A Mistitled Memoir?

Ben Anderson originally prepared what has become A Life Beyond Boundaries as a “simple kind of English-language text” (Anderson 2016, p. vii), destined for translation into Japanese and for publication in that language. The purpose was to expose “young Japanese students” (ibid.) to the interplay between the author’s experiences and his intellectual development and to “help [them] to think in terms of useful comparisons” (ibid., p. ix). This purpose helps account for the book’s two distinguishing characteristics. The first of these is, quite simply, its tone of deep and moving kindness, kindness that will recall for a great many readers their own conversations and encounters with the book’s author. The second is its programmatic nature.

The book’s programme is of four parts. First, and gently, it sets out Ben Anderson’s misgivings about a number of intellectual — and not so intellectual — fashions, particularly as embraced by younger scholars. Second, it promises to address “the importance of translations for individuals and societies” (ibid., p. x). Third, it takes as a central theme “the danger of arrogant provincialism, or of forgetting that serious nationalism is tied to internationalism” (ibid.). Fourth, every word of A Life Beyond Boundaries affirms the value of what is called “area studies”. I dedicate most of this review to considering the relationship between the third and fourth parts of this programme, between Ben Anderson’s study of nationalism and the Southeast Asian area studies project.¹¹

The importance of that relationship suggests that Verso Books could and perhaps even should have published A Life Beyond Boundaries under a somewhat different title. To be sure, good Marxists know their commodities, and ours is an age of self-conceived “global citizens”. Releasing a volume entitled Pushing the Boundaries of Southeast Asian Area Studies would thus certainly generate fewer sales for a print-capitalist enterprise than one bearing the title actually chosen, with its appeal to cosmopolitans ersatz and not so ersatz. But, while Ben Anderson may have defied boundaries, he also pushed them outward, extended them, broadened them. His concern with nationalism was closely related to that achievement. And doing justice to his memoir also requires attention to that achievement.

Ben Anderson’s engagement with nationalism was firmly grounded in his vocation as a Southeast Asianist. As A Life Beyond Boundaries makes explicit, the origins of his conscious relationship to the nation and to nationalism lay in his earliest days as a graduate student in the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell in the late 1950s. “Probably inevitably, we were almost all drawn into a close attachment to the nationalism of the country we chose to study” (ibid., p. 54). This “emotional attachment to ‘our countries’” (ibid.) grew directly out of the atmosphere that Lauriston Sharp, George Kahin¹² and John Echols had, along with others, fostered in Ithaca. It was an atmosphere in which “students felt like explorers investigating unknown societies and terrains” (ibid., p. 53), so undeveloped was the Southeast Asia field at the time.

Nor, after all, did attachments to Southeast Asian nationalisms among Ben Anderson and his peers emerge merely as a by-product of the camaraderie of studying languages and pioneering a new field. This was, after all, the era of the “new nations”, the “building” of which was to make them reliable bulwarks against international Communism. Cheerleading for the nationalisms of the region thus stood close to the core of the early Southeast Asian area studies project, a project centred on winning legitimacy for scholarship on these countries in the American academy. In describing that project as he first encountered it, however, Ben Anderson delivers one of the gentle rebukes for which A Life Beyond Boundaries is a vehicle. He has no time for indolent characterizations of the Southeast Asian area studies project as a monolithic Cold War exercise in American imperialism. Early funding for the study of Southeast Asia, chiefly at Yale and Cornell, came most importantly from...