1 Area Studies After 9/11, Requiescat in PaceTheories of Area Studies December 3, 2007 Presented by Ji-Sang Yoon
2 Introduction Area Studies has experienced a dramatic boost in government, business and foundation support in recent years as a result of globalization, the events of and after 9/11 and other strategic motivations. The weak institutional basis of AS in universities ensured their marginalization from the disciplines and the analytical categories of the disciplines remained theoretical encapsulations of an idealized Euro-North American narrative of socio-historical change. The centrality of state-centered systems of regulations and the modalities of the creation of area studies programs meant that their units of analysis were states rather than the broad geocultural regions they were ostensible designed to cover. The shift of the terms of opposition from the ‘threat of communism’ to a more formless ‘war on terrorism’ has led to a respatialization of the world and to a new territorialization of cultural identity.
3 One Step Forward, Two Steps BackWhile the attempt to create multidisciplinary assemblages of sholars on broad geocultural areas, defined by the strategic imperatives of the Cold War, was designed to compensate for the relative scarcity of studies on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in the U.S. as studies of the peoples of these territories had been dominated by European colonial powers, the institutionalization of area studies in universities led to a scholarship that was firmly based on nation-states rather than broad world regions, and confined within disciplinary boundaries rather than being multidisciplinary in orientation. This is not only because of a highly diversified research and linguistic environment but also because the U.S. was able to consolidate its hegemonic position by advocating the full political membership of non-Western peoples in the interstate system.
4 Cont. Asian studies(or East and Southeast Asian studies) alone remained an exception because these states had been able to withstand the collapse of most other low-and middle-income states in the 1980s since their economic growth had been based on the transborder expansion of Japanese production and procurement networks rather than on debt-led strategies of industrialization. When the decreasing salience of state-centered systems of regulation and budgetary deficits led to a steady decline of federal funds for area studies programs in US universities in the 1980s, governments of East and Southeast Asian states also seized the opportunity to fund programs of study on their own states and thereby influence American foreign policy just as trade tensions intensified between them and the U.S.
5 Cont. A US House of Representatives study uncovered that South Korea grants to the University of California at Berkeley had been based on an understanding that Korean politics be excluded from the university’s Korean Studies program while the Taiwanese government and foundations it controlled withdrew grants of $450,000 each from the University of Michigan because a senior Michigan academic had supported the ‘one china policy’ and from Columbia University because it invited Taiwanese dissidents.
6 Cont. In an era of “asymmetrical threats”-code for non-state actors undeterred by the overwhelming military superiority of the U.S.-these anxieties were amplified a hundred-fold when members of the al-Qaida network hijacked passenger airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though these attacks represented no serious military threat to the U.S.- indeed the emphasis on the destruction of the WTC in New York obscures how easily the defense of the Pentagon were penetrated-as the first attacks on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812, they sowed widespread fear and enabled the current Bush Administration to play on popular anxieties to declare a global ‘war on terrorism.’ The U.S. waged the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. This ‘war on terrorism’ was almost exclusively aimed at Islamic countries and Muslims in general. In short, even if area studies had once represented a step forward from old-style Orientalism, we have surely taken two steps back since 9/11.
7 What is to be Done? Though area studies scholarship had been constituted to provide multidisciplinary perspective on broad geo-cultural regions, we have seen that their mode of insertion within universities led increasingly to an essentialization and a reification of cultures of several world regions. The focus was on states or sub-national units rather than on the larger geo-cultural area. Just as the changed geopolitical realities after the Second World War led to a reconceptualization of Europe and to the institution of area studies programs, perhaps the changed geopolitical realities of the post-Cold War era will once again lead to a remapping of academic divisions. After 9/11, the world has been reshaped economically and politically. AS also has been changed the range from the specific areas to larger geo-cultural areas.