South East Asian Area Studies beyond Anglo-America: geopolitical transitions, the neoliberal academy and spatialized regimes of knowledge

Abstract

Critical theorists and scholars in Asian cultural studies have challenged the political legitimacy and analytical validity of the cross-disciplinary enterprise of Area Studies. Area Studies has been critiqued as emerging from and reflecting imperialist and Cold War-era political agendas; as being overly empirical and disinterested in or even resistant to critical theoretical methods; and as being an outdated form of knowledge that reflects a pre-globalization era defined by the geopolitics of the nation state. I challenge these three criticisms of Area Studies in light of the fact that, contrary to predictions, spatiality has not been erased but rather has been reformulated in the context of globalization. Critiques of Area Studies fail to address dramatic changes in global knowledge production underway as a result of the geopolitical rise of East, South East and South Asia, and overlook the ways the neoliberal re-disciplining of the academy is entrenching Eurocentric forms of knowledge. I argue for the validity and importance of a theoretically engaged project of critical Area Studies in an era when neoliberal managerialism and metrification of research and teaching are casting a conservative pall over the international academy by intensifying the spatialization of knowledge under early twenty-first-century globalization.