Remaking Area Studies

Remaking Area Studies
Jon Goss and Terence Wesley-Smith
It is widely acknowledged that area studies, the dominant academic institution
in the United States for research and teaching on America’s overseas
“others,” is in the thralls of a fiscal and epistemological crisis. The prevailing
mood of anxiety and uncertainty dates from the end of the Cold War and
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. At stake is the perceived relevance
of area studies knowledge in a new, more intense phase of globalization
characterized by diffuse challenges to the dominance of American economic
and political power and the apparent erosion of the conceptual and spatial
boundaries with which area studies constructed its objects and defended its
institutional identity.
As an effective collaborator in an American-led process of globalization,
area studies could be seen as a victim of its own success. Yet it is now quite
apparent that the triumphant mood surrounding the end of the Cold War
and what Roland Robertson calls “the compression of the world” was premature
(Robertson 1992, . Whatever the new era brings, it does not signal
the end of history, famously defined by Francis Fukuyama as “the end point
of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal
democracy as the final form of human government” (Fukuyama 1992).
Alternative ways of knowing and living in the world continue to be vigorously
asserted despite—or even because of—globalization’s universalizing
demands. Nor does the borderless world favored by the corporate champions
of globalization seem likely to eventuate anytime soon. As Arjun Appadurai
points out, while this new world is characterized by the increasing mobility of
objects, it nevertheless remains one “of structures, organizations, and other
stable social forms” (Appadurai 2001, 5). The central object in the architecture
of area studies, the sovereign territorial state, has not withered away
despite the increased speed and volume of flows of capital, technology, information,
and labor and the emergence of new regional and global instruments
of economic and political organization. Even if conservative commentator
Charles Krauthammer (1990/91) is correct to claim we are living through a
“unipolar moment” in the history of the international system, it remains a system
of nation-states. And it is a world where American power is increasingly
challenged by the rising influence of other states, particularly in the dynamic
Asia Pacific region, including China and India (Little 2000, 53–56).
Certainly, globalization draws attention to, and perhaps intensifies,
geographical and sociocultural heterogeneity within states and regions, challenging
conventional conceptions of “areas” upon which the area studies
project has been based. Nevertheless, this is still an era when understanding
the world requires understanding the specificity of the local, broadly defined
as the dynamic interaction of culture and place, within the context of global
change. This volume presents some critical theoretical insights regarding the
role of area studies as an organized intellectual project in an era of globalization,
and it explores the implications of these ideas for everyday curriculum
development and teaching practices. It does so with particular reference to
issues and practices in area studies programs focused on Asia and the Pacific.
The book also provides some points of comparison for American area studies
by examining the development of equivalent programs in Japan, as well as
making space for Pacific Islands Studies, an often overlooked segment of the
Asia Pacific field of scholarship.
There are numerous works tracing the development of area studies and
analyzing its current crisis (see e.g., Szanton 2004a; Miyoshi and Harootunian
2002; Ludden 2000; Dirlik 1998; Lewis and Wigen 1997; Heginbotham
1994). Remaking Area Studies is one of the few that also suggests
some practical applications of these ideas for area studies teachers and students.
The contributors share a commitment to the critical importance of
locality in a world increasingly seen as “flat” (Friedman 2005), as well as a
deep-seated unease about the way area studies knowledge continues to be
produced and disseminated in the American academy. In this introduction,
we make the case for more empowering forms of area studies, and contributors
elsewhere in the volume explore how these ideas might be translated
into effective student-centered learning practices through the establishment
of interactive regional learning communities.
Origins
The institutional history of area studies is related directly to the international
interests of the United States, which expanded rapidly in the decades after
World War II. University-based language and area studies programs emerged
in response to the perceived need for useful knowledge about the non-Western
places and people Americans increasingly encountered as military analysts,
policy makers, business leaders, and private citizens (Hall 1947). The intensifying
global confrontation with the Soviet Union gave this type of knowledge
considerable strategic significance and provided the primary rationale for the
deployment of extensive resources by government agencies and private foundations
(Szanton 2004b). Bruce Cumings notes the “often astonishing levels
of collaboration between the universities, the foundations, and the intelligence
arms of the American state” in the development and operation of area studies
programs in the postwar decades (Cumings 2002, 262).
Area studies programs were often heavily dependent upon support from
private foundations and government agencies, giving the field an opportunistic
bent compared to many other parts of the academy. More important,
direct ties to centers of economic and political power helped determine the
objects of study, the type of knowledge to be generated, and even the methods
of inquiry to be employed, leading to a dominance of the field of study
by realist political science and development economics.
The basic building blocks of area studies were sovereign states. This
was hardly surprising, since area studies was born into a decolonizing world
increasingly composed of these political entities (Ludden 2000, 11). Decolonization
represented a profound shift from an antagonistic world of colonial
empires structured by ideas of civilization, superiority, and race to a formally
symmetrical world of nation-states informed instead by notions of universal
human rights, freedoms, and needs—as well as novel ideas about economic
and political development. As John Kelly and Martha Kaplan argue,
this remarkable transition was engineered to reflect a new vision of world
order promoted by the United States, the principal architect of a range of
influential multilateral institutions, including the United Nations. The new
vision emphasized untrammeled access to overseas resources and “free” trade
rather than imperial acquisition of territory, and economic aid rather than
pre-emptive military action. This was to be a peaceful world based on the
normalization of the nation-state—“the natural choice of every people modern
and free, past, present, and future”—its precepts and protocols continually
reinforced through international pressures of one sort or another (Kelly
and Kaplan 2001, 20).
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this fundamental characteristic
of the field of inquiry. This was an academic enterprise that took as its
basic unit of analysis territories that were often the relatively recent product
of European imperialism and contained within their boundaries a bewildering
variety of social, economic, and cultural forms. Wedded to Euro-American
conceptions of the nation-state and progress and to the comparative approach
in which “Western civilization” was the normative case, area studies projected
the differences within sovereign states and areas they constituted onto the
boundaries between them. This state-centered approach often reinforced a
static view of culture and geography and the interrelationship between the
two. The areas to be studied tended to be viewed “as relatively immobile
aggregates of traits, with more or less durable historical boundaries and with
a unity composed of more or less enduring properties” (Appadurai 2001,
7). Area studies posited the other as somehow beyond—or more usually
“behind” in the developmental sense—the political-economic and sociocultural
structures of modernity, effectively denying the coexistence of multiple
complex modernities, including forms alternative or resistant to the Euro-
American project (Dirlik 1997, 12; Mirsepassi, Basu, and Weaver 2003, 12;
Harootunian 2002, 164).
From the beginning, area studies was an integral part of a modernist
project that sought to remake the world in the image of the West, and, as
David Ludden points out, it assumed “the power of national states to define
territories of culture and history” (Ludden 2000, 1). The type of knowledge
considered useful, at least by the funding agencies, was not the kind
produced in research on the classical languages and literatures of Asia, the
Middle East, or Africa, which was already part of the university establishment
in the form of Oriental Studies. Rather, knowledge was to be generated and
applied toward an understanding of the processes of modern social change,
particularly state building and economic development. Ultimately, all this
was viewed through the lens of American economic, political, and strategic
interests in particular parts of the world.
“Area” was the essential and sometimes the only organizing concept in
this branch of the American academy. What this meant in practice was some
sort of assemblage of disparate discipline-based interests. Although the situation
varied from program to program and over time, core faculty members
typically included the dominant economists and political scientists, supported
by historians and anthropologists and sometimes joined by other specialists in
literature or the performing arts. Although this arrangement provided institutionalized
space for sometimes useful cross-disciplinary conversations, it is
clear that the more ambitious goal of creating new, interdisciplinary forms
of scholarship was not realized to any great extent (Hall 1947). Most practitioners
continued to apply discipline-based approaches and methods in their
studies of particular areas, and integration, where it occurred at all, happened
only after the research work was done, when individual essays or reports were
brought together in multidisciplinary collections.
By the end of the 1980s and after more than forty years of scholarly
production, it was clear that area studies had played a major role in raising
awareness among Americans about other parts of the world. Some area studies
scholars, for example Benedict Anderson, James C. Scott, and Clifford
Geertz, also had a significant theoretical influence in the social sciences and
humanities. Yet there was no substantial body of theory identified with area
studies (rather than with the disciplines that made up its component parts),
no distinctive approach to inquiry, and no particular methodology that practitioners
could call their own.1
Signs of Crisis
The dramatic shifts in the global political landscape of the late 1980s revealed
the intellectual and economic vulnerability of the area studies establishment.
The end of the Cold War simultaneously reduced the strategic significance of
national and regional boundaries and facilitated the rise of a new discourse
of globalization. As David Ludden (2000, 12) points out, what changed in
the 1990s was not so much the fact of globalization, although the velocity
and intensity of global economic, social, and cultural transactions were clearly
accelerating. More important was the emergence of a neoliberal ideology
that recognized globalization as a central historical process, necessitating the
development of new economic and political institutions as well as new forms
of knowledge about the world. With an academic rationale closely tied to the
fate of sovereign states and apparently outmoded conceptions of political and
economic development, area studies as an institution was increasingly hardpressed
to respond to demands for knowledge informed by transnational or
even postnational concerns.
The first manifestations of the crisis in area studies were economic. Federal
funding for area studies had been in decline since before the end of
the Cold War, but the trend dramatically accelerated with the rise of fiscal
conservatism in the 1990s (see Koppel 1995), and private funding agencies,
including the Social Science Research Council and the Mellon, MacArthur,
and Ford foundations, began to adjust to the new “global” environment and
rethink their long-standing commitment to the field. This turn of events also
revived old academic rivalries in which some argued that scholars based in
the traditional disciplines were just as well-placed to throw light on local phenomena
as those in area studies departments, while others advocated universal
approaches to inquiry, such as those based on rational choice theory, that
simply denied the need for any specialized area-based knowledge in the new
world order. In response to the new interest in globalization, some colleges
and universities established global or international studies programs that
competed with area studies for funding, students, and scholarly credibility.
Area studies also faced new intellectual challenges. The 1980s and 1990s
witnessed experimentation and rethinking in the social sciences and humanities
that left few parts of the academy untouched. Increasingly influenced by
the works of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and others, scholars began to
raise new questions about connections between knowledge and power and
to examine the epistemological foundations of the modernist project itself.
Postcolonialism and postmodernism gained ground and new “critical” interdisciplinary
and multidisciplinary institutional sites were created, including
women’s studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. Particularly significant
was the intellectual consolidation of cultural studies, which began to
steal some of area studies’ thunder by tackling critical issues associated with
the globalization of America’s others, such as diaspora, transnationalism, and
the hybridization of popular culture. These fields repudiated essentialized
notions of identity in favor of mobility and border crossing (Dirlik 1997,
6), thus destabilizing, if not dissolving, the cultural and geographic boundaries
upon which area studies depends. Furthermore, these were academic
programs that, unlike area studies, quickly developed literatures that were
critical, deeply reflexive, and genuinely interdisciplinary. It is instructive to
note that Orientalism, Edward Said’s seminal work, had its major impact
outside of the area studies establishment, despite its direct implications for
that intellectual enterprise (Harootunian 2002, 151–153).
Area studies responded to its fiscal crisis by diversifying its sources of
funding. H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi (2002), for example, note
a dramatic rise in Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese support for Asian Studies
programs in the United States. Boosted also by an increase in federal funding
after the terrorist attacks of 2001, especially for “less commonly taught languages,”
such as those of the Middle East, the overall quantity of resources
flowing to area studies programs has thus been maintained or, in some cases,
increased. However, this has required that the area studies establishment be
willing to follow the cash, continuing a tendency whereby external agendas
modify or override internal rationales framed in academic or conceptual
terms. Indeed, of paramount concern is the continuing absence of any coherent
conceptual basis for this academic endeavor. As Ludden puts it, “There
is no theory of area studies or area-specific knowledge; there is only a set of
institutional, personal, and fragmented disciplinary, market, and professional
interests that converge primarily on funding” (Ludden 2000, 17). Similarly,
Harootunian and Miyoshi challenge us to “explain why funding is more
important than thinking through the reason for funding.” For them, the
result is an “unexamined compulsion to continue and repeat” an outmoded
set of practices in teaching and research (Harootunian and Miyoshi 2002,
5–7). Without a stronger sense of the intellectual underpinnings of the enterprise,
not least its distinctive epistemological claims, how can area studies
practitioners justify and defend their existing role in the academy, let alone
plan the further development of the field?
(Re)thinking Area Studies
Despite its numerous shortcomings, the essential mission of the area studies
enterprise—the systematic production of knowledge about other places
and peoples—is as relevant today as ever. Indeed, if anything its significance
increases as globalization entangles all human populations in new and increasingly
complex ways. These entanglements within global flows of capital,
people, and ideas are site- and situation-specific and, to be fully understood,
require the understanding of cultural and historical contexts that area studies
has always been well-equipped to produce. However, there are several significant
obstacles to be overcome before area studies can hope to re-establish its
relevance to the academy and other constituencies.
A long history of complicity with the national security project is among
the most intractable of the many issues affecting area studies today. Policy
linkages provided the primary rationale for the institutionalization of area
studies in the first place, and practitioners continue to face issues of scholarly
ethics or integrity as a result. Recent military forays into Afghanistan and Iraq
have clearly increased the demand for all kinds of experts in these areas, and
the Bush administration’s “war on terror” boosted government funding for
foreign language and area studies training. Of course, the issue of academic
independence is not as clear-cut as it might appear. As Bruce Cumings points
out, academic luminaries such as Paul Baran, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul
Sweezy worked in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. For
Cumings, such service by scholars can be justified by the level of threat faced
by the society at the time, but ideally it should be conducted outside the
academy. Under less extreme circumstances, Cumings sees “nothing particularly
wrong with scholars offering their views on policy questions, so long as
the practice is not openly or subtly coerced by funding agencies and does not
require security clearance.” (Cumings 2002, 263–264; 289–290).
If area studies programs have always had direct ties to foreign policy
and security establishments, they have also been closely associated with the
generation and dissemination of alternative, often dissenting, perspectives on
America’s overseas adventures (Szanton 2004b). The Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars (now Critical Asian Studies), for example, was launched in
1969 to voice opposition to the “brutal aggression of the United States in
Vietnam.” Its founders argued, “Those in the field of Asian studies bear
responsibility for the consequences of their research and the political posture
of their profession,” which they described as a “complicity of silence” (BCAS
1969). These arguments have obvious relevance for contemporary applications
of United States military power in conflict situations in the Middle East
and elsewhere.
There is an equally important need for alternative perspectives to the U.S.-
centric discourse of globalization (see Goss and Yue 2005; Gibson-Graham
2005). Undoubtedly, certain economic, political, and cultural concepts and
practices have increasingly universal application, but even “McDonaldization”
and “Disneyization” are contradictory hybridizing processes, and they
hardly herald a New World Order, the End of History, or the flattening of the
earth, as various teleological accounts would have it.
Area Studies Inside-Out
Perhaps the most pressing need is for area studies practitioners to use their
particular skills and resources to confront the pervasive realities of globalization
in new and interesting ways. One attractive alternative requires moving
the focus away from state-centered projects of modernization and development,
and engaging with what Appadurai calls “grassroots globalization”
or “globalization from below” (Appadurai 2001, 16–20). This represents a
profound shift in current practices with several different dimensions. First, it
requires modification of the present institutional architecture of area studies,
which privileges relations between world regions and global centers of political
and economic power and encourages a static, bounded view of areas and
identities, consistent with “a Cold War-based geography of fear and competition”
(Appadurai 2001, . At the very least this involves an increased
awareness on the part of area studies practitioners of the constructed and
contingent nature of the “areas” that frame their work, and a willingness to
cross received conceptual and institutional , as well as geographical, bound-
aries where necessary and appropriate.
A second shift involves the content of area studies research and teaching.
The area studies agenda is often dominated by issues and problems that
reflect the economic or security concerns of external actors and agencies,
particularly those of state and corporate elites. There is certainly a place for
such top-down and outside-in approaches and perspectives. But it is also
appropriate to de-center area studies to apprehend the “grassroots” reality of
the majority of ordinary people in other societies, particularly the everyday
basis of their ways of life. One way of doing that is through an engagement
with the local production, dissemination, and consumption of music, film,
dance, and other forms of popular culture. Another is through engagement
with the local initiatives organized around natural resources and productive
activities, both rooted in local cultural ecologies and linked with the global
political and cultural economies. Such an approach promises encounters with
sites of resistance and human creativity that often belie the inevitability that
characterizes much globalization discourse.
The third shift is at the level of epistemology and is by far the most
difficult to achieve. In the post–Cold War era, there has been much talk of
internationalizing education, including its area studies dimensions. But, as
Appadurai notes, this often takes the form of inviting diasporic others to join
existing area studies establishments—but only on Western epistemological
and ontological terms. Western ways of knowing and ideas about “progress”
have become privileged to a degree that non-Western and indigenous knowledge
is often portrayed as quaint or unscientific, certainly marginal and
irrelevant in a modernizing and globalizing world. Postcolonial studies and
indigenous studies have shown that the problem lies not only in how knowledge
about other peoples and places is used, but in how that knowledge is
constructed and reproduced in the first place. Imbalances of power are not
just geopolitical and geoeconomic, they are embedded in the very language
of modernization, development, and now globalization, from whence they
have become a part of area studies itself. New forms of area studies that take
ideas of internationalization and democratization seriously must find space
for the other ways of knowing and living in the world that continue to shape
the day-to-day lives of most inhabitants of the planet.
Moving Cultures
These were some of the ideas that informed an initiative of the University
of Hawai‘i’s School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies called Moving
Cultures: Remaking Asia-Pacific Studies.2 The initiative was funded by the
Ford Foundation from 1997 to 2002 as part of a larger effort to “revitalize”
area studies in light of what program officer Toby Volkman called “a
dramatically changed and increasingly interconnected world.” According to
Volkman, the in-depth knowledge of particular places that area studies has
always produced was still needed, but it was now important to revisit the
field’s “basic premises and procedures.” Among other things, this involved
questioning “the notion of distinct and stable areas, with congruent cultural,
linguistic, and geographical identities,” and finding new ways to understand
how local “identities and cultures are being formed and re-formed” in their
interactions with powerful global forces (Volkman 1999).3
Stage I of our Moving Cultures project responded to Volkman’s challenge
with a one-year collaborative research and instructional project focused
on the Republic of Palau, a Pacific island microstate increasingly affected by
flows of workers, tourists, and investment capital from Asia. The intent was
to defy conventional approaches to area studies by destabilizing the spatial,
cultural, and geopolitical categories often used to organize such work. The
Moving Cultures project brought together an interdisciplinary team of specialists
in various Asian and Pacific “areas” as well as politicians, community
leaders, academics, and teachers from Palau who would not normally work
together on a sustained basis. This was a highly unusual approach to Asia
Pacific studies, and one that responded to the challenge that “moving cultures”
presented to notions of the “local” in an era of globalization (Wesley-
Smith 2000a).
Although the first iteration of Moving Cultures produced some interesting
insights into Palauan experiences of globalization and generally raised
awareness of area studies issues, some aspects of the project were less successful.
A key objective was to find ways to correct some of the power imbalances
between the agents (researchers and students) and objects of inquiry
(studied communities) inherent in much area studies work by making our
Moving Cultures activities “genuinely collaborative.” By the time Stage I was
complete, however, we were just beginning to understand the enormity of
this task. Although many Palauan colleagues participated in the project, the
extent to which this served to “level the playing field” is by no means clear.
In an important cultural and epistemological sense it was still “our” game,
played out according to the dictates and conventions of Western scholarship.
We were effectively engaged in “a search for balance within a discourse that
is itself thoroughly unbalanced in its approach to the world, already firmly
committed to a particular intellectual tradition and ontology” (Wesley-Smith
2000b, 9).
Regional Learning Communities
Responding to these dilemmas, the emphasis in Stage II of Moving Cultures
shifted from research activities to the classroom, the principal site where the
culture of area studies is reproduced. In a concerted effort to “bring area
studies to the areas studied,” a team of instructors from the University of
Hawai‘i established relations with six other regional colleges and universities
to explore new forms of collaborative teaching and learning about Asia and
the Pacific.
What emerged from these interactions was a pedagogical model designed
to address some of the imbalances of power inherent in area studies. The
model advocates the use of interactive technologies to create dynamic links
between places where area studies are taught and the places being studied,
and so to destabilize the relationship between the subject and object of
knowledge. In this model the partner educational institutions collaborate in
the development of shared curriculum and adopt student-centered, dialogic
forms of teaching and learning in multisited classrooms. In other words, it
forms regional learning communities.4
Such learning communities were developed in multiple collaborations
between faculty and students at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji,
Canterbury and Victoria universities in New Zealand, Ateneo de Zamboanga
University in Mindanao in the Philippines, the National University of Singapore,
and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. Jointly owned
courses or course modules were developed and taught simultaneously on the
partner campuses using interactive technologies such as e-mail, websites, and
videoconferencing to link participants at each site (see also Sharma 2005;
Chang 2004).
The interactive courses explored the nature and local implications of the
global flows of capital, people, and ideas that affect local communities in
different ways. Modules were developed to examine three sets of related topics
associated with globalization: migration and multiculturalism; tourism,
representation, and identity; and globalization and popular culture. These
are topics of immediate relevance to people in each of the regional sites,
which as quintessential border zones exhibit all the tensions and contradictions
inherent in the contemporary study of place and culture. The pedagogy
is designed to give students an active role in shaping and exploring the topics
in close collaboration with overseas counterparts and to elicit personal experiences
and comparative perspectives.
Although one project (involving Ateneo de Zamboanga University) pursued
semester-long interactions, others found that the most practical approach
employed a scaled-down version of the Moving Cultures pedagogical model
focused on specially designed modules inserted into longer courses taught
independently on the collaborating campuses. Needless to say there are differences
in educational and institutional cultures that make such distanced
collaborations difficult to sustain over a longer term, and the four-to-fiveweek
modules could be tailor-made to fit into regular courses that satisfied
location-specific requirements without necessitating new course proposals,
special funding, and personnel actions. Inserting interactive modules into
existing courses also avoided the potential problem of recruiting students for
courses that are not part of the regular offerings. Finally, limiting the period
of intercampus activity avoided some of the planning and management difficulties
associated with regional campuses following different academic
calendars.
Re-Placing Asia Pacific Studies
Most of the contributions in this volume started life as papers presented at
the Moving Cultures capstone conference Remaking Asia Pacific Studies:
Knowledge, Power, and Pedagogy, held in Honolulu in December 2002. The
chapters are organized into three sections, intended to move the reader from
theoretically informed general discussions of the development and current
status of area studies, through some comparative perspectives from outside
the mainstream of American area studies, to case studies of attempts to translate
such critical insights into concrete teaching and learning practices. These
sections are followed by some concluding comments from Ricardo Trimillos,
who identifies emerging themes and “lessons learned” from the materials
presented in the book. Each section is prefaced by a brief introduction, which
situates the set of chapters in the context of the broader concerns of the text
and identifies relevant theoretical and practical considerations.
The three chapters in the first section, “Reshaping Area Studies in an
Era of Globalization,” explore some of the factors shaping the development
of area studies knowledge in the United States, as well as the shifting
regional geographies on which area studies programs are based. Together
they highlight the need for radical change in the pedagogies and practices
of area studies, without losing sight of the valuable insights that this type of
scholarship can provide. Arif Dirlik identifies a number of political-economic
developments shaping the crisis in area studies, with particular reference to
Asia Pacific studies, before discussing alternative ways of reimagining regional
geographies and issues. He notes in particular the significance of the end of
the Cold War for the modernization discourse and spatial categories that
emerged in the post–World War II period. Coupled with the rise of new
centers of global power, this has destabilized some fundamental aspects of the
area studies project and given rise to a number of alternative ways of claiming
knowledge about Asia and the Pacific. Dirlik discusses the distinctive
characteristics of these overlapping trends—identified as civilization studies,
oceanic studies, the “Asianization of Asian studies,” diasporic studies, and
indigenous studies—before concluding that no single approach is likely to
meet all the needs of more appropriate forms of area studies while avoiding
complicity with the neoliberal ideology of globalization. “If there is a crisis
in our ways of studying the world, including the Asia Pacific world,” he asks,
“is this crisis likely to be resolved by the substitution of a new paradigmâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›or
does the solution lie in the proliferation of paradigms in a world that does not
lend itself to easy spatial or temporal containment?”
Neil Smith’s contribution focuses on issues of space and scale in the production
of the geographical categories informing area studies. He notes that
the “whole global jigsaw puzzle” of spatial entities around which this type
of knowledge has been constructed has been thrown up in the air in recent
times. The challenge is to put the puzzle back together in more appropriate
ways while recognizing that some of the pieces coming back down have
been altered or replaced under the influence of globalization and other social
forces. For Smith, the key is understanding the processes involved. He asks,
“how do certain kinds of areas and borders get constructed, others eroded,
still others reconstructed in the context of specific, shifting and intensified
transnational flows associated with a new globalism?” Smith draws upon
theoretical insights from the discipline of geography and concludes that a
revitalized and reconstructed area studies will succeed “to the extent that it
does indeed embrace geographical theory and, in particular, theories of the
production of space and scale.”
Martin Lewis echoes some of the themes in the Smith and Dirlik contributions,
although employing different arguments and emphases. His work
is organized around a critical examination of different metageographical
schemes used to divide the world into civilizational, continental, and oceanic
realms. He also examines various constructs of “Asia” and “the Pacific”
before outlining the requirements for an alternate regionalization scheme to
inform area studies. He argues that the discourse of competing civilizations
and that of continents share common historical and intellectual roots, both
grounded in ideas of immutable physical, cultural, social, and economic features.
Oceans too, he suggests, are often incorrectly seen as simple, natural
units of geography, self-evident points of reference for dividing up the world.
Lewis argues that area studies cannot simply discard regional categories,
problematic as they are. Instead, we need to use them in ways that acknowledge
their complexity as well as their contingent and constructed nature,
while entertaining “alternative, overlapping, noncongruent regionalization
schemes, paying particular attention to dynamic border zones.”
While Dirlik, Smith, and Lewis discuss broad issues affecting contemporary
American-based area studies programs, in “Perspectives from Asia and
the Pacific” Lonny Carlile, Jeremy Eades, Teresia Teaiwa, and Lily Kong shift
the focus to related concerns and issues in some of the areas studied. Lonny
Carlile and Jeremy Eades examine trends in area studies and internationalization
in higher education in Japan, an important site for the production of
knowledge about the Asia Pacific region. Carlile traces the evolution of the
study of Japan’s “others” from the nineteenth century on and looks at how
changing geopolitical considerations and institutional reforms have shaped
contemporary forms of international study. He describes the early and wholesale
adoption of Western scientific modes of inquiry in higher education in
Japan—initially leading researchers to view even their own culture as “other.”
In more recent times the status of area studies research and education has
changed dramatically as Japan has been confronted with the new demands of
globalization and become obliged to adopt a more independent and assertive
regional posture.
Although Carlile argues that Japan is now in a position to forge models
of area studies research and teaching radically different from those of the
United States, Eades’ analysis suggests that this is not necessarily the case. He
examines the situation at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), a new
institution where area studies is not just a supplement to other programs, but
“the raison d’être of a whole university.” This represents a radical departure
for Japanese higher education, and, unencumbered by existing precedents
and institutional constraints, APU appears to offer enviable opportunities for
innovation. However, as Eades explains, there are real constraints stemming
from the fact that the initiative was designed primarily to attract students in
a shrinking and competitive domestic market and to tap into an expanding
flow of international students from other parts of the Asia Pacific region.
Eades is well aware of the conceptual and political issue associated with the
construction of regions raised by other contributors to this volume. Indeed
he explores in some depth the origins of the Asia Pacific idea, as well as
some of the regional issues that might feature prominently in the university’s
curriculum. Yet ultimately his concerns are pragmatic and administrative:
“Amoeba-like regions and open-ended disciplines raise serious implications
for teaching and library resources, especially in small international universities
whose composition may change rapidly in response to the vicissitudes of
the regional economy.”
Teresia Teaiwa has also been involved in program building at Victoria
University of Wellington in New Zealand, a country with strong historical,
cultural, geopolitical, and diasporic ties to the Pacific islands region. She
notes that over the last half-century Pacific Islands Studies has produced vast
quantities of material but has demonstrated no disciplinary or methodological
consistency. She shares the concerns of other area studies practitioners,
including Eades, about the challenges of studying “amoeba-like” regions
that expand or shrink over time and according to the nature of the inquiry.
She acknowledges that as it is usually defined “the Pacific” is a construct with
distinctly colonial origins, but she points out that the same might be said
about any modern Pacific island nation. In the end, Teaiwa follows Tongan
scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa in arguing that whatever the conceptual and practical
legacies of colonialism, only Pacific islanders “can make our region real.”
Teaiwa’s chapter offers a prescriptive answer to the question “What is Pacific
Studies?” that emphasizes interdisciplinarity, indigenous ways of knowing,
and comparative analysis before warning of the dangers of associating too
closely with a potentially hegemonic Asian studies.
As a complement to the critical concerns of earlier contributors, Lily
Kong of the National University of Singapore takes a pragmatic look at some
of the administrative factors affecting institutional collaboration, especially
those initiatives involving international partners. The most important factors
in the success of such projects, she argues, are personal commitment and the
development of interpersonal relations between faculty members who are
willing to invest time and effort to overcome professional disincentives and
institutional barriers. These are important practical issues that reappear in the
chapters about learning communities later in the volume.
In the third section of the book, “Asia Pacific Learning Communities,”
collaborators reflect on their experiences developing and teaching interactive
Web-based courses, initiatives designed specifically to address some of the
conceptual and theoretical concerns about contemporary area studies raised
earlier in this volume. These chapters thus represent attempts to bring the
insights of what might be called the “intellectual heavyweights” in the first
section to bear on the classroom-based construction and dissemination of
area studies knowledge. Each collaboration involved a different variation of
the Moving Cultures model of pedagogy and generated a wealth of experience
with the conceptual, technical, political, cultural, and bureaucratic issues
associated with this sort of educational innovation. It is hardly surprising that
some of these interregional, cross-cultural experiments were more successful
than others for both students and instructors. Taken together, the case studies
provide useful lessons on the potential and practical problems of international
collaborative learning intended to engage in “moving cultures.”
Finally, Ricardo Trimillos offers a concise “idiosyncratic” reflection on
the materials in this volume and on the future of Asia Pacific area studies generally.
Like many other authors in Remaking Area Studies, Trimillos grapples
with the challenge of defining fundamental units of analyses, in this case
the Asia Pacific region and its constituent subregional parts. He explores
this issue with particular reference to the organization and reorganization of
Asian and Pacific studies at the University of Hawai‘i, distinguishing between
“working definitions” (employed by primary user groups), and “workable
definitions” (invoked for specific purposes or occasions), and identifying some
associated conceptual, political, and practical considerations. An experienced
area studies administrator and teacher, Trimillos welcomes Moving Cultures’
focused attention on issues of pedagogy and knowledge delivery, applied and
practical aspects of area studies that he argues deserve more attention from
specialists. Trimillos discusses some of the shared characteristics of the collaborative
initiatives described in the book, particularly their emphasis on
student-centered, experiential learning. But he notes that the effectiveness
of these initiatives for “mastering specific knowledge orâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›raising levels of
critical thinking” remains unexplored. Trimillos concludes by enumerating
eight “lessons learned” from this attempt to rethink Asia Pacific Studies at
the University of Hawai‘i and argues that these “have a high degree of application
and relevance” for programs focused on other areas of the world.
Area Studies Futures
We believe that there is much to be learned from Moving Cultures and other
recent initiatives that confront the assumptions and practices governing the
first half-century of area studies in the United States. There is much at stake
as an accelerating process of globalization, itself poorly understood, continues
to challenge conventional understandings of place and culture. There is
no option but to continue the search for viable alternatives to an area studies
establishment that has, at best, only a dimly conceived sense of its intellectual
role in the academy. We continue to hope with Arjun Appadurai that while
the vision of “global collaborative teaching and learning about globalization
may not resolve the great antinomies of power that characterize this
worldâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›it might help even the playing field” (Appadurai 2001, 20).
Notes
1.╇ Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, most area studies scholarship was
informed by the ideas and assumptions of the modernization theorists, with their
emphasis on stages of growth and the global diffusion of modernity, or in more critical
works by dependency theory, which emphasized instead relations of power between
developed centers and underdeveloped peripheries in the global system.
2.╇ Some material related to the Moving Cultures project in this and other sections
has been drawn from Wesley-Smith 2000a and 2000b. The School of Hawaiian
Asian and Pacific Studies (SHAPS) is now the School of Pacific and Asian Studies
(SPAS)—see Ricardo Trimillos’ essay elsewhere in this volume.
3.╇ Ford received more than two hundred applications from colleges and universities
across the United States for Stage I of the Crossing Borders initiative (1997–1998),
and thirty were funded. The following year Stage I recipients were invited to apply for
Stage II funding (1999–2002), and eighteen received support. Recipients included
the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, University of Wisconsin,
Yale University, and the University of Michigan. The initiative sponsored a great variety
of projects, some of which, like Duke’s Oceans Connect, explored new conceptual
frameworks, while others, such as Michigan’s Grounding, Translation and Expertise,
attempted to encourage transdisciplinary and transarea collaborations within the institution.
Moving Cultures was one of a very few to focus on area studies pedagogy.
4.╇ This is not to suggest, of course, that these interactive learning communities
address all the imbalances of power inherent in area studies scholarship. Indeed, as
some contributors to this volume discuss, the project raised new questions about
forms of collaboration that rely on interactive technologies and may involve issues of
class, social privilege, and access to technology (see, e.g., Wesley-Smith 2003).