How Can Scholars from Formerly Colonizing Countries Assist in Decolonizing Burma Studies?

Abstract

How Can Scholars from Formerly Colonizing Countries Assist in Decolonizing Burma Studies? Rosalie Metro (bio) In 2022, Htet Min Lwin, a graduate student at York University, became cochair of the Burma Studies Group (BSG), a subdivision of the United States-based scholarly organization, Association for Asian Studies. He’s the second person with heritage from Myanmar to hold this role (which Maitrii Aung-Thwin also did) since the group’s formation in the 1970s—and certainly the youngest. The colonial origins of studying “the East” are well known, as are the roots of “area studies” programs in the Cold War national security interests of the United States and Europe. Thus, the term “formerly” in my title only refers to the end of an official governing relationship; coloniality persists in economic, political, and academic dimensions. Therefore, hearing of this positive news about the BSG led me to reflect on my twenty years participating in this discipline—what has changed, and what has not, in terms of who holds power. When I attended my first Burma Studies Conference in 2008 in Dekalb, IL (home of the International Center for Burma Studies), the field was dominated by older white people from formerly colonizing countries including the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, North [End Page 171] America, and Australia. Many of them could not speak Burmese or another ethnic nationality’s language. There was a sprinkling of senior bama men. After decades of military rule that had made field research difficult for many international scholars, and a general lack of interest in a country perceived as not geopolitically significant to former colonizers, Myanmar was not a popular country to study in the United States. Cornell University, where I was pursuing a PhD, was one of a handful of places outside of Asia that taught Burmese language, and there was only one other person in my class. As a white woman with U.S. citizenship, I didn’t fully understand how privileged I was to be studying whatever country captured my interest at an Ivy League institution. I didn’t question why “area studies” institutes are so often located outside the “area” itself, and in former colonizing countries. Fast forward fifteen years: although the discipline, like so much of academia, still skews white, older, and male, important changes have been spurred by the post-2010 expansion of the discipline as well as by broader cultural shifts. Htet Min Lwin’s cochairship of BSG does not mean racism within Burma Studies is over, any more than Obama’s presidency meant that racism in the United States had ended. But it would be hard to get through a humanities or social sciences PhD program in the United States or Europe studying Myanmar these days without learning or already knowing at least one of its languages. One new venue, the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, is devoted to bilingual content and the cultivation of scholars from Myanmar. There are so many researchers and scholar-activists from Myanmar sharing their insights and doing crucial work. More nuanced discourses around race and power have made it possible to pull apart easily conflated yet distinct terms like “foreign,” “white,” “Western/Eastern,” “Global [End Page 172] North/South” (in ways that made me settle on “scholars from formerly colonizing countries” in my title to identify people with similar positionality to my own, even while acknowledging how much that category is striated by race, class, and gender). It feels to me like the balance of power has shifted in long-overdue ways toward the prioritization of local knowledge. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. These changes are evidenced in Tharaphi Than’s (2021) essay, “Why Does Area Studies Need Decolonization?” In it, she addresses her fellow academics from the Global South and directs them toward “freeing each other from coloniality,” or the colonial dynamics which outlast colonization (Tharaphi Than 2021). She describes her own journey into the Western academy, noting that “to be modern and be accepted in the world education scene is to act the way the masters did” (Tharaphi Than 2021). She describes “Orientals adopting Orientalism,” as those who accept the Western canon and choose research...