Transitions

The life-span of independent journals can be dicey affairs. Launching an international journal as graduate students at UCLA seemed decidedly foolhardy especially when radical journals were finding the 1980s a difficult decade to survive, culminating of course in the epoch-making changes of the end of that decade and the early years of the next. What should have been an opportunity for rethinking, renewal and reinvolvement often saw a headlong retreat on the left. However, this journal, along with a resolute handful of others, has not only survived, it has thrived. We celebrate twenty years of publication with deep appreciation for our readers, subscribers, and the work of our editorial associates and board members. We also mark a transition. With this issue we step down as editors, passing the baton to Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, our longtime editorial associate.

The origins of this journal go back to the late 1970s when the events of the Iranian Revolution, the second-wave Indian women's movement, and a reinvigorated anti-apartheid movement had begun to galvanize students on many university campuses across the U.S. It was also a time when a new generation of students from the Third World was entering US graduate programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, a generation politicized by the anti Vietnam-war movement and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, witness to collapsing modernization projects and proliferating civil wars, deeply critical of the narrow nationalisms of the formerly colonized states and the growing reach of US military and cultural hegemony. These concerns brought many of us into common conversations at UCLA, encouraged us to organize reading groups and then a week-long international conference on South Asia in 1980, develop an editorial board, and publish some of the papers from the conference in what became the first issue of the journal in 1981. Our normative arena of inquiry extended from South Asia westwards to Africa and the Middle East, a region with centuries of shared histories, cultures, languages and migrations. Colonial rule — particularly British imperialism and colonial dominance — transformed but by no means eliminated those shared histories, though professional area studies in the United States and Europe and nationalist historiographies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East conspired to construct autochthonous models of social development, rather than present a more interesting and accurate picture of dynamically interlinked and co-evolving societies. This journal remains the only US university-based publication that consciously and consistently crosses the boundaries drawn by all three major "area studies" professional organizations of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Our vision has been to challenge the domains of academic specialization that are the result of the imbrication of social science inquiry within the matrix of European colonial priorities and the later exigencies of American imperialism expressed since the 1950s in the area studies approaches prevalent in modern academia. The established frames of national and regional area studies have, by and large, excluded dialogue among people with shared histories not only predating colonial rule, but also of the experiences of colonialism and the specific varieties of global capitalism and modernity that came with it. Primary among our concerns has been the effort to overcome these legacies. This is not to deny the value of disciplined empirical or historical study of localities and regions but rather to challenge the stark oppositions and narratives of exceptionalism that thrive on an ignorance of history and knowledge of comparable empirical realities in societies separated by the accidents of political geography and constructed narratives of difference.

Ironically, even as the area studies paradigms came under scrutiny in the heartland of its production during the late 1980s and 1990s, models of inquiry that foregrounded the local and led a retreat into particularism rose to prominence originating often in the former colonies. Ultimately, the true legatees of area studies were to be the nationalist political elites and aspirant elites. In many countries of the postcolonial world the Eurocentrism of conservative European and North American scholars found an echo in a form of reverse Eurocentrism, a resuscitated Orientalism that held up fragments of the pre colonial past as symbols of the authentic untouched by...