|
Saturday March 27 1:00–2:30 pm - Grand Ballroom Salon L, Philadelphia Marriott
By Prasenjit Duara, working paper, draft, not for citation, four excerpts from the paper, taken from different sections of the argument, placed online for reading in advance to give a sense of the kinds of issues addresses in the essay, to be read in advance by those planning to attend the Journal of Asian Studies Roundtable (Sat., 1:00 p.m.), in Grand Ballroom Salon L.:
How has Asia appeared as a region and been conceived as such in the last hundred years? While there has been a long-standing and still burgeoning historiography of Asian connections through the study of the pre-colonial and early modern maritime trade, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are generally not seen to be a time of growing Asian connections. The recent rise of interest in Asian connections in the current time is thus unable to grasp the continuities and discontinuities that form the present. Even more, it is unable to evaluate the risks and possibilities of the present moment.
Before launching upon the subject we need to question how, where and why a region appears. I will approach this question from the perspective of historical sociology. Scholars have made a useful distinction between a region and regionalization, distinguishing between the relatively unplanned or evolutionary emergence of an area of inter-action and inter-dependence as a “region”, and the more active, often ideologically-driven political process of creating a region, or “regionalization”.
While understanding the history of the concept of the Asian region requires utilizing both of these conceptions and their complex interactions, I believe that there is a more fundamental issue underlying why regions and regionalisms succeed or fail, and also why they take the shape they do, since few will argue that the Asian region represents the cartographic representation of Asia. After all, Asia was merely the name of the area east of the Greek ecumene in ancient times. I hypothesize that regions and regionalizations tend to follow the dominant or hegemonic modes of spatial production during a period. For the 20th century, the paradigm of large scale production of social space was the territorial nation-state under conditions of global capitalist production and exchange. Note that this way of formulating the problem may also incorporate the socialist nation-state which sought to industrialize under conditions of global capital accumulation. . . .
While the British and the Japanese empires were trying to create autarkic, interdependent regions to sustain their imperial power in Asia, anti-imperialist thought linked to rising Asian nationalism was seeking to build an alternative conception of the region. These intellectual proponents of an Other Asia evoked earlier linkages between their societies, but it should be noted that their conceptualization of Asia was itself premised and enabled by contemporary imperialist technologies and modes of regional integration.
The idea of Asia among these Asians was expressed largely through a cultural movement which is instructive for us to explore. I will review here the efforts of three intellectuals, Okakura, Tagore and Zhang Taiyan because in this early period, Asianism was principally an intellectual and cultural effort until it was overtaken by the Japanese military for imperialist purposes. . . .
The Cold War division of the world into two camps controlled militarily by nuclear superpowers seeking to dominate the rest of the developing and decolonizing nations may be seen as a kind of supra-regionalism. While in fact the two camps or blocs represented trans- territorial spaces including non-contiguous nations, the contiguity of core Eastern and Western Europeans nations within each camp served as a stepping stone for subsequent regionalism to develop within Europe. We see this tendency in Asia as well where regional interactions were promoted between the countries of CENTO, SEATO and ASEAN (1967) that were basically security alliances. The Japanese efforts to cultivate Asian markets during and after the Vietnam War also created some economic and cultural grounds for later integration. After the Cold War, ASEAN which was designed, unlike the European community, to serve the nation, not only expanded to include the ex-communist nations of Southeast Asia, but also became more oriented to serve the economic needs of the region. Moreover, places like Hong Kong which played an indispensable role as a conduit for exchange between the two camps were able to reinforce and benefit handsomely from older regional links especially between Southeast Asia and China. . . .
I am by no means arguing that we return-or can return—to pre-national mode of identities; rather I want to see whether the nationalist congruence between state and culture exemplified by the hard boundary may have represented a long 20th century moment. Certainly, the present regional nexus resembles the earlier Asian maritime networks in terms of this non-congruence. Although the actual products flowing through the Asian maritime networks were miniscule compared to today’s figures, the cultural flows they enabled–packaged in Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Islam—were nothing short of world-transforming. They created inter- linked cultural universes which, however, were rarely accompanied by the kind of political domination that became hegemonic from the 19th century. To be sure today’s cultural identities are shaped by circulations of culture, knowledge, technology, goods, services and finance that are dizzying in their velocity while also becoming deeply commodified or consumerist. Nonetheless, the older Asian models of cultural circulation without state domination of identity presents us with a historical resource to explore new possibilities. . . .
|
