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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.
Notes
1 In one of the more egregious books on the challenge posed by China, Graham Allison writes: “When Americans complain about how long it takes to build a building or repair a road, authorities often reply that ‘Rome was not built in a day.’ Someone clearly forgot to tell the Chinese. By 2005, the country was building the square-foot equivalent of today’s Rome every two weeks. Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement than the US did in the entire twentieth century. In 2011, a Chinese firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another construction firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. Indeed, China built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in just 15 years” (Citation2017, 54). This is egregious because it extrapolates contemporary trends without qualifications into the future just as Sayle projected Japan’s growth into the future—in China’s case all the more problematic because it does not take into account the aging of the population and the ecological consequences of rapid economic growth.
2 For some illustrative examples: In China some 1200 universities were established between 1997 and 2017 and in India, the number of universities rose from 184 in 1991 to 723 in 2013 (Collini Citation2017, 9; Deshpande Citation2016, 33). Of course, many of these universities are focused on the STEM disciplines and area studies figures at best marginally.
3 In the case of African Studies, the refusal of republican traditions in France to acknowledge ethnic minorities and multiculturalism has spurred scholars from francophone Africa to migrate to the United States (Dedieu Citation2002). I owe this reference to my colleague, William G. Martin.
4 The University Grants Commission (UGC) Centre for South and Southeast Asia at the University of Madras focuses only on the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore https://www.unom.ac.in/index.php?route=department/department/deptpage&deptid=17; the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Calcutta focuses only on Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Philippines https://www.caluniv.ac.in/academic/department/Sseas.html. In Africa, only 18 universities—or 2 percent of the universities in the continent have units of African Studies and an African Studies Association of Africa was only formed in 2013 (Gordon and Owpahene-Acheampong Citation2016, 9). No similar continent-wide association exists yet for Asian Studies.
5 At the AAS-in-Asia conference in New Delhi in July 2018, the Indian government refused visas to Pakistanis including US citizen of Pakistani descent (Redden Citation2018).
6 In the Soviet Union, the Orient had a different status historically and politically: it was the sphere of Russian imperialism to the “East” as well as its immediate neighbor—it didn’t have the socio-geographical distance of EuroAmerica and hence had a different trajectory (Marung Citation2019).
7 At its establishment in 2004, it had been known as the Office of the Chinese Language Council International (colloquially “Hanban”) and was a part of the CCP’s Propaganda and Education Wing, in response to criticism that it was a propaganda tool of the party, its name was changed on 4 July 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3091837/chinas-confucius-institutes-rebrand-after-overseas-propaganda.
8 In February 2010, testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that Washington could not pursue a similar strategy in China because it did not have the money (Jensen Citation2012, 274–275).
9 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/Oxfords-Indian-history-chair-gets-head-after-3-yrs/articleshow/1759612.cms. Later in 2019, the government endowed a Guru Nanak Chair at the University of Birmingham, https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2019/11/guru-nanak-chair.aspx. The ICCR currently has established 68 chairs in India studies in over 46 countries, with the most being in Germany (5), https://www.iccr.gov.in/online-form/chairs/introduction.
10 https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/launch-of-the-jawaharlal-nehru-professorship-of-indian-business-and-enterprise; https://mea.gov.in/press-releases.htm?dtl/2204/Endowment+of+India+Chair+at+University+of+Cambridge+UK.
13 The Indian diaspora in the United States has endowed chairs at Columbia University, http://india-herald.com/columbia-names-chair-after-noted-economist-jagdish-bhagwati-p471-1.htm, the Deepak and Neera Raj Center on Indian Economic Policies also at Columbia https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/news/sipa-establishes-deepak-and-neera-raj-center-indian-economic-policies, Indiana University at Bloomington http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17441.html, the University of California at Los Angeles http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/UCLA-Establishes-Endowed-Chair-711, and the University of Pennsylvania, https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/about/history/chair. More specialized endowments include a research professorship in Tamil at Stony Brook University https://www.newsday.com/long-island/education/tamil-stony-brook-university-sri-lanka-singapore-1.16930242, in Sikh Studies at California State University, East Bay http://www.sikhfoundation.org/sikh-punjabi-language-studies/ranjit-singh-sabharwal-chair-in-sikh-and-punjabi-studies/, and in Telugu at Emory University, https://news.emory.edu/stories/2015/09/er_telugu_culture/campus.html.
14 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/10/mittal-family-gift-expands-opportunities-for-south-asia-engagement/. Other wealthy alumni from India have also made generous donations to their US alma maters: Ratan Tata gave $50 million each to Cornell University and to the Harvard Business School, http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2008/10/indian-students-bring-diverse-perspectives; http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/Pages/tatagift.aspx; the Tata Trust has also endowed an Institute for Genetics and Society at the University of California, San Diego, https://tigs.ucsd.edu/; Mohinder Brar Sambhi endowed a chair in Indian music at UCLA; Nandan Nilekani endowed a chair on Indian and South Asian Studies at Yale, https://news.yale.edu/2009/11/20/steven-wilkinson-designated-inaugural-nilekani-professor; Naveen Jindal endowed $5 million in 2010 to the University of Texas at Dallas which named its management school after him, https://jindal.utdallas.edu/about-the-jindal-school-of-management/naveen-jindal/.
15 On another register, the Thunchath Ezuthachan Malayalam University has cooperated with the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen to set up a Herman Gundert Chair in Malayalam studies at Tübingen, named after an alumnus of that university who produced the first Malayalam dictionary in 1872, https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/malayalam-studies-chair-be-set-premier-german-university-34967.
16 Indian immigrant households have an income level more than twice that of the general population in the United States but data released in October 2020 also indicates that 6.5 percent of these households live below the poverty line (Columbia Business School Citation2020; see also Bose Citation2008, 13)
17 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/22/uc-irvine-moves-reject-endowed-chair-gifts-donor-strong-opinions-about-study. Among the books alleged to misrepresent Hinduism were Wendy Doniger’s (Citation2010) book which used psychoanalysis to provide an account of Tantrism among women and Dalits which ironically presents a more complete picture of Hinduism and James Laine’s (Citation2003) book on Shivaji because it raised some personal questions about the Maratha ruler and questions whether he was more concerned with building his kingdom than liberating Hindus from Islamic rule.
18 In contrast to the Trump administration, Democratic party politicians of Indian descent like Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna have been critical of the treatment of Muslim minorities (Jayapal Citation2019; Haniffa Citation2019).
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Ravi Arvind Palat
Ravi Arvind Palat is professor of sociology at Binghamton University and the author of Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim (Routledge, 2004) and The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015).