Organizer: Pheng Cheah, Cornell University
Chair: Naoki Sakai, Cornell University
Discussant: Joan Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Prevailing discourses about the global circulation of information make a hierarchical distinction between flows of factual data from peripheral cultures to metropolitan centers and flows of theory from "the West" to the Rest of the World. This disposition of "theory" and "culture" is politically dubious because it reproduces the distinction between the ex-colonial peripheries and the metropolis, as this has become enmeshed with the geopolitical and economic distinction of North and South, as an international division of intellectual labor that separates universal knowledges from non-Western area studies. Anti-theoreticism in area studies—the assertion that certain cognitive claims are exempt from theoretical evaluation because they are ‘empirical’—unwittingly legitimizes this division of labor. Moreover, this distribution of theory and culture is becoming obsolete in contemporary globalization. Its definition of theory is inadequate in view of the academic conversation occurring between various locations in the world, particularly around Pacific Asia. Global modernization has accelerated cultural, economic, and political interchange between different regions, bringing different forms of power-knowledge into more intense interaction.
In order to initiate a different circulation of academic conversation and debate, a different geopolitical economy of theory and empirical data in the fields of Asian Studies, our panel proposes to investigate the ongoing transformations of knowledge production that global modernization has brought about. Addressing the vexed question of how Asian Studies remains haunted by this atavistic historical construct, "the West," this panel will assess the changing roles and functions of the image of the West against which Asian Studies has traditionally defined itself. Drawing on expertise in history, literature, cultural studies, critical theory, and feminist studies, papers by Sakai, Chakrabarty, Cheah, and Barlow will seek to understand the West’s transcultural influences, global traces within theoretical knowledge produced in geopolitically specific locations, and also the ways in which theories are themselves transformed by their political effects when they are translated into practice in non-Western sites such as India, Japan, China and Indonesia. We have invited the historian Joan Scott to be our discussant because of her interest in comparative cultural history within a genuinely global frame.
Naoki Sakai, Cornell University
The effects of recent globalization requires us to acknowledge that the identity of the West is far from being unitarily determinable: various determinations of the West—such as economic, civilizational, racial determinations—do not necessarily designate the same geographic area or population. Historical conditions that allow us to overlook the heterogeneity and contradictions inherent in the concept of the West are fast disappearing. What has been called into question is the status of the West as a singular and unified referent. Especially because Asia has traditionally been defined as the negative of the West or the Occident, the over-determined nature of the West is most acutely felt in the production of knowledge in Asian Studies today.
Just as the identity of the West will vary according to the specific historical context, the identity of Asia is equally unstable. My paper will discuss one of the conditions that allows the West to appear as singularly determinable: it will examine how the distinction of the West and the non-West is constituted in the structure of address of knowledges about Asia. Drawing on material from Japanese Studies, I will examine how the West is foreordained by the way in which the addresser of knowledge on Asia presents her or himself in relation to the putative addressee. This inquiry will permit me to understand why these differing and contradictory definitions of the West are complicitous in shoring up the assumption that the West is some monolithic entity.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
In an article published in Representations 1992, I put forward the idea of ‘provincialising Europe’ as a program that European and non-European historians could collectively undertake. At the same time, I described this project as embodying a ‘politics of despair’ as the Europe of our mind, I argued, could not be provincialised. In this paper I consider the criticisms my original proposal received from other academics and discuss how the proposal might retain a certain practicality and relevance in the politics of scholarship today.
Tani E. Barlow, University of Washington
Many factors account for the distinctive, transnational quality of feminist studies now; a new international division of labor, the activism of immigrants and immigrant intellectuals, transnational women’s network and criticism of both colonial nationalism and "western feminism." Feminism is a globalized style of political thinking that emerged out of the workshops of colonial modernity in many parts of the world. The family relationship and common horizon should vitiate the continuing impulse to distinguish "not western" and "western" feminisms. However, to situate these in a common temporality does not resolve the question of difference or the question of how feminisms actually operate in any given situation. For that one must examine the already contaminated, spectral quality of the presumptions that specific feminisms, even national forms, claim for themselves. I investigate this problem of unequal and mutual relations in several current, useful feminist logics: Partha Chatterjee (derivation), Joan Scott (paradox), Li Xiaojiang (universal and particular) and Dai Jinhua (presence and lack).
Pheng Cheah, Cornell University
A neocolonial, geopolitical division of intellectual labour separates Asian studies from disciplines concerned with universal truths and ideals. Universalistic knowledges such as philosophy and other forms of theoretical inquiry continue to formulate ‘fundamental’ concepts and methods largely by abstracting from evidence confined to the socio-historical situation of the North Atlantic. On the other side, Asian studies have generally remained atheoretical because they are by definition concerned with the specificity and particularity of Asian cultures. This mesmerizing focus on the uniqueness of Asian cultures is, however, haunted by the spectre of the West. Because their claims of local uniqueness are the inverted mirror-image or phantom double of the universality claimed by the West, Asian studies are a priori barred from access to universality. At the same time, Asian materials or data are ironically processed through the concepts and methodologies of (Western) theory, which remain dogmatically unquestioned. This geopolitical division of intellectual labour between universal and particular knowledges, theory and area studies, is now obsolete. The heightened interaction between nation-states and cultures in globalisation has generated a discontinuous field of overlapping and contested universal areas. I take as an example the universalisation of Indonesia in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru quartet. Pramoedya suggests that the Indies pergerakan or national awakening, and not the Dutch colonial state, is the true heir to the European Enlightenment. I argue that we need a type of comparative cultural theory that sees Asian cultures—in their ongoing encounter with, and revision of, the legacy of Western modernity—as playing an integral role in the continuing articulation of an ever-changing universality.