Chair: Harry D. Harootunian, New York University

As cultural studies are transforming area studies, this panel seeks to find viable perspectives that can be offered on the issue of comparison or the basis of comparability. Implicit in area studies are spatial comparisons of events in which epochal changes in nation-states are compared in terms of variables abstracted from historical contexts, so that comparisons can find generalizable patterns of historical change. In this method of comparing different places and times, what need more adequate conceptualization are questions of temporality. This may be why the issue of temporality is at the core of recent cultural studies of modernity. Concepts, ranging from "alternative modernities," "the provincialization of the west," or the critique of the metaphor of "specter" that describes the implantation of western culture through colonial modernity, have attempted to develop a framework in which modernities are seen as coeval. In this view, historical changes are envisaged as simultaneous yet capable of producing configurations of difference. In fact, the question of how to theorize difference has become a bone of contention, since the suspicion over totalization leads to an appreciation of specific conditions and the local meaning of each event to the extent that comparisons highlight difference and, sometimes, the exceptionality of each case. Dialogues within and between cultural studies and area studies have transformed the polemics of historical specificity and generalizability, of difference and commonality of capitalist modernity, or of causality and interpretive analysis. This panel brings scholars of disparate disciplines to reconcile such polemics and discuss other related concerns on comparison.

Michael Dutton, University of Melbourne

Every story, writes Michel de Certeau, is a travel story, and this one is no exception. Like the story of Babel that begins with the disruptive actions of Noah’s three sons, the story of Asian studies in the West begins with the tale of travel of three close relatives: philology, translation, and Oriental Studies. Cut from a cloth woven of philology and translation, Oriental Studies would remain tied to its closest disciplinary relatives by the threads of method. These methodological threads were tightened by the turn to empirical detail that revealed inadvertently the inadequacies of romantic Oriental scholarship. The shift to a concern for ‘fact’ over fancy led to greater emphasis being placed upon linguistic mastery. Difficulty in mastering script-based languages led to lengthy apprenticeships in textual translation. One became trained in the method of translation and, unconsciously, took this ‘for a walk’ into the work of translating ‘real life.’ This move was further reinforced by the new pragmatic social science that Simmel tells us was "interwoven with life" and signed the death warrant on the romantic knowledge forms of the past. As social science area studies gained value among policy makers, world wars turned to cold wars, and it was in these conditions that governments turned to the area specialists. But as the cold war melts, and pragmatism fades, the Asian area studies method falls into question. It is the story of this Fall—a story that goes beyond a rendition of area studies as cold war puppet—that I would like to re-tell for it is in travelling through this tale, that alternative ways of "doing" can be found.

Akhil Gupta, Stanford University

This paper explores some of the tensions that lie at the heart of the scholarly study of nationalism as a modern phenomenon. On the one hand, nationalism is seen as something which has an origin, and which spread from that point of origin to different parts of the world through colonialism and competition. This is the narrative of nationalism that occupies the center of Benedict Anderson’s masterful study, Imagined Communities. Such a story emphasizes the processes of temporal succession. On the other hand, the study of nationalism has to contend with the continuous reproduction of nationalism as phenomena inside and outside the nation-state. Focusing on the coexistence and co-production of nationalism draws attention to the synchronicity of nation-states, and raises the question as to how similar global events produce differences. I am interested in particular as to how common geopolitical, economic, environmental, and institutional shifts have differential consequences for the temporalities of nationalisms. Such questions have become particularly acute in the face of the increasing speed of the global flows of ideas, images, finances, commodities, biogenetic materials, and peoples. What does it mean to speak of succession and synchronicity in the study of nationalism in such a context? If comparison across units such as nation-states is no longer to be taken as naturally meaningful, how could one reconceptualize the study of nationalism? In particular, how do the temporalities of globalization themselves draw upon, and challenge, the historical narratives of nation-states?

Hyun Ok Park, New York University

For the discussions of comparative framework of cultural studies and, in specific, postcolonial theory, I compare the Japanese and European colonialisms, despite overwhelming differences within each, and juxtapose the categories of otherness and sameness. A central point of recent colonial studies, primarily based on examinations of parts of Asia, Africa and the European metropole, is a "grammar of difference," in which the otherness of colonized persons is not inherent nor stable but created, defined, and maintained as a mode of colonial rule. With the case of the Japanese empire, I explore the idea of "sameness" as another mode of the colonial rule in which the construction of commonality rather than otherness was the colonial project. For instance, the move to Asia in the Japanese empire is portrayed as a reunion with Japan’s Asian kin, as part of an appeal to some vision of an "Oriental" community held together by common familial and blood ties. The relationship of the colonizer to the colonized in this conception of Japanese empire escapes the binary opposition of the self to other that is evoked in European empires. I argue that a central task in the study of colonialism must begin with identifying a range of differences among various types of colonialisms, especially on their geographic and racial politics. Given that current categories based on limited empirical grounds have been generalized to speak for the experience of colonial modernity, variant modes of colonialism compel us to question the received forms of comparability of otherness or sameness, and to search for new epistemological strategies.

Harry D. Harootunian, New York University

While area studies was explicitly implemented after World War II to encourage and even foster the development of new comparative perspetives across disciplines and between different culture regions, it was diverted by its desire to supply information crucial to the interests of the security state and private business. In time, the promise of comparison became part of its unconscious as the unit of the nation state took precedence over all other considerations, Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas capable of integrating different disciplines, it too often has settled for simple multi-disciplinarism that masquerades disciplinary coverage for comparison, language acquisition for method, the totality of the nation state for theory. In a recent collection of essays titled "The Specter of Comparison," Benedict Anderson has sought to show how the implantation of modernity in Southeast Asia invariably disclosed the specter of Europe behind it, as if it constituted a relationship between an original and its copy. What Anderson’s grasp of compares discloses is the persistence of a comparative strategy that has insisted on the originality and primacy of Europe (which appears as an epistemological concept rather than a geographic one) and the imitative status of all those modernizing societies in Asia and Africa that have followed it. Moreover, the conception of specter, which calls forth the role of the revenant that always returns to jar fixed boundaries of time and space, has been disempowered to function only to reinforce the permanence of a time lag that always privileges the first over the unfortunate late comer.

If area studies have failed to deliver on an initial promise to produce viable agendas for comparative studies outside of developmental and progressive narratives, the newer cultural studies have offered, in their effort to avoid totalities and essentialisms, to rethink the grounds of comparability by appealing to referents that exceed the unit of the nation state that has dominated the older study of areas. But too often the new cultural studies have unwittingly recuperated the binary and developmental strategies of earlier interpretative models. This has been especially true of its postcolonial inflection, which has side stepped the role of capitalism for an indeterminate conception of modernity, which still reveals the shadow of the original. The recent projection of "alternative" modernities have unintentionally reproduced the reliance on older comparative perspectives marked by temporal discontinuity and permanent lags. Proposing the existence of an alternative immediately calls into question the status of its other, what, in fact, it is an alternative to. Moreover, the presumption of an alternative modernity disguises the temporal difference between the original and now its ‘alternative,’ as if the first will always remain full and primary, while the ‘revisions’ can only appeal to the consolations of difference. In order to offset this asymmetry, many proponents of alternative modernities have appealed to forms of identitarian anti-colonial nationalism as examples of difference resting on the claims of cultural authenticity. But even here, we can see the specter of the time lag and the curious way that the present, as Walter Benjamin once noted, conjures up the past.