Asia literacy: A deeply problematic metaphor

Abstract

In separate ways, two issues have concerned scholars in Australia and beyond. The first challenge concerns a desire to respond adequately to the widely accepted critique of Euro-American centricism, which is deeply embedded in much of the social sciences and humanities. The second issue hovers around ways to respond to the unsettling impacts of digital technology, which has radically altered our everyday social relations, along with knowledge production, dissemination and preservation. Neither challenge is new. Far from resolving these old issues, however, we have instead been confronted with an even sharper awareness of their complexity. Most of the time, analysts address these issues as two separate areas of inquiry. Here, I wish to discuss one case, with much broader relevance, where the two issues intersect. I refer to the study of twenty-first-century Indonesia, a former European colony in Asia and Australia’s giant neighbour. I look at the problematic notion of ‘Asia literacy’ as widely used in Australia, across many professions and circles, including the government, the business community and the education sector. I argue that this key phrase is strongly biased, inadvertently recuperating the old Euro-American centricism already disavowed in much of the Western world. The phrase is also unashamedly obsolete in the early twenty-first century, which is marked by the rapid expansion of digital media technology around the globe, not least in Asia.