Area and International Studies: Cultural Studies

Abstract

Area studies have been the site in the United States Academy, where an in-depth understanding of the languages and cultures of other societies has been nurtured. Its institutional development, since World War II, has been the product of financial pressures in funding from the government and foundations. Its intellectual development has been the product of the changing views of language, discourse, and culture that have now come to be known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. The linguistic turn provided the intellectual resources for the current transformation of area studies as it reacted to feminism, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and most recently, globalization. The challenge of globalization has revealed some of the inadequacies in area and cultural studies' uses of a linguistically based culture concept that has relegated culture to shared local differences in the face of macro-processes of economic globalization. An alternative is to link culture with processes of circulation. In the social sciences and humanities, both the objects of study and their investigators are increasingly in motion; coordinating this ‘double circulation’ of communities of research and what they study is the central challenge for contemporary area and cultural studies.