Organizer: Richard H. Okada, Princeton University
Chair: Masao Myoshi, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: Frederic Jameson, Duke University
Scholars, scholarly disciplines, and academic institutions today face a crisis of unprecedented proportions. At issue are matters central to traditional learning in general and the East Asia field in particular: the status knowledge and its boundaries, including the role that institutions and disciplines have played in the acquisition and maintenance of particular kinds of knowledges and the position and also the relevance of the academic her/himself. The crisis results from the intellectual developments of the past few decades and from the dramatic changes in the world following the end of the Cold War. We are witnessing a shift in conceptions of knowledge from one anchored to holistic or totalizing visions and social scientific models to one that seeks to address local differences, carry out microanalyses on a global scale, and trace the networks of power and dominance that influence knowledge production. The changes profoundly affect Area Studies since "areas" themselves, once comfortably comprising distinct nations with distinct identities, are now irrevocably complicated by decolonization and the inexorable rise of postcolonial states, ethnic cultures, diasporic communities, and transnational corporations. The changes also put into question the institutional organization of knowledge, both in terms of larger divisions-humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences-and in terms of disciplinary autonomy. The role and significance of the scholar, too, are deeply affected and must be scrutinized. This panel will situate the crisis in knowledge and learning within new perspectives and frameworks that will enable clarification of the relations between disciplines and East Asian/Area Studies and the larger cultural/transnational contexts and will point to possible ways of dealing with it.
Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies After the Cold War
Bruce G. Cumings, Northwestern University
The Cold War, the American containment system, and the hegemonic position of the U.S. in the world economy drew boundaries that had the virtue of clarity: "area studies" and "international studies" had clear reference to places (like Japan and Korea) and to issues and processes (like developmental projects emphasizing markets or states). Political power was the ultimate force shaping scholarly studies of what used to be called "the non-Western world," but its most interesting effects were at those local points where power becomes "capillary" (Foucault)-like academic departments.
The American government and the major foundations followed the Cold War and hegemonic boundaries by directing scholarly attention to distinct places and to distinct ways of understanding them (e.g. communist studies for North Korea and China and development studies for South Korea and Taiwan). When Western communism collapsed in 1989-91, one set of rationales for studying "areas" (communist studies) collapsed, while another-"development," whether economic or political-deepened. In effect "area studies" merged with "international studies," with the boundaries of inquiry distending to approximate the reach of the world market. Government and the foundations were the quickest to sense this boundary displacement, but the source of power had shifted, from the concerns of governments to those of transnational corporations.
In this process of power-going-capillary but in a new direction, we can discern both the original flaws of the "area" boundaries, and the disordering occasioned by watershed changes in world politics. Yet scholars remain trapped in a larger, historical system that tends too often to define disciplines, departments, areas and subjects in advance of imagining or discovering them through disinterested scholarly inquiry. My paper will suggest how we might rethink boundaries (of area and discipline) and reengage our minds with the task of understanding the world outside American boundaries. The evidentiary basis of the paper will include utilizing the archival papers in the founding of area studies, several post-1989 texts, and the author's own experience in helping to found and develop two international studies programs.
Relocating Areas and the Promise of Cultural Studies
Harry D. Harootunian, University of Chicago
Area studies programs were formed in a context bounded by the beginning of the Cold War, considerations of the national security state and the success of the Soviet Sputnik, which led to the passage of the National Defense Educational Act of 1957. These historical markers help explain and are explained by the nature of area studies programs as they were implemented in American universities, as they were inscribed in their goals, mode of organization and pedagogy. While the area studies approach resulted in finding a place for the study of non-European societies in the academic procession, usually and still, at the end of the line, the study of areas was usually justified by appealing to the acquisition of knowledge useful to the national interest.
The end of the Cold War conflict has revealed not only the inutility of the older area studies approach (not to mention its incapacity to improve its location in the academic procession) but the failure of its system of knowledge. This failure was prefigured even before the collapse of the Second World, with the emergence of new interpretative strategies that were already putting into question received forms of knowledge and disciplinary practices. Loosely called cultural studies and emphasizing the importance of local, cultural differences (identities), the new strategies were invariably rooted in a conception of knowledge based on construction rather than the claims of reconstruction, micro and local analysis rather than a comprehensive holistic vision. My paper will consider how, if at all, the new cultural studies might be enlisted in the effort to imagine a new and more viable approach capable of relocating the study of culture areas that had once been the hostage of holistic and exceptionalistic knowledges. How might we negotiate the move away from a descriptive multi-disciplinarism emphasizing normative social values toward a genuinely interdisciplinary perspective, or one where disciplinary boundaries are more porous and permeable that, nevertheless, eschew all-encompassing worldviews in favor of agendas that seek to identify the figure of power and domination and its role in the construction of different kinds of relationships and identities?
Asian Exclusion Acts
Sylvia Yanagisako, Stanford University
This paper explores the acts of exclusion through which Asian Studies and Asian American Studies have patrolled their common boundary since the emergence of the latter in the late 1960s. The disciplinary assumptions and practices of cultural anthropology are scrutinized, because they have played a central role in the construction and maintenance of that boundary. The naturalizing of structures of inequality and their associated modes of subject formation is most transparent in the anthropological "field study" of natives in their natural habitat; but it also pervades the concept of the "cultural area," which assumes a harmonic compatibility between individual subjectivity ("personality") and collective subjectivity ("culture"). A contrasting model of displacement (natives in a foreign habitat) underlies ethnic studies assumptions of the disharmonic relations between hegemonic culture and ethnic subculture. By comparing John Embree's "classic" ethnography of a Japanese village (Suye Mura) with his monograph on "The Acculturation of the Japanese of Kona, Hawai'i," I will explore the constraints on inquiry and analysis imposed by the boundary between Area Studies and Ethnic Studies and the benefits of destabilizing their "Gentlemen's Agreement" of mutual exclusion.