The Geography and Area Studies Interface from the Second World War to the Cold War

Abstract

Disciplinary geography's history represents an important source for contemporary debates over the status of geographical knowledge across the social sciences. This article argues for a reorientation of geography's history by examining its interface with the development of area studies in the United States. It investigates the epistemological and institutional transformations that occurred in the decades before and after the Second World War as the regional concept transmuted into area studies. The article finds that although geography's regional concept shaped the spatial constructions of area studies, the latter's imaginative geographies fixed the regional concept along geopolitical visions of the nation‐state and Cold War regional blocs that continue to occlude social scientific attempts to redraw the borders of the world.

Key words:

• Area studies
• Geographic thought
• Geopolitics
• Region
• War

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ishan Ashutosh

Dr. Ishan Ashutosh is an assistant professor of geography at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405‐7100; [[email protected]].