focus of my interpretation of the sociopolitical, religious, and psychological meanings of an anti-traditional discourse among urban Tibetans. My pathologizing this intra-Tibetan discourse is meant to discern how modern subjectivity or its mindscape in the case of urban Tibetans is inherently conditioned by place as both geographic landscape and locus of memory. I then argue that the negation of anti-traditional Tibetans of their native traditional cultural and religious values and practices is a remembering process which is inversed as a process of seemingly intentional subversion, rejection, and forgetting; and I further argue that the anti-traditionalist imagining of a modern Tibet, though it uses nomenclature identical to that of China’s socialism, is not a replica of China’s modernity, but an exercise of a power discourse in a subaltern sense.