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Asian Cultural Studies 37 I want to discuss the radical potential of an Asian Cultural Studies. But, before I can do that, I must firstly address another question. Can one really even speak of an “Asian Cultural Studies”? After all, between the two fields of Asian Area Studies and the parallel universe that is Postcolonialism, there appears to be little geographic or theoretical room to constitute such a field. Despite this, that is precisely what appears to be happening with the emergence of journals such as positions, Traces and Inter-Asia, projects such as this one, and, perhaps most significantly, the emergence of strong centers of Cultural Studies outside the usual Anglo-American world. From Seoul, to Hong Kong and on to Taipei, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, and Singapore, new centers of Cultural Studies are making their appearance and producing work that throws up a set of potentially challenging questions that could redefine Asian Area Studies in the West. This challenges the hegemonic position of Western voices speaking authoritatively about Asia and, even more radically, challenges the epistemological assumptions that underpin that work. We are, therefore, beginning to see the slow and somewhat shaky appearance of a new field we could call “Asian Cultural Studies.” I say slow and shaky because, intellectually, this new field is being pulled by Area Studies and Postcolonialism in two distinct directions as both attempt to claim sovereignty over it. For the moment, then, Asian Cultural Studies is less a new field than a disputed territory where questions of intellectual sovereignty are yet to be settled. Let me endeavor, if not to settle these disputes, then, at the very least, to figure out what is at stake here. 2 Asian Cultural Studies: Recapturing the Encounter with the Heterogeneous in Cultural Studies Michael Dutton 38 Michael Dutton The largely US-dominated field of Asian Area Studies would, with some validity, see a Cultural Studies approach as being its wayward child. It is, for area studies, both a thing of youthful intellectual exuberance and promise within “the field,” but also something that is regarded as suspiciously trendy, light, postmodern, and Marxist. It is not, therefore, an area of serious intellectual or policy pursuit. For Postcolonialism, Cultural Studies is less a sub-area than a kindred spirit. The postmodern, Marxist, literary, and cultural bent of postcolonial scholarship cements this link even though the themes of hybridity, difference, and the centrality of the question of the colonial legacy tend away from many of the themes central to the constitution of Cultural Studies. Moreover, the geographic shift of the field, away from a single largely American-centric focus to one that is now established across an array of Asian centers, opens onto questions that potentially decenter the knowledge not just geographically but also intellectually. In both Asian Studies and Postcolonialism, then, the ownership claims over an Asian Cultural Studies, while not without validity, are far from being claims to full ownership. While Postcolonialism has proven to be a crucial intellectual precursor to an Asian Cultural Studies and shares with that field a certain theoretical “family resemblance,” the connections between the predominantly Western Area Studies and this new Asian-centric Cultural Studies are, intellectually far more fraught and raise far greater anxieties. For Western Asian Area Studies knowledge, there is a latent anxiety about the worthiness of the notion of culture central to the constitution of Cultural Studies. The reason is that Western Area Studies is, in many ways, the social science turn of Oriental Studies. As such, it drew away from Oriental Studies but still picked up from that discipline a set of assumptions about culture that are in many ways, antithetical to the notion of culture in Cultural Studies. This was hard for Area Studies to avoid, as this Western tradition of Oriental Studies was a field almost defined by the question of culture. In Western Oriental Studies, however, “culture” meant “high culture” and an understanding of this was thought to be crucial to any appreciation of the past great civilizations of the Orient. Oriental Studies was, in the main, interested and only interested in the “great civilizations” of the East. Emerging in the West at the moment of supremely confident empire, Oriental Studies displayed what Raymond Schwab once called a “condescending veneration” toward Oriental civilizations’ past.1 Operating within an enlightenment tradition of progress, Oriental Studies formed an illuminated two-way mirror that shone upon the greatness of “other” [read Asian] past civilizations only to further illuminate the greatness...

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