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Summary: Conversions into otherness and co-existence across postcolonial Asia...
Comment: For the weird surrealist poet cum travelogue writer, Henri Michaux, as "barbarian" from culture capital of surrealism and Tahitian fantasy, Paris, travel (here using the travelogue as poetic ethnographic genre) enacted and mimed a form of self abnegation, a way of abandoning habits and smug values; with the culturally coded "I" fleeing from its past into a perpetual present which is always outside itself, always other (beholding, praying to, invoking the other).
Asian peoples were for this poet traveller of altered states, "the last resistants" to western monotony; everywhere in A Barbarian In Asia Michaux exults in excess, difference, makes poetic propaganda "for an endless variety of civilizations" by which to counter the idea of only one (monologue). His 'orientalism' is made explicit, ironic, and exaggerated enough to become what I would call, tonally, "mock orientalism," such as claiming that political domination is hard "even for an Asiatic."
Particular national or local cultures comprise for Michaux a hybrid personality "of a thousand different elements"; each culture in Asia provides a kind of sensuous style and confronts the barbaric outsider as a landscape not of humanistic sameness but of utter estrangement and a halting of predictable codes. Going beyond Marxist analysis and Christian pieties, Michaux contends that a miner's strike should be supplemented, and is, by "a miner's civilization."
Michaux journeys into cultural co existence: "To avoid war construct peace." That is, to avoid the monologue of imperialism, both political and cultural, construct estranging dialogues and multiple styles, interrogations of oriental and occidental, so called civilized and so called barbaric. Rather than a conversion experience into the commodity form there should be a conversion through voicing otherness, outsidedness
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Summary: An european look at asia
Comment: Henri Michaux was travelling by himself in Asia in the 30's when he wrote his first book. Without knowing the language, the culture, the way of life, he tried to describe what he was looking at, the very first impressions he was having, before consience altered his vision. He had a very sharp "eye" for the countries he was living in, the people he was meeting, the stories he read. His perception is very european, but his curiosity for Asia, the "snapshots", images, comparisons, the knowledge he found there makes it a great read.
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