Asian American studies in travel

摘要

This short essay situates this journal's special issue within the Cold War history and politics of transpacific knowledge formation by calling on Edward W. Said's concept of ‘traveling theory.’ Contributors to this groundbreaking collective project have shown us that Asian American critique interfaced with Asia can upset the discipline's boundary and its assumptions enough to generate new questions and objects of inquiry. At the same time, a discipline's travel necessarily accompanies and (re)institutes troubling apparatuses of knowledge and power. Of particular concern here are the two elements that largely set the discursive parameters of Asian American studies as they have been institutionalized in the United States: liberal multiculturalism and the ethno-national organization of knowledge. Also integral to the area studies formations, they have together served as a powerful epistemic tool for the US-led Cold War geopolitical management of the post-Second World War, postcolonial world. What are the consequences of traveling knowledge uncritical of such earlier history? The essay suggests that the inter-Asia, transpacific critique and its historical materialist interrogation of the Cold War legacies in Asia should remain urgent if we were to sustain the productively unsettling effects of Asian American studies' travel to Asia.View full textDownload full textKeywordsTraveling Theory, Cold War, postcolonial, neocolonial, transpacific, politics of knowledge, area studies, Asian American studiesRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2012.659815