Duplicities: the false promise of Asian Studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT The rise of Asian states—particularly China and India—and their search for energy, raw materials, and markets has spurred talk of a “Global Asia.” Though this has spawned a vast literature, the complexities of language and research environments and the absence of a complex grid of scholarly exchanges—translations, collaborative exchanges, comparative analysis—has meant that these studies have not challenged reigning conceptions of a broad geocultural area and studies of individual states or subregions continue to emphasize their exceptionalism. Though inter-referentiality was projected as a strategy to break out of the “intellectual claustrophobia” of area studies, the continued acceptance of Asia as a cartographic space marginalizes the very global linkages that are salient aspects of the present epoch. Hence area studies scholarship continue largely to obscure the global reach of state and private agencies and of their diasporas as these seek to project elite views and understandings of their states overseas. Rather than taking cartographic units as epistemological fields, we need to chart patterns of human activity to historicize spatial designations.