Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, 2000 The dilemmas of theory: the Trajectories project Ashish RAJADHYAKSHA Review: Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed), Trajectories: Inter-AsiaCultural Studies, London/New York: Routledge, 1998 xx 1 pp. 391 ISBN 0415 15 3 247 Pbk ISBN 0415 15279 9 Hbk Probably the best way for me to read this most remarkable of anthologies on post-col- onial theory is tangentially to its intentions. The book itself has been around for a while now, as has the formally unpublished collec- tion of presentations at the Inter-Asia confer- ence in Taipei, and the entire initiative has now crystallized down to a speci®c set of projects, which include this journal. It has therefore already been `read’, and acted upon, in ways that enviably adhere to its proposi- tions, i.e. ®rst, to re®gure received cultural studies modes in terms of decolonization poli- tics and, secondly, to emphasize what the book calls the practice of the `activist scholar’. Few books these days receive such focused attention. Why then the tangent? Because it also seems to me that the book needs to be read as much for what it says as for where it hesitates . In presenting cultural activism as a mode of substituting, bypassing, even acting out, the formidable crises that theory itself seems to have landed, this anthology seems in its claims for collectivity to open up a far more interesting critical juncture ± and a way of reading it as well ± than any of the individual essays in it do. The problem, the point of hesitation in virtually every essay, is a well- known one: how does one apprehend one’s object (Can one ever? Should one?). With most of the cultural formations discussed here inheriting the widespread problem of not pos- sessing traditions of objectivity ± in the Re- naissance sense of an objective, a reality `out there’ that can be captured as through a lens ± until modern, usually nationalist/anti-col- onial formations assembled, and even at times imposed, the ego cogito of the modern subject, the book relentlessly foregrounds a real crisis in the non-Western world. The crisis is re- vealed directly in Kuan-Hsing Chen’s remark- able preface (about which more in a moment), and by Leo Ching and Law Wing-Sang’s ex- position of the dif®culties posed by the im- perialist±nationalist wrappings under which modernity arrived in Japan and Hong Kong respectively. It also comes out indirectly in other essays: is the object to be found by literally going `into the ®eld’ (as Kenneth Dean does in looking for local responses to Chinese nationalism), through translating pol- itical identity into cultural identi®cation (as Yung-Ho Im’s new social movements seem to be doing as they face the extraordinary prob- lem of commercialization via state control), through simply `yielding’ to pressures and thus ending old imperialism with new (Ding- Tzann Lii); or is the object now too hopelessly internalized, too much within us, to ever let out (Nandy)? The scope of this anthology allows this reviewer to speculate on a wider problem. Perhaps the best short-hand way of doing so would be to trace the problem to the rather bizarre, two-faced legacy that we can now begin to comprehend in the way we receive post-colonial theory, and one of the founding ®gures of that theory: Edward Said. Said fea- tures, as he must, prominently in the pages of this book. Here, two decades after Orientalism ®rst mounted its attack on knowledge pro- duction ± knowledge itself now seen as ISSN 1464-9373 Print; ISSN 1469-8447 Online/00/010203± 04 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd