South East Asian Area Studies beyond Anglo-America: geopolitical transitions, the neoliberal academy and spatialized regimes of knowledge^*

* A draft version of this paper was posted online as: Peter A. Jackson (2015), ‘Spatialities of Knowledge in the Neoliberal World Academy: Theory, Practice and 21st Legacies of Area Studies’, Crossroads Asia Working Paper Series, No. 25.

ABSTRACT

Critical theorists and scholars in Asian cultural studies have challenged the political legitimacy and analytical validity of the cross-disciplinary enterprise of Area Studies. Area Studies has been critiqued as emerging from and reflecting imperialist and Cold War-era political agendas; as being overly empirical and disinterested in or even resistant to critical theoretical methods; and as being an outdated form of knowledge that reflects a pre-globalization era defined by the geopolitics of the nation state. I challenge these three criticisms of Area Studies in light of the fact that, contrary to predictions, spatiality has not been erased but rather has been reformulated in the context of globalization. Critiques of Area Studies fail to address dramatic changes in global knowledge production underway as a result of the geopolitical rise of East, South East and South Asia, and overlook the ways the neoliberal re-disciplining of the academy is entrenching Eurocentric forms of knowledge. I argue for the validity and importance of a theoretically engaged project of critical Area Studies in an era when neoliberal managerialism and metrification of research and teaching are casting a conservative pall over the international academy by intensifying the spatialization of knowledge under early twenty-first-century globalization.

KEYWORDS:

• Area Studies
• critical theory
• globalization
• Eurocentrism
• neoliberalism
• global rankings

Notes

* A draft version of this paper was posted online as: Peter A. Jackson (2015), ‘Spatialities of Knowledge in the Neoliberal World Academy: Theory, Practice and 21st Legacies of Area Studies’, Crossroads Asia Working Paper Series, No. 25.

1 See: ‘Update on Chinese Censorship of Academic Publications’, Association for Asian Studies (www.asian-studies.org.asia-now/entryid/103/update-on, accessed 9 November 2017).

2 The stated aims of the German Excellence Initiative, promoted by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) are to: promote cutting-edge research; create outstanding conditions for young scientists at universities; deepen cooperation between disciplines and institutions; strengthen international cooperation of research; and enhance the international appeal of excellent German universities (www.excellence-initiative.com, accessed 10 February 2015).

3 A small number of internationally influential theorists are based outside the West. For example, the Argentinian anthropologist Néstor García Canclini has produced internationally influential accounts of cultural hybridity from his position at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. For an account of Canclini’s work see Jackson (2008).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was supported by the Crossroads Asia Competence Network at Bonn University as part of the Area Studies Initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.