Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity eds. by Edith W. Clowes and Shelly Jarrett Bromberg (review)
- Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity eds. by Edith W. Clowes and Shelly Jarrett Bromberg
Geographers are accustomed to having to explain what they do. This often involves dispelling notions that we all make maps or received our degrees after memorizing the capitals of the 50 states. In fact, geographers such as Alexander B. Murphy and the late Harm de Blij have written works making the case for why geography matters.1 Key elements of their respective arguments for the discipline's relevance share quite a bit with those advanced for area studies in Edith W. Clowes and Shelly Jarrett Bromberg's Area Studies in the Global Age.
For example, both area studies and geography are deeply concerned with "truth on the ground" and therefore focus on the changing physical and social composition of the world. Each must consider interrelations between environmental change and demographic, social, political, and economic change. Moreover, both fields employ the notion of liminality. Both geography and area studies of varied disciplinary perspectives consider how the structures, ideologies, and identities of the past remain visible and influential within societies, economies, polities, and environments today.
Perhaps one of the foremost criticisms leveled at geography during the 20th century is echoed in critiques of area studies today. Both have been accused of failing to engage across disciplines, conversing only within specific regional specializations, and of being unfocused, descriptive, and lacking an interpretive framework (xiii). A strong case against this critique may be found within Area Studies in the Global Age.
Composed by literary critics, geographers, international relations experts, and cultural, social, and art historians, the chapters of this volume evocatively speak to the multiplicity and simultaneity of the past and present, of the traditional and the modern, as well as the "global," "regional," and "local." Contributors undertake this task with deep knowledge of the historical, linguistic, and sociopolitical/cultural contexts of which they write. These include chapters about places, processes, and people within Africa, Central, East, and North Asia, Eastern and East-Central Europe, and Latin America.
The book usefully elucidates the challenges of juxtaposing varied epistemological approaches and methods. This is carried out in the introduction and in four section-introductions that should prove particularly valuable to graduate students considering which approaches to employ in their studies. The [End Page 141] four sections of the book explore the themes of "rethinking national histories," "contrasting regional and national identities," "challenges to civil society," and "legacies of imperial systems." Each section combines disciplinarily, theoretically, and, at times, methodologically diverse chapters in which one may encounter approaches as diverse as rhetoric studies, memory studies, political/social geographies, discourse theory, human rights theory, and both qualitative and quantitative interview analysis.
As scholarly perspectives concerned with how people, environments, and places are organized and interconnected, both area studies and geography represent the interdisciplinarity so often called for but so rarely achieved in the academy. They endeavor to provide a critical window into where things happen, why they happen where they do, and how specific contexts (historical, cultural, economic, political, social, and environmental) influence the varied processes by which people in different parts of the world adapt or fail to adapt to globalizing dynamics. This volume also fruitfully engages with how modern technologies have brought people from across the globe into contact, with enormous political and cultural consequences. As noted in the book's introduction by Edith Clowes and Shelly Jarrett Bromberg, our current era of hyper mobility and global interactions should logically make area studies more relevant than ever, yet trends seem to be going in the opposite direction.
Far from being a screed or lament, Area Studies in the Global Age poignantly explores reasons for the "turn" away from area studies in the academy. Ironically, many of these are paralleled in the recent history of geography. For example, since the 1950s a number of high profile geography departments have been closed in major academic institutions, including all departments in the Ivy...
