"What's Left of Asia?" (original) (raw)
Related papers
There is no “East”: Deconstructing the idea of Asia and rethinking the disciplines working on it
Kervan. International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, 2018
This introduction summarises the steps which led the scholars grouped in the Coffee Break group to undertake the project and then accompanied them from the awareness of the need to deconstruct the idea of geographic boundaries and, consequently, of area studies such as “Indology” or “South Asian studies”, to the need to deconstruct disciplines such as “Philology” or “Literature” themselves, since they are also historically and culturally loaded and risk to tell one more about their subjects than about their alleged objects of study. This pars destruens is followed by a pars construens suggesting as an alternative a situated epistemology which refutes to essentialise the “Other” and, on a more practical level, by the constant implementation of team work.
CAS200. Syllabus. Introduction to Contemporary Asian Studies. U. of Toronto. Fall 2022. Dylan Clark.
This course is designed to introduce students to an array of places and peoples i n South-, Southeast-, and East-Asia, using a multidisciplinary lens. We will consider the making of Asian "nations" and "ethnicities." We will seek out interconnectivity and blurring between these groupings, as we study state apparatuses, migration, and histories. And we will probe seemingly mundane factors o f everyday life, such as food, music, and television. Our aim is to disrupt neat and nationalistic notions of "tradition," "culture," and "history." In exploring "modernization" and "development" in Asia, we aim to denaturalize and politicize these terms, and give attention to their stratified outcomes in terms of class, region, gender, religion, and ethnicity. We seek to question "Asian Miracles," and better understand post-colonial, developmentalist, and neoliberal regimes as they impact everyday lives in Asia.
"Postcolonialism, Globalization, and the 'Asia' Question." (Oxford UP, ed G Huggan)
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, 2013
"How to make sense of ‘Asia’––an impossible object of study––and what it means today in light of the rise of China after the age of opium wars and full-on imperialism. To what extent, the chapter asks, is Asia today best understood as a China-centred global system, as also suggested by ASEAN+3? Certainly, the PRC poses a number of challenges to current theories about colonialism, sovereignty and the alleged end of the Cold War. Equally clear is that, although sometimes designated as ‘non-colonized’ or outside the problematic of postcolonialism, the PRC is deeply influenced by modern imperialism and neoliberalism. The chapter picks up on the ‘missed opportunity’ between postcolonial and China studies and the relative non-engagement with the PRC in inter-Asian cultural studies, offering a series of reflections on overlaps between them––e.g. in terms of modernization theory, Orientalism and Occidentalism, totalitarianism––as well as opening up avenues for further debate. Keywords: Asia; China; Orientalism; Occidentalism; modernization; neoliberalism; Tibet; Cold War; revolution"
The institutionalization of Asian Studies as a field in the Humanities and Social Sciences is greatly indebted to Western, especially North-Atlantic, traditions of thought, organized by the curiosity over regions and people historically connecting Europe and Asia. This ultimately led to distinct forms of compartmentalization of Western perception of alterity which was framed by patterns of Imperial curiosity and priorities of colonialism – especially until mid-20 th century, when European colonialism dwindled in most of Asia and Africa. The end of Second World War and the ensuing re-structuration of the world also affected models of knowledge production concerning different cultures, regions and populations. This is when imperial approaches gave way to " cultural " areas, a conceptualization boosted by the North-American area studies framework, which helped to reorganize international geopolitics in many aspects, including knowledge production. Area studies have both helped to develop capacities of scholars dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of specific spaces, whilst simultaneously isolated academics in compartmentalized frameworks, or " conceptual empires " – academic communities insulated into self-contained realities that, likewise, consecrated defined spaces to specific themes, methodological approaches, intellectual jargons, etc (van Schendel, 2002: 647-668). Another undesired effect of the area studies approach to international scholarship has been the concentration of expertise in regions of the Global South in Northern academies. The consequence is that postcolonial peripheries still suffer from the same and mutual isolation, blindness and ignorance that once affected them under colonialism. Asian, African and Latin American academies had very limited direct contact and are largely ignorant of one another´s intellectual agendas. It has even affected the geographical perception of these regions, sometimes reinforcing imperial boundaries drawn by colonialism. Correspondingly, international mainstream of Asian Studies is still deeply marked by the priorities (in terms of agenda, teaching and funding, for example) derived from North-Atlantic intellectual traditions largely overshadowing academic interests of Asia developed elsewhere in the world. How about the intellectual interest on Asia developed outside the North-Atlantic outline where area studies approach and confinement was not obligatorily resourced as a framework on Human Sciences?
Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2010
How has Asia appeared as a region and been conceived as such in the last hundred years? While there is a long-standing and still burgeoning historiography of Asian connections through the study of the precolonial and early modern maritime trade, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are generally not seen as a time of growing Asian connections. The recent rise of interest in Asian connections in the current time is thus unable to grasp the continuities and discontinuities that form the present. Even more, it is unable to evaluate the risks and possibilities of the present moment.