Introduction: What's Left of Asia

When we began organizing this special issue in 2003, we were motivated by two imperatives for rethinking "Asia."¹ One has a long history: the project of rethinking Asia has infused the complex histories of struggles that defined and redefined what and how Asia means. The fluctuating meanings and valences of Asia were particularly driven by Europe's subjugation of regional empires and societies in Asia since the mid–nineteenth century, which marked a watershed in the global expansion of capitalism. Yet Asia was also mobilized by multiple social imaginaries and enlisted in the imperialist projects of the United States and Japan, as well as by various anticolonial movements, alliances, and revolutions. In an important sense, we inherit this historical terrain, full of the past's contradictions, tensions, and mixed legacies as still-living forces to be contended with in the current global conjuncture. Ours is a moment, of course, marked by the reassertion of U.S./Western global hegemony and the occupation of Iraq, as well as by the commemoration and revival of the five-decade-old dream of the Bandung spirit and the first formation of the East Asia Summit.² Thus the challenge today is that while we cannot escape rethinking the question of Asia, we also can neither reduce Asia to certain Western historical imaginaries nor invoke an essential, ontologically pure Asia as self-evident, self-sufficient, and self-made.

The dramatic rise of new regional networks and discourses emerging in Asia and beyond presents another imperative for rethinking Asia today. Since the ending of the Cold War era, the growth of these efforts—what Tani E. Barlow in this collection calls "reregionalization"—does not point to a single imaginary or identity, but intersects with various contradictions and historical problems both old and new. While the Cold War may have ended as an official era, it has not ended as a reality, as the Thirty-Eighth Parallel dividing the two Koreas indicates.³ Less stark but no less the products of the global Cold War, albeit in new forms, are the transformation of the Taiwan issue into a "new world order" conflict of "democracy," the Japanese right-wing politicians' brazen commemoration of its Second World War criminals, the mutation of the Taliban in Afghanistan from Washington's "freedom fighters" to its "terrorists," and so on. Hence Asia doubles as the old frontier of an incomplete Cold War and as the home of what Washington calls the "axis of evil," the center stage for the open-ended war on "terror." But we should note here that our inclusion of West and Central Asia in this introduction runs the risk of an Asian expansionism, as it is questionable whether people in these regions see themselves as part of Asia or as Asians, as the Asia-signifier circulates mainly in East Asia and North America. And yet our intent here is to disrupt the euphoria over Asia in certain quarters and to suggest that if Asians—and Asianists—were to take this name and traditional cartography seriously, they should register the occupation of parts of Asia.

Intersecting with these discourses are networks that have grown out of the post–Cold War era market expansion and that now link various parts of the Asian continent in new ways. Note, for example, the group called the Shanghai Six (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) and its attempts to coordinate the political and economic interests of central Asia in order to strengthen a regional position in the North-dominated neoliberal empire. The accelerating trade between China and India, whose economies are predicted to make up half of the global economy by 2050, has given rise to the talk about the "Chindia" effect, the "Chindia" region, and think-tanks such as the India-China Project and the China-India Project.⁴ The ongoing negotiations for an "ASEAN plus three" (i.e., the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus Korea, China, and Japan) promote greater regional integration through inter-Asian flows of capital, resources, and labor. At...