Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies » (New Edition)

At the time of his death in 2009, Masao Miyoshi was Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Harry Harootunian is Professor of East Asian Studies at New York University.

Under globalization, the project of area studies and its relationship to the fields of cultural, ethnic, and gender studies has grown more complex and more in need of the rigorous reexamination that this volume and its distinguished contributors undertake. In the aftermath of World War II, area studies were created in large part to supply information on potential enemies of the United States. The essays in Learning Places argue, however, that the post-Cold War era has seen these programs largely degenerate into little more than public relations firms for the areas they research.

A tremendous amount of money flows-particularly within the sphere of East Asian studies, the contributors claim-from foreign agencies and governments to U.S. universities to underwrite courses on their histories and societies. In the process, this volume argues, such funds have gone beyond support to the wholesale subsidization of students in graduate programs, threatening the very integrity of research agendas. Native authority has been elevated to a position of primacy; Asian-born academics are presumed to be definitive commentators in Asian studies, for example. Area studies, the contributors believe, has outlived the original reason for its construction. The essays in this volume examine particular topics such as the development of cultural studies and hyphenated studies (such as African-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American) in the context of the failure of area studies, the corporatization of the contemporary university, the prehistory of postcolonial discourse, and the problematic impact of unformulated political goals on international activism.

Learning Places points to the necessity, the difficulty, and the possibility in higher education of breaking free from an entrenched Cold War narrative and making the study of a specific area part of the agenda of education generally. The book will appeal to all whose research has a local component, as well as to those interested in the future course of higher education generally.

About the Author

Masao Miyoshi is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Harry Harootunian is Professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. They are coauthors of Postmodernism and Japan and Japan in the World, both published by Duke University Press.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: The "Afterlife" of Area Studies	1
	Ivory Tower in Escrow	19
	Ando Shoeki - "The Forgotten Thinker" in Japanese History	61
	Objectivism and the Eradication of Critique in Japanese History	80
	Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Studies: Issues of Pedagogy in Multiculturalism	103
	Signs of Our Times: A Discussion of Homi Bhabha's: The Location of Culture	119
	Postcoloniality's Unconscious / Area Studies' Desire	150
	Asian Exclusion Acts	175
	Areas, Disciplines, and Ethnicity	190
	Can American Studies Be Area Studies?	206
	Imagining "Asia-Pacific" Today: Forgetting Colonialism in the Magical Free Markets of the American Pacific	231
	Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies during and after the Cold War	261
	The Disappearance of Modern Japan: Japan and Social Science	303
	Bad Karma in Asia	321
	From Politics to Culture: Modern Japanese Literary Studies in the Age of Cultural Studies	344
	Questions of Japanese Cinema: Disciplinary Boundaries and the Invention of the Scholarly Object	368
	Contributors	403
	Index	405