Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region

1 Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections

1 Disciplines anD area stuDies in the Global aGe southeast asian reflections Goh Beng-Lan In recent years the conceptual underpinnings and continued validity of area studies in a globalizing world have been severely questioned. Emanating from a critique of Orientalism, but also reflecting changing institutional politics in the American academe following the end of the Cold War, the attack on area studies has spread across the globe. This has resulted in growing pronouncements on the failure of area studies in producing a synthesis of knowledge that transcends disciplinary divides and power hierarchies between the Western and non-Western world. 1 The spread of this critique has led to a common view that area studies is in a state of “crisis”.2 Ironically, however, this critique of area studies comes at a time when regional perspectives are gaining ground in defining regions based on local priorities. The critical agendas that propelled the attack on area studies in Euro-America appear to undermine such promising effort. As the crisis of area studies galvanized scholars to deliberate over its fate, some scholars in Asian Studies3 have sought to find “afterlives” for area studies by pointing to regionally located scholarships as alternative sites from which EuroAmerican -centric visions could be denaturalized.4 In the words of Miyoshi and Harootunian: The afterlife thus refers to the moment that has decentered the truths, practices, and even insitutions that belonged to a time that could still believe  Goh Beng-Lan in the identity of some conception of humanity and universality with a Eurocentric endowment and to the acknowledgement that its “provinciality” must now be suceeded by what Said called “a contrapuntal orientation in history”. (Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002, p. 14) Yet the prospect of recentring knowledge production back to regions themselves raises its own set of questions. For one thing, regional scholarships have always existed alongside Euro-American social sciences. In fact, strident regional scholarships were contesting the dominance of colonial scholarships during the decolonization era in endeavours to map out national histories. These local voices were often dismissed as “nationalist” if not “nativist” and have remained under-examined and unnoticed, even by scholars located within the regions themselves.5 The unspoken politics of theory at the time, supposedly speaking on behalf of some universal and objective standard, determined which scholarship could be regarded as theory, and which relegated to more subjective and parochial forms of knowledge. Similarly, the quest for the afterlives of area studies is underpinned by epistemological imperatives of a North American style of knowing, which has strongly shaped post World War II discourses of area studies.6 The throwing back of area studies to local scholars comes at a time when the epistemological rules of the day appear to be about a search for diversity rather than similarity, an eschewing of western and nation state frameworks, and a rejection of the possibility of any bounded geographical and identity conceptions in the current world. More poignantly, underpinning these imperatives is a vicious polarization of opinions over disciplinarity in the context of epistemological challenges to disciplinary foundations, and debates on the politics of knowledge production. In this polarization where there is often no middle ground, disciplines are either seen as immutable and to be strictly defended, or as oppressive and to be dismantled. Equally, theoretical-political differences between the right and left, and even amongst these groups themselves, are bitterly divided, and growing more dogmatic in the face of postmodern challenges.7 In such an atmosphere, concepts and social categories become part of a social science language game; they are hijacked, reified, and frozen by dogmatic ideological and disciplinary purposes making alternative persuasions simply difficult or misunderstood. In this context, how might local scholars negotiate the difference in what counts as “scholarship” in Southeast Asian and Euro-American settings, while remaining true to their calling to prioritize local perspectives? Given the global diffusion of Euro-American ideas in today’s world, how are alternative Southeast Asian Reflections on Disciplines and Area Studies  social scientific discourses possible? At the same time, what are the conditions and processes that enable alternative epistemologies and imaginings without falling into the traps of essentialism or chauvinism? If indeed the project of knowledge production has become polycentric, would the agendas and ideas from regional scholarships be accepted into dominant paradigms, even if they were to overthrow their fundamental disciplinary and epistemological (theoretical-political) premises? What are the grounds...