"You Asians:" On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary

Partly because of the consequences of accelerating globalization and the emergence of what, for the last decade or two, a number of people have referred to as the postmodern conditions discernible almost everywhere on the globe, we are urged to acknowledge that the unity of the West is far from being unitarily determinable. The West is a mythical construct, indeed, yet what we believe we understand by this mytheme is increasingly ambiguous and incongruous; its immoderately overdetermined nature can no longer be shrouded.

Until recently the indigenous or local characteristic of a social and cultural construct found in places in Asia, Africa, and sometimes Latin America has routinely been earmarked in contrast to some generalized and euphemistic quality specified as being “Western.” Without this institutionalized gesture whereby to identify what is allegedly unfamiliar, enigmatic, or barbaric for those who fashion themselves to be “Westerners” in terms of the Western/non-Western binary opposition, it would be impossible to understand the initial formation of Asian studies as a set of academic disciplines in North American academia. Things Asiatic were brought to scholarly attention by being recognized as “different and therefore Asian.” Then, tacitly from the putative viewpoint called “the West,” “being different from us” and “being Asian” were taken to be synonymous in its anthropologizing gesture. A regiment was in effect according to which an acknowledgment of allegedly unfamiliar, enigmatic, or barbaric things was immediately a recognition of one’s positionality as a Westerner. A similar operation could well be performed with Africa or Latin America, so as to identify Africa or Latin America as belonging to the Rest of the World, the rest that is left over when the humanity of the West is strenuously extracted from the world.

Let me begin my essay with a brief meditation on the term Asia and the people who call themselves Asians. Instead of speaking from the usual viewpoint of “we Westerners”—a customary addresser stance when one writes in English in the United States—let me address myself from the contrasting position of “we Asians.” For those who fashion themselves as Asians, the word Asians is implicitly we Asians and serves as a vocative of a first-person plural pronoun that self-reflectively designates a group of people whose primary commonality is supposed to consist of “being of Asia.”

But, who are the people who call themselves Asians? Or, more fundamentally, where is Asia? What is it?

I am not sure to what extent one can seriously claim today that Asia is, first of all, a cartographic index. Nonetheless it is widely believed that Asia is a certain proper name that indicates a vast geographic area with its huge resident population. Accordingly, some people might without reflection assume that those who live in the geographic area called Asia are naturally designated as the Asians.

The population inhabiting the area called Asia is called the Asians. From this, however, it does not necessarily follow that the people thus called Asians are able to gather themselves together and build some solidarity among themselves through the act of their self-representation or auto-representation by enunciating not only we but also we Asians. Clearly there is a wide gap between the fact that the population is described as Asians by some observers standing outside the population—we will inquire into the conceptual specificity of this “outside” or externality later—and the self-assertion by the people themselves in terms of the name attributed to them. Some sort of leap is required in order to move from the state of being described as Asians by some outside agents to the self-representation as a subject in terms of we Asians. And let us not be negligent of a historical verity that this leap could not be made until the twentieth century. Until then, generally speaking, there were objects designated as Asians but there...