The decline of Asian Studies in the West and the rise of knowledge production in Asia: An autoethnographic reflection on mobility,knowledge production,and academic discourses

Abstract

In recent years, the discipline of Asian Studies has struggled to adapt to a changing world and has seen a decline in student interest. A discourse about this issue has emerged that attributes this “crisis” in Asian Studies to various supposed faults in its forms of knowledge production, and that looks with hope to Asia for new forms of knowledge about the region. This paper takes issue with this discourse by employing an autoethnographic narrative to examine the ways in which mobility has affected the discipline of Asian Studies. It traces a path, followed by this author and many others, from an affective fascination with a foreign society to the professional production of knowledge. It then examines how this professional knowledge production has transformed under the influence of different forms of mobility (state-sponsored, private, and global digital), transformations that have led to the current “crisis” in Asian Studies.

Introduction

In 2018, I left a tenured position as an associate professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) to take up a contract position in Southeast Asian studies at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). When I began my career in the early 2000s, such a move would have been unimaginable. At that time, UHM enjoyed international recognition for its expertise in Asian Studies, and there was a dynamic community of faculty and students at the university engaged in the study of the entire Asian region. UBD, by contrast, was a young university, founded in 1985 and focused heavily on training teachers for the domestic educational system. By 2018, however, the two universities were no longer as different from each other as they once had been. This is in no small part because UBD has successfully pursued an ambitious plan to become a globally competitive research university, but as we will see in this paper, it is also because Asian Studies is not as strong at UHM as it once was.

To say that UBD has transformed whereas Asian Studies has struggled at UHM fits with ideas that academics have written about over the past quarter century concerning “the decline of Asian Studies in the West” and “the rise of knowledge production in Asia” (Chou and Houben, 2006; Goh, 2011). Although the field of Southeast Asian Studies experienced some declining interest in the 1980s following the end of the Vietnam War (Hirschman, Keyes and Hutterer, 1992), the idea that Asian Studies is declining in “the West” became particularly pronounced in the 1990s when the interdisciplinary approach to the study of foreign societies known as area studies, of which Asian Studies is a part, came under attack, particularly in the United States (US). Established following World War II as a means to train an elite corps of experts who could advise the government on world affairs, by the 1990s area studies had expanded far beyond its original postwar mission such that numerous universities across the country had area studies centers and programs that sought to educate students about the world, whereas still many others had area studies experts working in disciplinary departments and performing the same task. However, with the end of the Cold War and the advance of processes that we collectively label globalization, the US government and certain funding agencies began to re-allocate support for area studies to programs that focused on transnational issues, rather than the national concerns that had served as the core focus of area studies up to that point (Prewitt, 1996). At the same time, the field of Cultural Studies emerged and critiqued area studies for perpetuating imperial and Orientalist modes of knowing (Rafael, 1994; Jackson, 2003) whereas scholars in the social sciences, as they competed for reduced state resources, repeated a critique that had long been made of area studies that it lacked theoretical rigor (Bates, 1997).

This triumvirate of challenges to area studies was interpreted by some as an indication that this approach to studying foreign societies was in decline in “the West” (King, 2005: 15). Further, the Cultural Studies charge of Orientalism granted this “crisis” as it was at times labelled, a moral dimension as it suggested that the challenges to area studies were the just rewards for its purported misguided approach to knowledge production (Reynolds, 1998). Meanwhile, as area studies faced critiques in the “the West,” the growing economies of Asia enabled universities to expand and as they did so, several established area studies centers and/or programs in the first decade of the 21st century (for Southeast Asia, see Ooi, 2009). Here again the moral critique of area studies has been invoked to describe these developments as a challenge to Western hegemony (Jackson, 2019), and scholars from Asia (but with PhDs from “Western” universities) have called for a reorientation of knowledge production from “the West” to the Asian region (Chen, 2010; Goh, 2011).

My career in academia, first as a graduate student and then as a professor, has coincided with these developments. However, throughout this time I have always found myself in disagreement with these academic discourses about the faults of area studies and the rise of Asia as a center of knowledge production. Although I have come to strongly believe that Asian Studies is “in decline” globally in that, as we will see below, fewer and fewer young people today are choosing to pursue a career of studying an Asian society, I do not agree with my colleagues that this declining interest can be attributed to such issues as the persistence of Orientalist and imperial ways of knowing, or a lack of theoretical rigor and transnational approaches to scholarship (Chua et al., 2019). Further, although I have left an American university with a long history of Asian Studies expertise for a new university “on the rise” in Asia, I do not agree that Asia is “de-centering” the West in terms of knowledge production. I do not agree with these views because they do not reflect what I have experienced.

Given there is a clear disjuncture between what has been written about these topics and my own experiences, in this paper I will explore why this is the case by employing autoethnography or autoethnographic narrative (Phan, 2011; Luke, 2018; Stanley, 2016) to bring this dissonance into focus. Although there are undoubtedly countless factors that have influenced how I have experienced my career in Asian Studies, in this paper I will attempt to highlight the role that mobility has played not only in my career, but in the careers of some of the scholars who have written about the crisis in Asian Studies, and in the lives of young people today who are choosing not to pursue the study of Asia at all. What I hope to demonstrate is that over the past 30 years, different forms of mobility have shaped how different generations of people have experienced foreign societies and that those changing experiences have affected how these people have approached the academic study of Asia, as well as why people today choose not to pursue an academic study of an Asian society at all.

Although some self-reflexive writings by Southeast Asia specialists have been published (Goh, 2011), the ideas that I will examine through an autoethnographic narrative are ones that have not been directly addressed in those writings or in the scholarly literature on the state of Asian Studies. This absence in the scholarly literature, I argue, points to the importance of the autoethnographic approach. Although there have been countless articles published over the past 30 years on the challenges facing the discipline of Asian Studies, as we will see in this paper these studies have largely repeated the same ideas across that entire time period. One important reason why this body of scholarship is so repetitive is because scholars have based their ideas on extant published studies on the topic, and as a result, they end up replicating what has already been said, with each new study producing a longer list of works cited. Autoethnography, however, allows for the introduction of new information, and in so doing, holds the potential to move a discussion in new and constructive directions. That is the aspiration of this essay. Through an autoethnographic narrative, it will attempt to examine the disconnect between the ideas that have been expressed about the discipline of Asian Studies and what is actually happening “on the ground,” both in the discipline and in the world at large.

Area studies and their affective entry point

Before we begin, there is a distinction that I wish to make clear. Today if one attends a major area studies conference, such as the annual Association for Asian Studies conference in the US, one will find scholars from around the world in attendance. Although these scholars all research topics relating to an Asian society, I would not consider all of the attendees to be “area studies specialists” in the strictest meaning of that term. At its outset, area studies were established as an enterprise focused on the study of foreign societies. Today, by contrast, one can find numerous scholars from Asia at a major Asian Studies conference who research about their native society. I would label people who study their own society as “national scholars” whereas I consider those who research foreign societies to be “area studies specialists.” The line between these two categories can of course at times be blurred, but what is important for this paper, I argue, is that the factors leading someone to study one’s own society differ from those that lead someone to study a foreign society, and that understanding these differences is important for comprehending why there is declining interest today in a discipline such as Asian Studies.

In its crudest terms, I would argue the core difference is that the people who become area studies specialists somehow become fascinated with a foreign society then come to study it formally through an academic discipline that they also become interested in, whereas national scholars develop an interest in an academic discipline and then focus their research on their native society. As such, although both groups develop an interest in an academic discipline, the connection they have to the society they study differs. Although an attachment to one’s home society can be extremely complex, it is nonetheless an attachment that develops from birth, whereas the fascination that someone develops towards a foreign society often comes later. Meanwhile, members of diasporic communities can of course harbor complex connections to both their home society (where they live) and a foreign society (where their ancestors or they themselves originally came from) and could potentially fall into either of these two general categories.

Thinking about how people become interested in foreign societies at that later period is extremely important for understanding a discipline such as Asian Studies; however, it is a topic that is rarely addressed, in part, as one scholar has argued, because it is often contingent and affective factors that lead people to area studies whereas once they have become socialized to the norms of the profession they tend to explain how they entered the field in less contingent and affective ways (Rafael, 1999: 1211; Rafael, 2003). My entry into the world of area studies was heavily based on such affective factors that, following the dictates of the profession, I learned to play down (until the writing of this paper). The first society I ever studied seriously was the Soviet Union, and my first affective encounter with that world came when I met a Russian girl named Katya. I grew up on a farm in rural Vermont, far from anything foreign, but there was a small college nearby that had summer foreign language programs. When I was around 6 years old, I met Katya, a Russian girl about my age who was the daughter of a visiting professor. Somehow my parents were invited to a party at her house one evening. They brought me along and told me that it was very rare to ever meet a Russian. I remember feeling somewhat scared, but that fear quickly transformed into affection when Katya’s mother offered me cookies. They were a variety of cookie that I had never seen before and were literally my first taste of “the foreign.” I liked those cookies a lot. I also remember liking Katya, so much in fact that I later named a beautiful all-white baby goat on our farm after her. That goat tragically died young, but so special was she to me that we buried her at the edge of our yard, placing a stone with “Katya” written in white paint on the grave.

Several years later when I entered university, I declared Russian my major. Did I do so because of Katya? Not literally, but whatever I had felt when my fear of the unknown transformed into the excitement of experiencing something new and rare as I tried the cookies Katya’s mother offered me and as I played together with Katya in the backyard, is, I would argue, precisely what I felt countless times in the Soviet Union as an exchange student in the 1980s as I interacted with all kinds of people who, such as Katya and her family, were difficult for Americans to ever meet at that time. Indeed, there was something intoxicating and even addictive about gaining access to a world that few others could encounter and experience, and my first tastes of such experiences in the Soviet Union made me desire more such unique encounters. At that time, I had friends in college who studied Mandarin and were experiencing the same sense of adventure in China as I was in the Soviet Union. Upon completing the bachelor of arts course in 1989, I therefore decided to spend “1 year” in Taiwan teaching English to see what Asia was like and to experience more unique encounters.

I arrived in Taiwan in August, 2 months after the Tiananmen Square incident had taken place in China. Later that autumn as I settled into a routine of teaching English and studying Mandarin, I observed from afar as the Berlin Wall came down and then as one Eastern European country after another broke away from the Soviet Bloc. The Cold War was coming to an end, as was the world that I had spent my university years studying to understand. More specifically for me, however, is that I could see that a world that I had special access to was now opening to others. The luster of the Soviet world started to fade for me. Meanwhile, I was becoming increasingly fascinated with another world—that of Taiwan, and Asia more generally. My initial plan to teach English in Taiwan for “1 year” turned into 4, as I invested a similar amount of time and effort into learning Mandarin as I had earlier spent in studying Russian.

Although I enjoyed living in Taiwan immensely, I did not like the fact that there was limited space for career advancement as an English language teacher. However, there were few other options. There were limited opportunities in multinational companies, but to obtain such a position required that one first return to the US and be hired by the parent company, or to complete a Master of Business Administration course. Unsure if I would enjoy working in the corporate world, in the end I decided on the only career familiar to me, that of an academic. I therefore applied to and was accepted into the master of arts (MA) program in Asian Studies at the UHM, enrolling in August 1993. At the time, I was not sure what I could do with an MA in Asian Studies, but my plan was to try to find a way to transition from graduate school to a professional position somewhere in Asia, as I loved living in the region and wanted to return as soon as possible.

In Hawaii, however, I quickly came to realize my professors had a different view of the career paths available to me. This became apparent in my first semester of graduate school when I applied for a scholarship to study in Hong Kong the following summer. As part of the application, I had to write an essay in which I discussed my professional plans and goals. Although I was unsure, I wrote that I wanted to obtain a PhD then work at a university in Asia. After submitting my application, a member of the selection committee saw me on campus and informed me that the committee wanted me to rewrite and resubmit my essay as the members wanted “more concrete” information about my plans.

I remember feeling somewhat embarrassed by this request. The scholarship I was applying for was an in-house scholarship that was not difficult to obtain. The problem was that my statement about wishing to work in an Asian university was simply too naïve of a response for the faculty members on the selection committee to accept. My professors had been socialized into a profession that placed universities into a distinct hierarchy. In that hierarchy, Americans with PhDs from US universities for the most part did not work at Asian universities. Although a lack of positions in the US in a given year might lead a young scholar to accept a position in Tokyo, Singapore or Hong Kong, this was expected to be temporary until that scholar could move on to a university in Australia, the United Kingdom (UK) or the US where successful Western academics “belonged.” Indeed, this was how area studies was structured. Area studies specialists were scholars who worked in “the West” and occasionally travelled to “the Rest” of the globe to collect data for their research. In 1993 the life I desired to live did not fit that model. This was partly due to the fact that I had yet to be socialized into academia and to learn to privilege professional norms over affective attachments, but it was also, I would argue, because my affective attachments to Taiwan and Asia were of a novel nature, having been nurtured by a form of mobility that differed from the form of mobility that had led many of my professors to Asian Studies.

State-sponsored mobility, private mobility, and academic socialization

I did not realize it at the time, but in hindsight I can see that my encounter with that scholarship selection committee in 1993 was one between two different generations, each of which was shaped by a different form of mobility. The faculty members on the scholarship selection committee were all Chinese Studies experts, and although some were ethnic Chinese who had migrated to the US from China, Hong Kong or Taiwan, the others were North Americans who had initially gained direct knowledge of a Chinese society through what I call “state-sponsored mobility.” More specifically, these professors had first encountered a Chinese society through an official university exchange program or in conducting doctoral research that was financially supported by their university or the US government, or a combination of the two.

When Asian Studies area programs were first established in the US following World War II, the government and private funding agencies invested heavily in training a corps of experts (Szanton, 2002). This included providing support for a period of work, research, or study in a foreign country. In particular, the US government’s Fulbright fellowships, participation in government-sponsored programs such as the Peace Corps, and scholarships from area studies centers and organizations that worked to support the state’s interests such as the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation, were all means by which future area studies specialists gained knowledge of Asia through state-sponsored mobility in this period.

For many of these scholars, the limited time spent in a foreign country as a Peace Corps volunteer, or even as a soldier, offered an affective entry point into the profession, as those experiences sparked a fascination that led to a lifetime of study. In this way, many of my professors and I were all attracted to the area studies profession in the same way. Where, however, our experiences differed was in terms of the presence or absence of limits. In the world of state-sponsored mobility, there were limits to what the state sponsored and this limited what scholars were able to achieve, or to imagine they could achieve. With a few exceptions, most state-sponsored mobility scholars became experts on one place, gained proficiency in one language, and spent their careers researching about that single place using sources in that one language and by only occasionally making research trips to that one country.

In traveling to Taiwan on my own, finding employment and paying for language study myself, I engaged in a different form of mobility, one that I label “private mobility.” That I was able to do so was thanks to various developments that had not been in place in the 1960s and 1970s when my professors spent time on state-sponsored stints in Asia. In particular, by the 1980s economic development in places such as Japan and Taiwan had created a demand for English language proficiency as well as the financial means for people to pay for private instruction, such that a significant number of foreigners could live in these countries for an unlimited amount of time. Further, in being able to stay longer than state-sponsored mobility allowed, one could also do more. For instance, in addition to studying Mandarin in Taiwan for 4 years, I also studied Taiwanese and classical Chinese, experiences that I would not have enjoyed were my time limited to a 1-year state-sponsored stint in country.

When I arrived at UHM in 1993, I found that many of my fellow graduate students had likewise gained knowledge of a foreign society through private mobility. In fact, many had followed a similar trajectory as me to graduate school, by either having spent a few years teaching English in Taiwan, China, or Japan, or having served for 2 years in an Asian country as a Mormon missionary. Nonetheless, although we had followed different trajectories from our professors, we graduate students were still all socialized into our professors’ way of producing knowledge about foreign societies and of planning an academic career, or what we simply viewed as the norms of the area studies profession. This meant, among other things, that we were to produce scholarly knowledge in English that would be published by a reputable Western academic press, we would land a tenure-track job in Asian history in the US, we would attend conferences mostly in North America but at times in Europe or Asia, and once every few years we would travel to Asia to conduct further research. Working in Asia, meanwhile, was not seen as a viable or desirable option.

From affective fascination to professional scholarship

Although I was socialized into the academic world of my professors, one way that I differed was in examining a transnational topic in my doctoral dissertation rather than by focusing on a single society as they all had. I would argue that this decision was directly related to private mobility. During the 4 years that I lived in Taiwan, I made two or three trips to Thailand, extending one of those visits to close to a month as I traveled by bus through the northern and northeastern parts of the country. I found Thailand fascinating and would have loved to live there and learn more about it, but at the time that was very difficult as the salary for teaching English, the only job available to me, was not enough to support oneself. I met teachers from the UK and America who worked there, but to do so they would teach for a while in Taiwan or Japan to save money and then would travel to Thailand to teach until their savings ran out. Personally, I was not willing to live such a precarious existence, and so Thailand, and Southeast Asia more generally, remained an object of fascination for me, but for practical reasons I could not develop that interest.

Not, that is, until I entered the graduate program in History at the University of Hawaii. By the end of my first year in the MA program in Asian Studies I had decided that I needed to study a discipline that offered a clearer career trajectory than Asian Studies did, and I therefore applied to and was accepted into the MA program in History, thinking this would lead to a job in academia that would enable me to periodically travel to Asia, having by that point been convinced by my professors to give up on the idea of living full-time in the region. I was fortunate to receive a generous 2-year scholarship from the East-West Center, a US government educational and research institute on the UHM campus, to support my studies. I took advantage of this opportunity to engage my fascination with Southeast Asia by starting to study Vietnamese and taking courses in Southeast Asian history. Although UHM did offer Thai language courses, I felt there was more potential to integrate a study of Vietnam with my main focus on Chinese history given that prior to the 20th century classical Chinese had been the main literary language in both China and Vietnam. I therefore focused on studying classical Chinese and the modern vernaculars of Mandarin and Vietnamese to be able to conduct historical research on both China and Vietnam. Accordingly, for my MA thesis I wrote about a travelogue that a Chinese monk compiled while visiting Vietnam in the late 17th century (Kelley, 1996), and for my doctoral dissertation I examined poetry that Vietnamese envoys had composed while traveling to Beijing in the 16th to 19th centuries on missions to present tribute to the Chinese court (Kelley, 2001; 2005).

My decision to examine these transnational research topics was at one level motivated by the affective fascination I had developed for Chinese and Southeast Asian societies through the experiences that private mobility afforded me before I entered graduate school in 1993. However, as a graduate student I then discovered theoretical approaches for my research that took me far beyond the affective fascinations that had served as my entry point to area studies. I did this by taking graduate seminars on historiography, world history, ethnographic history, and nationalism, where I was exposed to all manner of theories and approaches from the analyses of discourses and power of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, to the large temporal and spatial examinations of the past of the Annales School and the World Systems Analysis approach, to the examinations of national and ethnic identity of Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith. These and numerous other theoretical approaches played a role in determining the specific research topics I chose and the ways I examined them. To give an early example, in my MA thesis on the travelogue by a 17th century Chinese monk who journeyed to Vietnam, I was inspired by Said’s Orientalism (1978) to examine the culturally distinct ways in which Chinese in the past “Orientalized” their own “Others” (Kelley, 1996: 105).

Experiencing the critique of Asian Studies

Around the time I completed this master’s thesis in 1996 I began to become aware of some issues that were being discussed in the larger world of area studies. With the end of the Cold War and the advance of globalization, some area studies funding agencies began to shift their support from research that focused on single nations to studies that examined transnational issues. Here a significant development came in 1996 when the Social Science Research Council announced it would restructure its support for doctoral research by replacing the geographically defined grant programs that had long been in place with new programs based on global thematic issues (Prewitt, 1996). A year later, in 1997, the Ford Foundation launched a multi-year initiative on “Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies,” devoting $25 million to promote scholarship that focused on transnational and multidisciplinary issues, an approach that came to be referred to as “border crossing” (Ford Foundation, 1999).

This restructuring was carried out by funding agencies and coincided with two other developments: a decline in state funding for universities and the rise of Cultural Studies. In the 1990s, I did not feel any effect from reductions in state funding at UHM; however, the US government reduced funding for the East-West Center, which limited the number of scholarships the organization could offer. Those of us who had already been granted scholarships were not affected, but it did mean I had to seek alternative funding for my PhD studies, whereas prior to that point it had been possible to obtain 3 additional years of support for doctoral studies after completing the MA. Fortunately, there were still ample sources of funding available from the US government, UHM and private organizations, and I succeeded in securing support for the 4 years that I was in the PhD program. Nonetheless, I could see these changes to the financial support system for area studies alarmed my professors.

That said, the issue that clearly rankled my professors the most were some of the critiques about the area studies profession that circulated at this time, including those that came from proponents of the new field of Cultural Studies. Area studies was labelled as a Cold War enterprise and its practitioners were charged with all manner of crimes, from being theoretically simplistic, to essentializing nations, to producing scholarship that was Orientalist and/or that served the interests of the U.S. government (Rafael, 1994; Palat, 1996). As I read these critiques, I felt ambivalent. On the one hand, these charges were made in the abstract, targeting “area studies” as a whole rather than by pointing to actual scholars and their writings. I personally struggled to find examples in the scholarship I was reading in the 1990s of works that could be interpreted as Orientalist or as following Cold War imperatives and serving the interest of the US government. As for my own work, I could not imagine how a dissertation on premodern Vietnamese envoy poetry written in classical Chinese could be of even the remotest value to US strategic interests. As a result, I was not convinced of these critiques. On the other hand, I could see that there were numerous professors who researched and taught about a single nation, and given that I had already discovered the value of comparative scholarship through my own research, I agreed with the critique that area studies scholars should be more transnational and comparative in their work.

As it turns out, some Asian Studies scholars, including some of my own professors, agreed with this point and began to talk about the need for larger, more comparative “border crossing” approaches to the study of Asia, such as those promoted by the field of world history. Although on one level I was pleased to see scholars promoting this approach, at the same time these discussions also made me feel quite awkward, as what some professors were excitedly proposing as novel was an approach that my graduate student colleagues and I in the History Department were already employing. Beyond the theory we learned in the required historiography seminar, UHM had a strong world history program and virtually every graduate student took world history as one of their required four PhD fields. This included taking a reading seminar that covered theoretical approaches and a research seminar where we researched and wrote about an historical diaspora. Through a combination of these seminars, as well as the experiences that state-sponsored and private mobility offered, the majority of my graduate student colleagues all ended up working on a multidisciplinary and comparative topic of one form or another, from deconstructing ethnicity in a Muslim rebellion on the periphery of China (Atwill, 2005) to examining the diasporic writings of Chinese intellectuals in Singapore (Kenley, 2003).

Border crossing and its limits

Although I was therefore not convinced of some of the critiques made of area studies, such as that it lacked theoretical sophistication, I found the “remedy” of world/comparative history that was proposed by some of my professors and scholars at other universities, to be a declaration of the obvious. Nonetheless, that my graduate training and dissertation research fit perfectly with the trends in area studies emerging in the late 1990s gave me a good deal of optimism when I entered the job market in 2000–2001. However, I quickly discovered that the professors in the history departments that I applied to seemed to struggle to accept a “border crosser” such as me. Given that I had training in both Chinese and Southeast Asian (as well as World) history, linguistic competence in Mandarin (and classical Chinese) and Vietnamese, and had written a dissertation about the writings of Vietnamese envoys who had literally crossed the border into China, I was in a position to apply for job openings in both Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Fortunately, in 2000 and 2001 there were numerous such positions advertised. However, I was not shortlisted for any of the initial jobs I applied for. Although I do not know why I was rejected for some positions, for others I was able to obtain some feedback, and that feedback was revealing. For Chinese history positions, I was deemed to not fit because I was “really more of an historian of Vietnam,” and for Southeast Asia positions, some of which directly sought an historian of Vietnam, I was considered “really more of an historian of China.”

At the time, this surprised me. Given there were increasing calls in Asian Studies and academia more generally, for “border crossing” scholarship, why would professors attempt to label me as an historian of either one nation or another rather than to see me as someone who could do precisely what was being called for? I was not sure, but I also felt perhaps the real issue was simply I was more junior than the other applicants. In the end, however, I did succeed in getting a job that year, and in that position I later saw from the other side of the job-search process how some other “border crossers” encountered the issue of being categorized as an historian of a single nation, as I was informed that I had.

To cut a long story short, my own department, the History Department at UHM, advertised a position for Vietnamese history late in the 2000–2001 hiring season, and by a stroke of good luck I was hired for that position. As I participated in the work of job search committees in the years that followed, I observed on more than one occasion how certain job applicants who engaged in transnational research and had competence in multiple languages would get pigeonholed into national categories by my colleagues, and that this never worked in favor of the applicant. So, for instance, if there was a position for Japanese history and the applicant examined some transnational topics between Japan and Korea and had linguistic competence in both Japanese and Korean, there would be colleagues who would argue that the applicant was “really more of an historian of Korea.” Ironically, outside of the context of a job search, some of these same colleagues would promote the importance for the future of Asian Studies of “border crossing” scholarship.

These experiences started to provide me with a sense that the world was changing faster than many academics were able to keep up with. Further, I could see connections between the degree to which scholars were, or were not, able to adapt to the changing world and the form of mobility that served as a foundation for their careers and their knowledge production. More specifically, I came to see that the ways of knowing that state-sponsored mobility had enabled were by the 1990s far too deeply rooted for many scholars to be able to fully comprehend and accept the forms of transnational or multi-national knowledge that private mobility made possible, even though at a theoretical level they could accept that engaging in “border crossing” scholarship was a good idea. From what I observed in the late 1990s and early 2000s when “border crossing” was becoming a mantra, it was difficult for those who had never become proficient in more than one language or knowledgeable about the history of more than one nation to understand that it was possible to know and do more than they had. Finally, in the hierarchical world of academia, it was likely also difficult for senior scholars to acknowledge the advances that junior scholars were making. As such, it is significant to note here that this tension between senior academics and the knowledge that their junior counterparts had gained (in part) through a new form of mobility is mirrored in the experiences of some of the other authors in this special issue who likewise found their knowledge challenged or questioned by their seniors upon returning to their home country after studying in “the West” (Karakas, 2020; Nonaka, 2020; Phan and Mohammad, 2020; Phung, 2020).

The “Asian century”

When I began teaching in 2001, I saw myself precisely in multi-national “border-crossing” terms, as an historian of both China and Vietnam. Further, in the years that followed I worked to expand my expertise to become an historian of Southeast Asia as well. The position in Vietnamese history that I obtained was categorized as a “Southeast Asian” history position and I was required to teach a survey on the modern history of the entire Southeast Asian region. At a general level, my training prepared me for this, but in my first years of teaching I sought to deepen my knowledge of Southeast Asia by studying a new language. The insight that linguistic competence provides is key to the area studies enterprise, however, in the field of Southeast Asian Studies there have been very few scholars who had ever studied more than one Southeast Asian language. Further, by the 1990s a good proportion of the scholars who were trained in the 1960s and 1970s were publishing works on Southeast Asian history that relied increasingly, if not entirely, on Western-language sources. This can at least partly be explained in terms of mobility. After relying on state mobility to study and conduct doctoral research in a Southeast Asian country in the 1960s to early 1970s, many scholars did not have state-sponsored mobility opportunities to support the study of a second language.

By the second half of the 1990s, however, one really did not need state support to study a second language. Instead, as globalization made travel ever easier and more affordable, it became increasingly possible to simply travel to and study in a Southeast Asian country on one’s own. As I began teaching in the early 2000s, that is precisely what I did. I took language classes at UHM and then traveled to Southeast Asia during the winter and summer breaks to study more. Here I was finally able to engage my fascination with Thailand by studying Thai for 5 years. I then studied Khmer for 3 years and Sanskrit for 3. In the process I spent one summer studying in Thailand under a government-sponsored program and made multiple trips to Cambodia at my own expense to study in a language center. All of this language study enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of Thailand and Cambodia, and as I did so, I developed upper-division courses that focused on the transnational historical connections between what is now Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

For me this period from 1989, when I first went to Taiwan, to the early 2000s, when I became conversant in Thai and Khmer and developed a wide range of courses on Southeast Asian history (as well as courses on Asian and world history), was a golden age of Asian Studies for me and it was golden in no small part because of private mobility. My own experiences of mobility had led me to pursue a path of transnational inquiry that fit perfectly with the trends in my field, and private mobility enabled me to expand my area studies expertise in ways that most of my predecessors never had. I thus felt extremely pleased with my professional growth, and I looked to the future with optimism, as in the “Asian century” that the media claimed was dawning, I was equipped with knowledge about East and Southeast Asia and was thus well positioned to prosper in such an age. This, however, is not what ultimately transpired. Instead, the world that had changed too fast in the 1990s for some scholars to keep up with continued to transform and has ultimately left the entire enterprise of Asian Studies behind.

Global digital mobility and the decline of Asian Studies

In the first decade of the 21st century I witnessed a clear decline in interest in Asian Studies start to take hold at my university. I noticed this first at the graduate level. In the 1990s, many of the graduate students studying Asian history at UHM were Americans, most of whom were White and male. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century I detected far fewer members of that demographic. Further, I also noticed a decline in the level of preparedness of all the Americans who applied to graduate school. Whereas many of my colleagues in the 1990s had all spent stints overseas of at least a couple of years, by the late 2000s I started to see more and more graduate applicants who had only taken a 2-week trip to China or had become interested in Asian history after taking a single course in university.

This perplexed me, for as my trips to places such as Thailand and Cambodia demonstrated to me, by the early 2000s it had become much easier to find ways to work and live in Southeast Asia and gain a linguistic foundation in a local language than had been the case a mere decade earlier when I had wanted to do so. So why were we not seeing Americans who had spent a few years living, working, and studying in Southeast Asia applying to study History? In addition, I also wondered about the affective entry point through which people become attracted to area studies. The ways in which the decreasing number of American graduate applicants were coming to the study of Asian history struck me as being of a different nature than in the past. How, I wondered, could one decide to apply to graduate school in say Chinese history after having taken a single course in university? Such a person could not possibly have experienced that intoxicating sense of discovery upon entering a world that few others are able to access that led me, and many others, to become addicted to studying a foreign society.

This retreat of Americans, particularly White Americans, from the study of Asian history perplexed me, but I did not see others express concern about this issue. Given I am a White male and there is a strong emphasis in American higher education on promoting diversity, I was reluctant to raise this issue. Indeed, it was politically wiser at the time for a White male to predict his gradual extinction from the field and to declare that Asian Studies would soon be the domain of “heritage students,” the children of immigrants (Reid, 2003a; 2003b). Although some heritage students did apply to our program, as well as some students from Asia, in the 2010s the numbers of applicants from those demographic categories also declined.

Some of my senior colleagues, reflecting the logic of their state-sponsored mobility training, attributed the decline in applications that became particularly evident by the 2010s to a lack of funding. In fact, however, we increasingly struggled to find good applicants to offer our state funding to. Meanwhile, as I observed the decline in numbers of first White American and then heritage and foreign graduate students and witnessed the rapid economic and societal changes that were taking place in Southeast Asian through my frequent trips to the region, I became convinced that a better explanation for the declining interest in studying about Asia in the US is the emergence of new forms of mobility that I collectively refer to as “global digital mobility.”

I use the term “global digital mobility” to refer to the ways in which the twin processes of globalization and the Digital Revolution enable people to traverse the globe with increasing ease, both physically and virtually. Global digital mobility has greatly reduced the distance of foreign societies from our own. This has led foreign societies to become less “foreign” and much easier to access, both of which, I argue, contribute to the decline of interest in the academic field of Asian Studies, as it has transformed the affective entry point to the discipline. Whereas it was the “foreignness” and various degrees of inaccessibility that initially attracted me to the Soviet Union, to Taiwan, to Vietnam, and even to Thailand and Cambodia, in the age of global digital mobility that affective entry point has largely been replaced by either the banal omnipresence of the entire globe on our cellphones or the ease with which people can travel to and work in foreign lands. These two phenomena lead to different outcomes, but both contribute to the decline of the academic study of foreign societies.

In the 1990s, as China went through a period of astounding economic growth, I had expected this would lead to a surge of interest in learning about China, as had happened with Japan during its economic boom years of the 1980s. That, however, did not happen. Instead, I witnessed the Internet fill with accounts of pollution and environmental degradation in China, whereas in the 1980s there had been much less information about Japan in the pre-Internet media, and the reports that did appear tended to be about sensational topics, such as reporting that a single apple or a cup of coffee in Tokyo can cost $8 dollars. Such limited reports about Japan made people intrigued about the country, whereas I would argue the extensive information about the downside of China’s economic transformation that we find on the Internet has served to make people disinterested in that country. In this way, the omnipresence of digital information can eliminate an affective entry point to the study of a foreign society.

At the same time, globalization has made it physically easier for people to travel to, and work in, foreign societies. This has been a boon for people who, through one way or another, still develop an affective attraction to a foreign society, as it enables them to pursue their passion in the very society that they are attracted to, something that I was unable to do in the early 1990s. Indeed, at the same time that I noticed White Americans disappearing from our graduate program, I came across more and more young Americans of all stripes as well as people from countries all across the globe, working in places such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia in occupations that were unavailable to me in the early 1990s when I wished I could live in Taiwan by engaging in a profession other than teaching English.

As such, just as my experience of private mobility led me to encounter a foreign society in ways that differed from an earlier generations’ experiences of state-sponsored mobility, so is it today that global digital mobility is transforming the way that people encounter and experience foreign societies. A major difference, however, is that although those of us who became interested in a foreign society through private mobility socialized ourselves into established area studies modes of academic knowledge production and thereby perpetuated an academic enterprise (albeit with some degree of tension with our seniors), global digital mobility is leading young people away from the world of academic area studies entirely. Given that an academic career was in many ways a last option for me, I am not surprised that young people today are choosing different paths. Indeed, if I had visited Asia for the first time in 2009 rather than 1989, I cannot imagine that I would have chosen to pursue a PhD in Asian history when there are so many other options for working in Asia. Instead, I would like to think I would have followed in the footsteps of some of the young foreigners that I have come across in Vietnam today who have established media companies, tech startups, and hip restaurants.

The unfulfilled age of area studies in Asia

As I began to notice signs of declining interest in Asian Studies in Hawaii, but before I realized more and more young people from around the world were starting to live and work in Asia, I looked with envy at developments in higher education in Southeast Asia. Although there were already some Asian Studies programs in the region, such as at the University of Malaya, the early 2000s witnessed the development of numerous new programs. In Thailand, for instance, Thammasat University established an undergraduate program in Southeast Asian Studies in 2000, Chulalongkorn University began to offer an MA in Southeast Asian Studies in 2002 (Ooi, 2009: 432–433), and Wailailak University set up an MA in Regional Studies around this time as well. Similarly, in Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia instituted a Southeast Asian Studies minor in 2000 (Ooi, 2009: 430). Finally, in Singapore in 2001 a major new government-sponsored research institute, the Asia Research Institute, was established under the directorship of Anthony Reid, a specialist on Southeast Asian history.

Developments such as these all seemed to indicate that a new era was dawning in Southeast Asia (and one can point to similar developments in East Asia at this time as well), one in which knowledge production about the region would increasingly be produced in the region and by scholars from the region. Unsurprisingly, it was not long before this idea began to be expressed in academic writings. One work that made this point powerfully was Taiwanese Cultural Studies scholar Kuan-hsing Chen’s Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Chen, 2010). In this work, Chen called on scholars in Asia to create a new form of scholarship about the region that could liberate knowledge production from its ties to the West, the Cold War, and colonial and imperial projects. The way to do this, Chen argued, was through a process of “inter-referencing,” where scholars would produce knowledge by comparing societies in Asia that share comparable characteristics, rather than by employing theories developed in the West. This method is often referred to now as “Inter-Asian referencing” (Chua, 2014) and it is promoted not only by Chen but by a network that he helped found, the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium, and a journal that he helps edit, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

Meanwhile, around the time that Chen’s book was published, Malaysian anthropologist Goh Beng Lan edited a collection of biographical reflections from scholars in Southeast Asia that likewise encouraged scholars in the region to develop theoretical approaches that would chart a new path. Entitled Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region (Goh, 2011), this work begins with a lengthy and thoughtful introduction by Goh in which she ponders what kind of scholarship scholars in Southeast Asia can and should produce at a time when area studies is facing challenges in the West and when there is perhaps the possibility of re-centering knowledge production about Southeast Asia in the region itself. Unlike Chen, Goh does not offer a clear roadmap forward, although it is evident that she hopes scholars in Southeast Asia will discover the means to produce a new form of scholarship that will both address local concerns and contribute to the global world of scholarship.

I can recall that when I read these works shortly after they were published, I likewise shared some of Goh’s excitement, as the above-mentioned institutional developments in the region seemed to point to the dawn of a new age for Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia; however, I was skeptical that the institutional developments in the region would lead to new forms of knowledge. The problem is that although it is fashionable to critique Western forms of knowledge and seek to champion alternative and locally grounded ways of knowing, the body of knowledge that has been developed in “the West” can easily deconstruct much of the locally produced scholarship in the region. Once, for instance, one has learned from “Western” theorists the ways in which nations have been constructed and imagined, it becomes impossible to accept the degree to which the nation is essentialized and taken for granted in, for instance, the many articles on Vietnamese history that get published each year in Vietnam. Indeed, programs in Southeast Asian Studies at Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand deliberately introduce ideas from “Western” area studies to critique such locally produced essentialized forms of knowledge (Thongchai, 2005).

For those who do not, or cannot, read such scholarship, the idea that it is possible to create new forms of knowledge is appealing. Hence, Asia as Method and the concept of inter-Asian referencing has generated some excitement in the fields of education and the sociology of education (Park, 2016; Zhang, Chan and Kenway, 2015; Takayama, 2016; Takayama, Sriprakash and Connell, 2017). However, I have not seen it gain much traction in the world of Asian Studies, nor have I detected signs that it has enabled the “re-centering” of knowledge production about Asia. First, Chen’s technique of inter-Asian referencing is precisely the type of comparative approach that scholars of world history have been employing for decades, which some Asian Studies scholars belatedly began to promote in the mid-1990s. Yet unlike Chen and the proponents of inter-Asian referencing, world historians do not limit themselves to comparing societies within a region, as they view the very concept of regions as problematic (Lewis and Wigen, 1997). Second, in seeking to provide an alternative to “Western” scholarship on Asia, Chen’s inter-Asia referencing relies on the existence of a reified and incommensurable “Asia” that “Western” scholarship has long deconstructed (Goh, 2019: 500).

In the end, it is probably not surprising that new ideas and approaches have not emerged. What is perhaps more important to focus on is the fact that student interest in Southeast Asia in studying about the region is, as in the rest of the world, extremely limited. To some extent there are signs that the study of Southeast Asia is expanding at certain Chinese universities and there is a growing number of students from Southeast Asia who study at Chinese universities; however, at this point it is still unclear how far that trend will develop. Instead, globally the discipline of Asian Studies has faced declining interest such that in 2019, a group of scholars from the Asia Research Institute in Singapore acknowledged that there is a global “crisis” in Asian Studies and the core cause of the crisis is a decrease in funding and institutional support due to a lack of students (Chua et al., 2019: 32). As for why students are not interested in studying about Asia, these scholars offered several reasons, all of which had been made about area studies and Asian Studies for decades: area studies is implicit in imperial ways of knowing, it lacks theoretical rigor and it does not focus on transnational phenomena (p. 35). As for the way forward, these scholars again repeated the same arguments that have been made since the 1990s, namely, that Asian Studies needs “to be open and responsive to trans-regional comparative engagements” and “to be equally open to the deep inter-disciplinarity” (Chua et al., 2019: 45).

In 1993, when I left Taiwan to enroll in the MA program in Asian Studies at UHM, I knew absolutely nothing about the discipline of Asian Studies other than that it focused on the study of Asian societies. If someone had told me at that time that Asian Studies produces forms of knowledge that are Orientalist and complicit in imperialism or that the discipline focuses too narrowly on nations rather than examining transnational processes, I would have had no idea what any of that meant, and I would not have cared. All I knew was that I was fascinated with places such as Taiwan and Thailand I wanted to learn more about them, and ideally I wanted to live in those societies. In other words, these arguments about what needs to change for students to be attracted to Asian Studies miss the point on multiple levels. Besides the fact that they are calling for changes that have long been made by many of us in the discipline, they constitute a professional, academic solution to what is a non-academic, non-professional affective motive.

Additionally, and not without irony, the generation of scholars who have made such calls for change have also led an effort to maintain the institutional status quo of area studies. As the major funding agencies changed their priorities and restructured their programs in the 1990s, universities sought to maintain the same structures that had existed for decades. For instance, in the 1990s various universities in the US sought financial support from Asian countries to maintain their Asian Studies programs. In so doing, as Harootunian and Miyoshi have pointed out, they sought “new infusions of cash in a world more global and culturally borderless than the one that existed at the inception of the Cold War,” but they used that funding “to maintain the received structure of operations” that had been in place since the beginning of the Cold War (2002: 6). Hence, money was solicited from the Korea Foundation to support Korean Studies, and the Japan Foundation for Japanese Studies, etc., without questioning how and where such programs fit in an increasingly global world.

At the University of Hawaii, I repeatedly saw evidence of this phenomenon. A perennial concern expressed by Asian Studies administrators at UHM was the need to secure funding to support language programs. Enrollment in “less commonly taught” languages such as Thai, Khmer, and Indonesian was often low and the administration found it difficult to justify supporting the teaching of these languages, although continued to do so. The response of the Asian Studies administrators was invariably to try to find financial support for the teaching of these languages “to maintain the received structure of operations.” Meanwhile, I do not recall anyone ever discussing issues such as why so few people decide to study these languages, what effect the rise of English to global dominance (Pennycook, 1994; Phillipson, 1992; Phan, 2017) is exerting on area studies, and what (if anything) could be done to create a recognizable need for “less commonly taught languages” or to move beyond “the received structure of operations” so as to better address the needs of our contemporary world.

The issue here is thus twofold. The critiques of area studies, from the 1990s to the present, have made abstract charges about knowledge production against unnamed individuals, when the work of many scholars who write about Asia do not show evidence of the problems these critiques claim to identify. Meanwhile, those responsible for the institution of Asian Studies have tried to maintain the same structures that have been in place since the advent of the Cold War well over a half century ago. In other words, although scholarship has changed, institutions and critiques have not. Meanwhile, the world outside of academia has transformed dramatically and academic interest in Asian Studies has declined in tandem with those changes. When scholars then try to address this “crisis,” they do so by employing the extant critiques, and by defending extant institutional structures, the two features of Asian Studies that are the most out of touch with our transformed world.

Conclusion: Autoethnographic narratives and scholarly discourses

I often think back to the 1990s when I listened to some of my professors talk about the need to engage in transnational research. I remember feeling uncomfortable that these scholars were seemingly unaware of the fact that a younger generation in their very midst was already doing what these scholars had only recently “discovered.” However, as a junior member in a hierarchical academic world, I did not point this out. I also think back to the early 2000s when I was surprised to see that White American men were disappearing from my graduate seminars. However, as a White male in a politically charged academic environment, I did not point this out. Finally, I also remember back to sometime around 2010 when I noticed that there were not only White American men, but people from every imaginable background starting to live and work in places such as Vietnam and Thailand. I suddenly realized that I had discovered the cause of the “crisis” in Asian Studies. The affective entry point that leads people to become fascinated with a foreign society was now enabling those people to live and work in that society.

I point these moments out because they were key times when my personal experiences did not fit with what was happening at an “official” level in academia around me. What is more, moments such as these were connected to the changing forms of mobility that I argue in this paper have had an impact not only on my own life but on the entire discipline of Asian Studies as well. Although I have delineated the ways in which my experiences did not match the discourse that developed concerning the decline of Asian Studies in “the West” and the rise of knowledge production in Asia, some of these experiences, as I indicate above, took place in contexts of human interactions with fellow academics, including some of those who contributed to developing the discourse. Further, the dynamics and politics of those interactions played a role in maintaining the disconnect between what I experienced and what was expressed in academic discourses. This is a phenomenon that we can see in all the papers in this special issue and is a topic that autoethnography is particularly well suited to bring to the fore.