Jackson, Peter2022-05-050967-828Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/1885/264540Critical 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as being overly empirical and disinterested in or even resistant to critical theoretical methods; and as being an outdated form of knowledge that reflects a pre-globalization era defined by the geopolitics of the nation state.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.The research for this paper was supported by the Crossroads Asia Competence Network at Bonn University as part of the Area Studies Initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.application/pdfen-AU© 2019 SOAS University of LondonArea Studiescritical theoryglobalizationEurocentrismneoliberalismglobal rankings201910.1080/0967828X.2019.15879302020-12-27