Dibyesh Anand sets out a clear thesis in Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination—that the manner of Tibet's representation, the ways in which it has been imagined, has played a central role in determining Tibet's political identity. In service to this thesis, he enlists methodologies and theories drawn from the literature of postcoloniality and applies them within the larger analytical context of “critical international relations.” As expected, there is a heavy emphasis on the Western literature on Tibet, particularly the English literature, and on the British imagining and “scripting” of Tibet's identity.

But this approach omits much, and it is fundamentally troubling as a result. It is perfectly acceptable to note the ways in which Western writers conjured up what Anand terms “Exotica Tibet.” It is also perfectly acceptable to note that this “Exotica Tibet” played a role in the way many British viewed Tibet (e.g., “Tibet is a place that is discursively constructed through the imaginative practices of the various actors involved,” p. 65). But as Anand colors in the outline, the analysis becomes simplistic and reductionist, predictably demonizing Western motives in studying and rendering non-Western cultures knowable (pp. 17, 24). The things that Anand gets right—Westerners conjuring up an image of an exotic Tibet, Britain defining Tibet's status as being under Chinese suzerainty—are not major discoveries. They are, after many years of academic discussion and writing, quite banal and have been described by many others.

A more problematic element stems, ironically, from Anand's inability to use any materials other than those available in English. Thus, while he describes Britain's imaginative construction of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet (a concept that was admittedly vague and ultimately problematic), he seems to have no interest in possible non-Western influences on the application of the concept to Tibet. Is it really surprising that the term “suzerainty,” a term redolent of the feudal past, should appear in a relationship that has been characterized in Chinese materials as one in which Tibet was a fanshu or dependency of the Qing? These sorts of issues need to be explored; after all, Britain was not functioning in a vacuum, but was dealing with Tibet and China, both actively and reactively.

Anand often writes about representation with no real insight into what is being represented, at least insofar as Tibetans have written about themselves in their own language. As a result, one gets the impression that, for him, English-language representation is all, even though there is a plethora of Tibetan-language publications and Web sites in which Tibetans speak about themselves and their society—in exile and in Tibet. This willful ignorance of Tibetan self-representation is a serious flaw. When Anand mentions that the Green Hotel in Dharamsala is so named because of the influence of the ecological ethic on Tibetans (p. 125), it is simply because that is all he can see. That Trehor Lobsang Namgyal (Tre hor Blo bzang rnam rgyal) named the hotel after its painted color is irrelevant: Anand is only dealing with what the color represents—to him. All of this leaves the reader with a sense that the book relies too much on solipsism, banality, and posture.

And posturing there is. To raise at the outset the notions of appropriating space for “hitherto silenced and marginalized voices” and opposition against a discipline that traditionally made no claims “on behalf of the underprivileged,” and then to concentrate almost exclusively on Western voices, only introducing Tibetan voices from the elite group of Tibetans writing in English, is posture. Some of this is almost self-satirizing (e.g., Rousseau and Kant are dismissed not for specific ideas, but for being “two white, privileged European males,” p. 2).

On such a foundation, Anand easily fixes most of the blame for what has befallen Tibet on Perfidious Albion. Not that Britain was unwilling to manipulate Tibet's situation to its advantage, washing its hands of the relationship when it was convenient to do so. But this is well known to the point of triteness. When one works exclusively from Western sources in exploring questions of Tibet's identity, it is hardly surprising that Western actions loom largest. This presents a skewed view. Tibetan and Chinese actions are at least as important in understanding how Tibet came to be recognized as a part of the People's Republic of China. One might, for instance, examine Tibet's dealings with the Guomindang, described in several sources, including Tubten Sanggyé's (Thub bstan sangs rgyas's) memoir of the Tibetan office in Nanjing, as well as a variety of increasingly available Meng-Zang weiyuan hui (Mongolian-Tibetan Affairs Commission) materials. And a sea of materials is available on Tibet's relationship to the Qing. This is not idle criticism: broad knowledge of primary sources would force an observer to temper an image of Tibet as largely a passive victim of the West. But that would produce something other than a study such as this, in which non-Anglophone voices are “silenced and marginalized.”