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By way of a postscript to this volume, I thought it might be useful to offer some remarks on its concerns from the perspective of an Australian observer of Asian cultural flows and trans-Asian cultural traffic. As an academic living and working in Asia, I am no doubt a participant observer of these developments most of the time, but my own research is Australia-based — and declaring a certain detachment gives me not only a reflective distance but a position to reflect upon. From this Australian observer’s position, then, how does the question of the “trans-Asian” arise? In practice, the meaning of this and other related terms (“intra-Asian”, for example) can easily be regulated: the trans-Asian is what happens across a geographical space that you decide to demarcate in a certain way. While “trans-Asian” is a term emphasising the energy of the flows “across” rather than the outlines of the space itself, it must presuppose these (and thus the “intra-Asian”) in order to come into our thoughts. Having demarcated your space, you can fuss about its edges and borders, and you can argue according to your philosophical or political persuasion about where they should be located (“is Australia part of Asia?”); you can show that borders may be permeable and spaces multiply mapped (asking, “what about AsianAustralians ?”); or you can remind people of the first two persuasions that sometimes real borders are barriers (“try landing in Australia as an ‘illegal Asian’ migrant”). However, once a space is in some way bounded as “Asia”, then intra-Asian traffic can simply be defined as traffic taking place between various elements in that space as contrasted with whatever other relations those 11 Participating from a Distance Meaghan Morris 250 Meaghan Morris elements might maintain with places outside the borders that you have defined. This is how the now much-abused term “Asianisation” began its media life in Australia in the mid-1980s: Asianisation was an economic development, whereby the volume of trade between countries in the region began to exceed the volume of trade between those countries and the rest of the world. When neat phrases such as these drift over into cultural analysis and political hype, their meaning quickly becomes murky. At the same time, in practical social encounters their limitations also become much clearer. Let me offer an example. When I applied a few years ago for the position of Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, my job interview began with a blunt but pertinent question guaranteed to make me nervous: “Have you lived in Asia, Professor Morris?” Professor Morris boldly replied, “No, never!” Then a senior Hong Kong scholar with a wonderful smile (like a shark, I thought at the time) leaned forward and said, “Oh, but isn’t Australia part of Asia?” Professor Morris laughed and possibly blushed. This was a moment when I was put in my place as someone not Asian in Asia. It was nevertheless an intra-something exchange; everyone knew why this crack was funny, and Professor Morris felt quite at home. The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference, for the duration of which I wondered what I could say about any kind of Asian cultural traffic, since this is not something that I “work on”. But the scholarship gathered here soon made me realise I could speak with the authority of an experience of being “trafficked” myself; after all, as academics, we not only engage in traffic ourselves and analyse other people’s traffic but negotiate the worldly trafficking of our own professional skills. Interesting questions about this kind of traffic — academic, intellectual, political — arise for the sorts of activity that both conferences and collective volumes involve and sketch out for the future. I suspect that through these mundane and increasingly “ordinary” activities, new relationships have been forming which will lead to more traffic of various kinds — traffic that will be consequential for the medium- to long-term development of scholarship in the region. So, to conclude this volume I offer four points for further reflection. First, let me extend my remarks about academic traffic into disciplinary territory, where border disputes of a worldly as well as theoretical kind occur — for example, between “area studies” and “cultural studies”. Rather than discussing the border between these fields, I want to focus on something disputed between them, namely, the form of expertise appropriately subject to academic trafficking in Asia. This...

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