The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States

Vicente L. Rafael

Social Text, No. 41. (Winter, 1994), pp. 91-111.

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 The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States

- Vicente L. Rafael
I
In a recent essay on the teaching of Asian literatures in United States uni-
versities, Rey Chow writes about the role of area studies in segregating the
study of non-European cultures into administratively expedient programs.
She goes on to make the increasingly commonplace observation that area
studies programs are more often than not sites for the production of con-
temporary versions of Orientalism. By privileging the nation-state as the
elementary unit of analysis, area studies conceive "areas" as if they were
the natural-or at least, historically necessary-formations for the con-
tainment of differences within and between cultures. Equally significant is
the tendency among many area specialists themselves to divide the area's
history into a "classical" period wholly distinct from the "modern" era.
Such historical divisions have the effect of organizing academic labor by
assigning the "classical" period to the humanities and the "modern" era to
the social sciences.'
If it is possible, then, to speak of the cultures of area studies in the
United States, one might think of them as ensembles of knowledges and
practices grounded on specific linguistic competencies and formulated
within, as well as across, disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, such
grounding and the disciplinary demarcations it presumes are underwrit-
ten by a discourse of liberal pluralism. For this reason, area studies not
only reiterate different versions of Orientalism; they also produce by
necessity multiple repudiations of these versions. What is significant
about area studies, then, is not so much the unsurprising point that they
are tied to Orientalist legacies; rather, it is that since the end of World War
11, area studies have been integrated into larger institutional networks,
ranging from universities to foundations, that have made possible the
reproduction of a North American style of knowing, one that is ordered
toward the proliferation and containment of Orientalisms and their cri-
tiques. Furthermore, it is a style of knowing that is fundamentally depen-
dent on, precisely to the extent that it is critical of, the conjunction of cor-
porate funding, state support, and the flexible managerial systems of
university governance characteristic of liberal pluralism.
In this essay, I want to look into some of the rhetoric around the
development of area studies in the late 1940s and point out the ways by
which it was linked to a larger Cold War liberal project for the conceptu-
alization of global as well as local differences. I then want to show how
some of the assumptions of liberal area studies regarding the production
of knowledge, the place of theory, and the national locations of their cir-
culation have been reworked and problematized within the context of
Southeast Asian studies-the "area" in which most of my own work is
set-with reference to recent assessments of such regional programs in the
United States. In particular, I will be raising a series of questions around
the relationship between the agencies and locations of Southeast Asian
studies which might suggest ways of resituating the study of areas within
the broader concerns of cultural studies today.
I should note at the outset that this essay neither attempts to recon-
struct a comprehensive history of area studies programs in the United
States (such an attempt would, I think, be impossible, given the radically
uneven developments among the different programs and the complex and
often vexed relationship between such programs and the areas themselves)
nor at any point suggests programmatic changes within existing institu-
tional resources (libraries, language instruction, translation projects, etc.,
all of which merit important but separate consideration). Instead, my
focus on a rhetorical account of area studies arises from my interest in the
changing stakes in regional specializations in a post-Cold War and
post-civil rights era when the very categories of local and global are con-
stantly renegotiated and reinvented and when assuming a singular, unified
position from which to ask about such developments has become politi-
cally unfeasible and structurally impossible. Hence, the necessarily frag-
mentary and provisional nature of this essay and its more circumscribed
project of suggesting how the emergence of modern area studies might tell
us how differences have been accounted for-domesticated, if you will-
within the liberal culture of the U.S. academy in the latter half of the
twentieth century, and how that culture continues to shape critical predica-
ments which many of us (and it is precisely the question of this "we" that
is unceasingly problematic in liberal society) inhabit today.

One of the most instructive and prototypical pronouncements on the

urgent need for regional specializations in the immediate post-World War
I1 era is Robert Hall's Area Studies: W i t h Special Reference to Their Impli-
cations for Research i n the Social science^.^ Hall, a political scientist at the
University of Michigan who specialized in modern Japan, was part of a
research team that conducted a survey of area studies programs in the
United States with the support of the Social Science Research Council in
1947. His plea for the institutionalization of area studies rests on three
reasons: their continuity with the traditional humanities fields, their

Vicente L. Rafael
promise for promoting sites of interdisciplinary consensus between the Just as the
humanities and the social sciences, and their usefulness for training good
citizens to safeguard American national interests in the aftermath of a humanities
global war and in anticipation of future ones.
Contrary to received ideas, Hall argues that "World War I1 was not were meant to
the mother of area studies." Their real forerunner was classical studies,
cultivate a
with its focus on ancient Greece and Rome. What links the two is their
stress on linguistic competence as the key to scholarly research. But while
self that was
classical studies trafficked in the civilization of the dead, modern area
studies would deal with the societies of the living. Through their associa- authorized to
tion with social science disciplines, they would come to function as the
contemporary equivalent of classical studies. Indeed, Hall quotes John transmit the
Stuart Mill's defense of the study of Greek and Latin to establish a rela-
tion of succession between ancient and modern area studies: legacy of the

Without knowing the language of a people, we never really know their past, area
thoughts, their feelings, their type of character; and unless we do possess this
knowledge of some other people than ourselves, we remain, to the hour of studies would
our death, with our intellects only half expanded. . . . Since we cannot divest
ourselves of preconceived notions, there is no means of eliminating their develop a body
influence but by frequently using the differently colored glasses of other peo-
ple; and those of other nations, as the most different, are the best.3 of elite scholars

Here, the humanist rhetoric about the expansion of self-understanding in capable of

and through the learning of languages, allegorized as the means with
which to alter one's visual fields, becomes a basis for arguing the legiti- producing
macy of area studies.4 Just as the humanities were meant to cultivate a self
that was authorized to transmit the legacy of the past, area studies would knowledge
develop a body of elite scholars capable of producing knowledge about
other nations to the benefit of "our" nation. The pedagogical value of about other
-

area studies lay precisely in shattering the intellectual isolationism of

nations to the
Americans in the same way that classical studies in Mill's era resulted in a
break with "British provincialism," leading to the acquisition of a far- benefit of
flung empire. "Is there not a similarity in our own position today?" Hall
asks. "Do we need those 'differently colored glasses' to live wisely in our "our" nation.
new 'one world'?"5
Living in this new world order, however, demanded what Hall calls
the "total knowledge of areas." Fixated on philology, the traditional
humanities had failed to synthesize their "vast accumulation of knowl-
edge." Modern area studies, by contrast, had the benefit of the social sci-
ence disciplines, which "offered lines of approach never before available"
for the task of obtaining "precise knowledge of all other lands and all
other people^."^ T h e modernization of area studies thus lay in the inter-

Area Studies in the U.S.

vention of the social sciences and their capacity to organize disparate data,
generalize about their significance, and map their regularities, differences,
and transformations.
In completing the task of the humanities, modern area studies would
have to depend on social science disciplines for methodological and theo-
retical vectors. This was because area studies were seen as "new arrivals,"
as yet lacking "solidity" and a "scholastic core." Like new immigrants,
they required vigilant supervision and guidance until they could be assim-
ilated into the epistemological field of the disciplines and the governing
structures of higher education. Positioned in a belated and secondary rela-
tion to the disciplines, on the one hand, and to the exigencies of university
policies, on the other, area studies would eventually come to realize their
full potential: that of "bringing about the cross-fertilization within [sic] the
social sciences and of bridging the gap between the social sciences and the
humanistic disciplines" in the interest of "working toward the fundamental
totality of all knowledge."7
Hall thus posits a reciprocal but asymmetrical relationship between
area studies and the disciplines. Surveying the various programs existing
in 1947, he attributes the emergent interest in area studies to a "deep
and fundamental dissatisfaction" with conventional research approaches
and the "sterility" of current methods. Developing in increasing isolation
from one another and prey to overspecialization marked by extreme
abstraction, the disciplines-those "vertical pillars of knowledge"-were
in danger of cutting themselves off from one another and from the real
world. As a result, "twilight zones and vales of ignorance" had fallen
among the disciplines and between the university and society. Caught
within the iron cages of their disciplines, men came to resemble "nuns
[who] fret not in their narrow cells." Threatened with intellectual and
social emasculation, scholarly men were turning in increasing numbers to
area studies to rescue them and their disciplines.8
Envisioned in part as a gendered response to a perceived crisis in
American higher education, area studies were ways of managing the drift
and discontent among disciplinary practitioners:

The hope is that the total approach to an area will not only help fill the now
unknown interstices, but also bring about an exchange of the particular
knowledge and particular insights of the different disciplines, to the general
enrichment of r e ~ e a r c h . ~

Interdisciplinary by vocation, area studies would provide the ready vessel

for manly interdisciplinary camaraderie. As such, they would provide the
sites for testing disciplinary hypotheses and the raw materials with which
to fuel the production of theory. The "homogeneity" and boundedness of

Vicente L. Rafael
an area would provide common ground for "cooperative attack" and thus
for the intellectual incitement to energize the disciplines. Area studies
were thus charged with a mediating function, "nourishing" the disciplines
so as to bring them in better touch with the "real world."
The engendering of knowledge via the union of masculine social sci-
ence and feminine area studies is imaged by Hall as the coming together
of scholars breaking out of their individual pursuits to work as a "team":
a veritable army of experts, each with his own specialized tools, prepared
to do their share in the total mastery of an area. Such teamwork would
forge consensus amid disciplinary differences, as a "common body of
knowledge upon which all could agree" would serve as the basis of future
research.10 Area studies conceived shortly after one world war and in the
midst of the Cold War thus furnished a screen for re-creating the sense
and sensation of a regimented yet egalitarian union of men. In doing so,
the discourse on area studies reproduced the liberal ideal of managed plu-
ralism that would bind the diversity of the world within the flexible
authority of experts and practitioners.ll As Hall writes: "The greater man-
ageability of data on limited areas should be an advantage to quicker
research. . . . As these horizontal studies come to cover all areas they will
supply a truly solid base upon which universal social science laws and
probabilities may be built."12 Which is to say that area studies hold the
potential for reorganizing the division of labor among disciplines, thereby
rejuvenating their production on a global scale. From being new immi-
grants or emergent minorities, the "soft," "uncertain," and "experimen-
tal" set of practices known as area studies would become, under the
patronage of the social sciences, a junior partner in laying out the spaces
for the disciplinary mapping of the world.13
In proposing the institutionalization of area studies, Hall is insistent
on one thing: that area studies be subordinate to the epistemological
authority of the disciplines and that they defer to the managerial proce-
dures of departments. Because they are "almost the sole guardians of
scholarly standards," the departments and disciplines are needed to con-
tain the "horizontal" and potentially open-ended spread of area studies.
Hall envisions the training of specialists with "dual competenciesm-or
"dual citizenship," as he sometimes calls it-in an area studies field and in
a recognized discipline. Particularly in graduate programs, area studies
should be regarded as an "additional competency, not an alternative one"
to disciplinary training. While establishing consensus among disciplines,
area studies were also meant to redraw again and again the boundaries
between them. In maintaining disciplinary distinctions, area studies thus
also retained for themselves a relation of dependency to such disciplines.14
Through area studies, then, the "integration" of differences-between
disciplines, global regions, and nation-states-could be accomplished

Area Studies in the U.S.

Most area studies without altering their distinctiveness or disrupting their sovereignty. Sim-
ilarly, collaborative work can be carried out and consensus reached with-
programs in the out abandoning the privileges of individual scholarship or the sanctity of
professional careers. Hall's integrationist logic and liberal philosophy thus
United States work toward the reproduction of a set of hierarchies and a field of unequal
relations.
were conceived We can see this tendency in his emphasis on fieldwork as a crucial
component of area studies training. The graduate education envisioned by
at a moment in
Hall begins with language training and elementary familiarity with an
American history area, followed by the study of social science theories to gain disciplinary
competency over a period of about three years. This trajectory carries
when liberal over into a year-long residency in the field, during which the student is
able to test theories against realities. As such, he converts the field into a
ambitions for laboratory as well as into a stage in the passage toward credentialization.
Just as the areas are regarded as fully formed units with fixed borders-
enforcing a stable pluralities available for standardized management-so is the field
seen as a distinct node in a network of knowledges and rituals of profes-
global peace sionalization among scholars. The field is thus integrated into the univer-
sity through area studies, but only as a token in a general economy of
necessary for
motives. The "conservative" function of area studies, that of segregating
capitalist differences, is made to coincide with their "progressive" function, that of
systematizing the relationship among differences within a flexible set of
expansion disciplinary practices under the supervision of experts bound by the com-
mon pursuit of "total knowledge."
coincided It is useful to stress here that most area studies programs in the
United States were conceived at a moment in American history when lib-
with liberal eral ambitions for enforcing a global peace necessary for capitalist expan-
sion coincided with liberal anxieties over desegregation, spurred by the
anxieties over successes of the civil rights movement. Indeed, the passage of the single
most important piece of federal legislation for the funding of area studies
desegregation, programs, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, was
held up by a number of southern congressmen who feared that it would
spurred by the
intensify federal intervention on all levels of schooling and thus further
successes of hasten desegregation. Only because of the generalized hysteria over the
putative technological advances of the Soviets, as represented by the
the civil rights launching of the Sputnik satellites, did liberal Cold War ideology manage
to contain southern racialist fears and allow for the enactment and subse-
movement. quent extensions of the NDEA. l 5
The advocacy of area studies in the late 1940s and the 1950s was thus
implicated in the contradictory social conditions of the nation. Liberal
discourse regarded African Americans and other minoritized populations
as "problems" to which a "science of society" might provide solution^.'^
To an influential sector of social scientists working with various founda-

Vicente L. Rafael
tions, such populations were objects of analysis and targets of examination
and testing insofar as they were also subjects of a universal juridical order
as citizens who may be equal to, yet were culturally distinct from the
white majority. Analogously, the discourse on area studies positioned areas
as integral to, yet ultimately separate from, the precincts of the discipli-
nary professions and segregated from scholars and their institutional affil-
iations. Hence, the incorporation of area studies as managed sites of
higher education also had the effect of producing a field of exclusions. For
within the interdisciplinary optic of the liberal notion of area studies, the
area and presumably its populations remained at a safe remove, managed
by the operations of the social sciences into stages of comparable devel-
opment, cultural groupings, or discrete ethnolinguistic realms. In this way,
the area under study became an understudy for those in the United States
who remained within sight of but on the periphery of the academy, figures
who served to incite disciplinary interests while calling for the supervision
of trained experts."
It is within the context of this liberal response to the new nations in
the world and the new subjects within the nation that we can understand
Hall's third claim for the importance of area studies: that they would serve
the national interest. By producing a body of area specialists who could
serve as teachers, area studies would expose undergraduates and other
nonspecialists to other peoples. By teaching survey courses such as
"world" or "Asian" civilizations, such scholars would contribute to the
mission of general education: to form an "informed citizenry" capable of
keeping the peace:

Could we arrive more quickly at a durable peace and maintain it more

securely if we knew better the nations and people with which we must deal?
. . . Can we no longer doubt that total peace is the direct counterpart to total
war? A vast understanding and continued interest in all other lands and in all
other peoples is mandatory if we are to gain that peace.'=

By creating a "vast body of knowledge" about other peoples, area studies

are invested with a nationalist wishfulness. T h e disciplined study of oth-
ers ultimately works to maintain a national order thought to be cotermi-
nous with a global one. Area studies thus have a civic vocation: to make
Americans slulled managers of foreign and domestic affairs. Compre-
hending the world within a nationalist framework that is also underwritten
by a liberal consensus, area studies would help produce a "better citi-
zenry" able to coordinate differences "out there" as well as "in here."lg In
this liberal account, then, area studies are pressed to perform a chain of
mediations, integrating while discriminating among the disciplines and
between the disciplines and the field, the university and the nation, and

Area Studies in the U.S.

the local and the global. As such, rationales for the institutionalization of
area studies tended to be complicitous with postwar nationalist appeals.
Such appeals hinged not only on the disciplinary containment of a "red
menace" abroad and at home but also on the neutralization and assimila-
tion of an emergent "rainbow menace" within the nation it~elf.~O The lib-
eral project of harnessing area studies for the sake of "waging peace" as
the equivalent to waging war entailed the cultivation of interdisciplinary
flexibility: techniques for managing the politics of difference transferable
to any part of the world, including, not coincidentally, "our" own.

Some forty-five years after Robert Hall's brave new predictions about
area studies, a series of essays addressing the fate of one such area, South-
east Asian studies, was published by the Association for Asian Studies.
Entitled Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America,
this volume brings together some of the papers given at an SSRC-spon-
sored conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1990 that was attended by
some of the most prominent scholars in the field.21 In what follows, I
want to pursue some of the recurring themes in these papers which sug-
gest some of the ways that the practice of area studies has become more
problematic in recent years. Along the way, I want to tease out what I take
to be an implicit though repressed term in the discussion of the current
and future formations of area studies: the presence of what I will call an
immigrant imaginary, which calls into question the integrationist logic
inherent in liberal conceptions of area studies.
It is important to point out the particular political context of the con-
ference at which these papers were delivered. These assessments of the
state of Southeast Asian studies were in part constrained by the need to
justify continued funding of research and university programs by the Ford
Foundation and the SSRC. It was perhaps this requirement of ensuring
the institutional viability of Southeast Asian studies in the light of chang-
ing budget priorities among foundations that in part shaped the tone and
substance of the conference papers. Thus the attempts to balance, as it
were, the present fate of Southeast Asian studies between a sense of crisis,
on the one hand, and a set of possible resolutions, on the other, tend to be
situated with the limits (both fiscal and epistemological) set by existing
foundations.
Two themes run through the papers in Southeast Asian Studies in the
Balance. The first is profound pessimism regarding the immediate future
of Southeast Asian studies in the United States. The second is cheerful
optimism on the prospects of a Southeast Asian studies carried out by
"indigenous scholars" trained in the West but based in the countries in the

Vicente L. Rafael
region itself. Such indigenous scholarship would be written primarily in
the vernacular and would be geared toward a local audience, but at the
same time it would be translatable and transferable to a global readership.
Charles Hirschman, for example, shows that while the membership of
the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) has gone up over the last two
decades, those members identifying themselves as "Southeast Asianists"
have steadily declined from 71 3 in 1978 to 528 in 1989.z2 Hirschman
thinks that the decline in the quantity and possibly quality of American
Southeast Asian scholarship lies in the national decline of graduate pro-
grams as a whole since the 1970s and in the even more spectacular decline
of the United States as a world power beginning with the end of the Viet-
nam War. Subordinate to the "core" disciplines and deemed less impor-
tant in relation to more "developed7' areas of study, such as East Asia,
Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, Southeast Asia pro-
grams have tended to be doubly marginalized in most North American
universities. As such, they have been particularly hard hit by changing
world political conditions, recurring economic recessions, and altered fed-
eral and university spending priorities.
However, Hirschman is also hopeful regarding the growing impor-
tance of scholarly work written by Southeast Asians themselves, many of
whom have had graduate training in the United States. He points out the
startling fact that as of 1989, the majority-about two-thirds-of Ph.D.
dissertations written in this country with a Southeast Asian focus have
been by Southeast Asian scholars and concludes that the most important
works in the area will be written, if they aren't already, by those living
there.
Charles Keyes joins Hirschman in lamenting the marginalization of
Southeast Asian studies in the United States since the end of the Vietnam
War.23 To begin with, he claims that what is called "Southeast Asia"
largely amounts to an artificial grouping of diverse lands and peoples pro-
jected as a distinct region by colonial administrators and by allied leaders
as a theater of operations during World War 11. Furthermore, Southeast
Asian cultures tend to be all too derivative and hybrid, lacking in "classi-
cal traditions" and a "core" civilization. For Keyes, then, the difficulty of
doing Southeast Asian studies lies in the unwieldy diversity of the region
itself, its illusory unity that in fact is historically-which is to say, politi-
cally-produced. Where North American scholars might expect to see
continuous wholes, they get fragmented and fragmentary polities; rather
than neatly bounded areas where cultural borders snugly wrap around
social groups, they encounter a "subregion of Asia" whose regional coher-
ence is a direct result of modern imperialist interventions. There is thus
no way that one can conceive of the area outside of the politics of its des-

Area Studies in the U.S.

ignation. The arbitrariness and diffuseness of the region are at the source
of the arbitrariness and diffuseness of the scholarship about it. Similarly,
the vicissitudes of United States involvement there account for the erratic
support for and the uneven quality of the programs here.
But like Hirschman, Keyes reflects optimistically on the prospects for
Southeast Asian studies undertaken by indigenous scholars, "now deeper
and richer than any carried out by Americans." Whereas "we" used to
study "them," they have now become much better at studying themselves.
In addition, a new generation of undergraduates-second- and third-gen-
eration Asian Americans as well as recent immigrants from the region-
have now begun to take an interest in Southeast Asian studies as part of
their general education and language requirements. In either case, indige-
nous scholars rather than just plain "Americans" now seem poised to be
the next vanguard of Southeast Asian studies.
This play between the dramatization of marginality and the celebra-
tion of scholarly diversity is best exemplified and closely argued in the
essays by James Scott and Benedict Anderson. Scott's remarks are per-
meated with an acute sense of anxiety over the peripheral status of South-
east Asian studies in the university. He agonizes about

how scattered and marginal we are within the academy, how the cultural
and historical diversity of the region we study divides us-what do the stu-
dent of rice planting in Ilocos and the student of Burman court poetry have
to say to each other-and how Southeast Asia as a field of study has a
stronger administrative presence than an intellectual presence.Z4

There is a lingering fear here that Southeast Asian studies may no longer
be, if it ever was, for real. Lacking an "intellectual presence," it may be
more of a bureaucratic charade, a failed colonial enterprise. First of all,
" O U ~ " problem with studying the region lies in its unmanageable diversity,
beginning with the profusion of languages and the practical difficulty of
mastering them. Even more significant is the historical hegemony of social
science disciplines over area studies in the United States, which has
severely distorted "our7' knowledge of and approaches to the field. Such
conditions have turned "Southeast Asian studies [into] something of a
freak, relatively overdeveloped when it comes to political science and
anthropology, woefully underdeveloped when it comes to literature, art,
music, classical studies, and contemporary popular culture."25
What is curious about this diagnosis is the way it accounts for the pre-
dominance of the social sciences in area studies. Rather than as a function
of the academy's complicity with the politics of Cold War liberalism, Scott
sees the ascendance of the social sciences as the result of the absence of a
"tradition of Orientalism" in American Southeast Asian studies. Such a

Vicente L. Rafael
classical Orientalism, with its focus on the humanities, would have How do area
anchored the evanescent and ever shifting social science theories through
which the region has been largely seen.26 Minimizing the "prejudices" studies participate
that classical Orientalism invariably contains, Scott nonetheless laments its
absence. He argues that such a tradition would have provided a humani- in the unequal
ties core that would have mitigated the "freakish" development of South-
contests, uneven
east Asian studies, making it more intellectually recognizable and endow-
ing its practitioners with a semblance of institutional respectability.
articulations,
Because of the absence of an Orientalist tradition, Southeast Asian
studies remains far too vulnerable to theories which prove no more than and contingent
"shallow and ephemeral fads." Echoing Robert Hall's complaint about
the isolation and overspecialization plaguing the disciplines, Scott carica- appropriations of
tures such fashionable theories as "Rube Goldberg machines for scratch-
ing our backs." However, where Hall saw area studies as a solution, Scott contemporary
sees them as casualties of crass careerism pinned to such fads as "post-
modern modes of analysis," whereby "larger and larger claims are theories?
imposed on ever smaller bits of empirical matter." What emerges, accord-
ing to Scott, is a kind of unbridled "interpretive freedom" on the writer's
part whose results have little value beyond the moment of their writing.
Hence, the anxiety about marginality is linked to a resistance to theory, or
at least to theory as scholarly affectation, on the part of Scott. Theories,
like commodities, do not have a long shelf life. What "we" need in area
studies are works that are "strong" enough to resist the built-in "obsoles-
cence" of theories and will not disappear "without a trace7' once the the-
ory on which they are based "falls out of fashion."27
In what seems an overhasty conflation of theories with commodities,
Scott elides the link between the circulation of theories and the politics of
knowledge where area studies are concerned. For theories do not just
come and go. They are enforced or marginalized, patronized or demo-
nized, translated and revised. They are used contextually and reworked by
different practitioners for specific purposes. And they tend to be trans-
formed by, as well as transformative of, the institutional contexts in which
they are deployed. In response to Scott's critique of the place of theory in
area studies, one might pose the matter differently. For example, one
might point out that the exercise of distinguishing between "fads" and
"fundamentals" relies for its coherence on relations of power existing
within a particular interpretive community. One then would need to ask
how and why certain theories, including something called "classical Ori-
entalism," enable or disable the production of certain kinds of scholarship,
and to inquire into the varied effects of and reception to that scholarship
at a given historical moment. One might also ask how certain figures
come to act as patrons of certain theories, investing them with the cultural
capital necessary for their institutional legitimacy. In other words, if there

Area Studies in the U.S.

is a politics of theory, how do area studies participate in the unequal con-
tests, uneven articulations, and contingent appropriations of contempo-
rary theories? What are the powerful effects of such politics? And how is
it that they are sometimes represented in the guise of Orientalist nostalgia?
How do such politics determine whose works will be read, ignored, or
rediscovered?
A consideration of theory as an arena of conflict and debate, rather
than simply as a tool for exacting consensus and furthering careers, opens
up another aspect of Scott's paper, one that can be seen in all the other
papers in this volume: the question of the "we" who are engaged in
Southeast Asian studies. Just who is this "we7'? Spoken within a specific
conference setting but also addressed to others beyond this immediate
context, this "we" is left largely unspecified.
Are there ways in which one might complicate this "we" and worry
this positing of a unified professional identity? What if this "we" came to
include Southeast Asian scholars themselves, whether based in the region
or elsewhere, including the U.S., but fluent in the area's vernaculars?
Could we then still speak, as Scott does, of language as "our greatest
practical problem"? For whom would it be a problem? By complicating
this locus of address, could one also begin to rethink the question of
"marginality"? From the point of view of those who occupy multiple mar-
gins, or who may have grown up thinking that their margins were centers
in their own right-at least until they went to graduate school-how might
the pathos of marginality in the academy appear? Would it bring them to
long for incorporation into the "mainstream" or to form alliances with
other peripheral formations in the academy? In short, what would an
account of Southeast Asian studies look like once "we" began to ask who
the "we" of its address differentially interpellates and selectively posi-
tions?
Hence when Scott, like Hirschman and Keyes, concludes that the
hope for Southeast Asian studies lies in the work of "indigenous scholars"
out there from whom "we" can and must learn, one might pause to ask
about the constitution of this difference between "us" and "them." For to
raise this question is also to ask about the location of Southeast Asia itself.
If the identity of the region is historically the result of imperialist and
nationalist imaginings, is it possible to conceive of counterimaginings that
might result in the fragmentation and displacement of these hegemonic
conceptual formations? For example, what if one were to consider immi-
grant styles for conceiving an "area" that might relocate bits and pieces of
Southeast Asia in Hmong settlements in suburban California; Filipino
domestic helpers, mail-order brides, and artists in London or San Diego;
or Vietnamese and Thai businesspeople in Texas, New York, and
Louisiana? In such cases, "Southeast AsiaH-or at least its fragments-

Vicente L. Rafael
could no longer be neatly fixed on a topographical grid as that which is
separate and distinct "out there." The differences marked out by the
regional term would, from the perspective of the immigrant, begin to
migrate "in here," redrawing the distinction between "us" and "them."
It is my sense, then, that to speak of "indigenous scholars," for what-
ever strategic reasons, in the late-twentieth-century United States simul-
taneously raises the question of the immigrant imaginary in the configu-
ration of area studies. For what if one were to take seriously the position of
Southeast Asian scholars who, for various reasons, cannot or choose not
to return to their "homes"? What are the predicaments faced by immi-
grant scholars once they are part of a plural diaspora? How do these
predicaments differ from those of American and indigenous scholars?
(Indeed, what is "American7'?How secure is that term? And isn't "indige-
nous" always already a historical and therefore negotiated term?) How
does one begin to think about the works of Southeast Asian scholars
(admittedly few in the U.S., but whose conditions may be analogous to
those of immigrant scholars from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East,
Europe, and so on), who are no longer, if they ever were, indigenous to
any one place? How might their work-inescapably written in conversa-
tion with other disciplines and other areas and engaged in various projects
of affiliation both within and outside the academy-play differently to
"American" and "Southeast Asian" audiences? Indeed, how would such
Southeast Asian scholars negotiate the difference in what counts as
"scholarship," "critique," "commitment," and "career" between "here"
and "there"?
In raising these questions, I do not pretend to offer any answers but
only highlight something alluded to but never quite rendered explicit in the
papers in this volume: the gaps between and within the locations and agen-
cies of Southeast Asian studies. Since decolonization, and in the face of
global capitalism, mass migrations, flexible labor regimes, and spreading
telecommunications technologies, it has not been possible for area studies
to be, or merely to be, a colonial undertaking that presumes the metro-
pole's control over its discrete administrative units. Rather, it has become a
decentered affair, as Southeast Asian studies is carried out in places as var-
ied as Ann Arbor and Amsterdam, Tokyo and Ithaca, Singapore and Seat-
tle, Manila and London. In addition, since the end of World War 11, South-
east Asian studies in the United States has had among its more important
practitioners European (Jewish, Irish, British, French, and, on occasion,
Czech) and Japanese immigrants, even as U.S. Southeast Asian scholars
have migrated since the mid-1970s to such places as Australia, Canada,
Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in
search of opportunities no longer available in the depressed university
markets of the United States. Benedict Anderson's essay "The Changing

Area Studies in the U.S.

Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950-1990"
offers the most thoughtful and sustained arguments regarding the need to
consider the national specificity of Southeast Asian studies and its practi-
tioners, stressing the importance of examining the relationship between an
area under study and the shifting areas from where it is studied.28
Like Scott, Anderson sees a crisis in Southeast Asian studies, though
not simply in terms of its academic marginalization or deficient Oriental-
ist legacy. Rather, Anderson probes into the rise, demise, and potential
resurgence of Southeast Asian studies in terms of those he regards as its
principal agents and the changing locations and conditions of their work.
These include the seminal father figures (for they are all male), the colo-
nial scholar-bureaucrats; their postcolonial successors in the form of
North American male and female university scholars; and the indigenous
Southeast Asian scholars, many of whom are now working "back home."
Anderson points out that the main differences among these agents of
Southeast Asian studies lie in the historically distinct professional envi-
ronments in which they have lived and worked. T h e older generations of
European and Euro-American scholars before World War I1 rarely started
out as area specialists and, with the possible exception of some Americans,
did not have formal university affiliations while they resided in the region.
Appointed to the bureaucracy, these colonial scholars enjoyed the advan-
tage of living in the area full-time, wholly subsidized by the state and
under no great pressure to publish. More important was the degree to
which they became "creolized." They mixed easily with local elites, were
plugged into the currents of everyday politics, and commonly had South-
east Asian spouses and/or lovers. As a result, they acquired a degree of flu-
ency in the vernaculars sufficient to translate documents directly useful not
only for the policing of populations but also for the collection and conser-
vation of "classical texts" ranging from epigraphy to epic poetry. Hence,
while their work was shaped primarily by the interests of the colonial state,
the site of their scholarship was contiguous with the place of their daily
existence, so that a deep and continuous connection obtained between
what they did and where they lived.Z9
By contrast, modern area specialists in the United States are no longer
the beneficiaries of a colonial welfare state but are employed as full-time
scholars in universities and must compete under marketlike conditions
for promotions, publications, and grants. Furthermore, in addition to
doing research, they are required to teach and serve on university com-
mittees, so that they can no longer expect to spend extended periods of
residence in their areas of study. Indeed, travel itineraries have been
reversed; area specialists find themselves spending increasingly abbrevi-
ated periods "there" while bringing spouses, children, or lovers "back
here" to live. Of course, the history of decolonization, the consolidation of

Vicente L. Rafael
disciplinary divisions and professional standards, and the postwar stress
on general education as part of the university's civic responsibility have
radically altered the institutional and methodological contexts for area
studies. Whereas colonial bureaucrat-scholars literally governed the very
objects of their study (and so came to know them intimately), modern
area specialists are governed by their disciplines and departments and are
subject to the "theory-market" which designates objects and methods of
study. Hence, while the former's investigations were delimited by the
administrative borders of their area ("Java," "Malaysia," "Burma"), the
latter are attached to disciplines in which areas figure belatedly as cases
against which to test hypotheses. The overall effect of the "moderniza-
tion" of area studies for Anderson is to shatter the fit between the sites of
scholarship and everyday life and thus to rupture the ties between the
places of work and the spaces of love.
Symptomatic of this alienation is the "chaotic" condition of language
learning in Southeast Asian studies. Colonial scholars became fluent in
both the oral and the written vernacular and therefore were able to embark
on elaborate philological, archaeological, and literary studies. However,
modern area specialists, with their primary allegiance to the theoretical
idioms of their disciplines, come to apprehend only the most superficial
and mundane aspects of the vernacular. As a result, language teaching has
become divorced from literary studies and demoted to a "service role." It
is a poor cousin to the disciplines, invested with little cultural capital
within the university. Narrowly utilitarian in aim, language training cuts
modern specialists off from ancient and contemporary literary traditions,
further alienating them from their area of ~ t u d y . 3 ~
Against this pessimistic account of the contemporary state of South-
east Asian studies, Anderson points out what may be the most promising
solution to the present crisis, one that resonates with the expectations of
the other writers in the conference: the growing numbers of postcolonial
Southeast Asian scholars. Living and working in the region itself, indige-
nous intellectuals are structurally analogous to-though politically dis-
tinct from-colonial scholars in that their work intersects with their daily
lives, making the political stakes in their scholarship patently obvious.
Their physical location enables them to command the vernacular, which
provides them with ready access to local knowledge and important
archival resources and with critical familiarity with the literary traditions
of the region. Dwelling near the imaginative lives of the area's peoples,
indigenous scholars are positioned to convey its nuanced structures of
feeling and to draw on classical traditions to illuminate contemporary
events, and vice versa. And those scholars who can translate between
English and indigenous writings, for both Anglo-American and interna-
tional audiences, are not only producers but brokers of kn0wledge.3~

Area Studies in the U.S.

 One can deduce from Anderson's account, or at least from my sketch
of it, a dialectical progression in Southeast Asian studies. It begins with
the colonial accumulation of knowledge that has both a political and a
foundational significance: political in that it furnishes the ends of colonial
hegemony; foundational in that it initiates the modern discourse of area
studies. This stage is then negated by a postcolonial, liberal, and United
States-centered moment governed by what I have earlier called an inte-
grationist cultural logic. Such a moment is characterized by the global
diffusion of American interests in the wake of decolonization and there-
after by the emergence of new nation-states, on the one hand, and of
communist and minority challenges, on the other. At the same time, the
But what does it
disciplinary work of the social sciences in the United States gives rise to
mean for technologies intended to manage the modalities of national and ethnic
differences flexibly. It is precisely this double context-a world trans-
indigenous formed into a collection of nation-states and a (dis)United States desirous
of managing international and domestic differences-that fosters what
scholars to Anderson sees as the dystopic conditions of modern Southeast Asian
studies: the alienation of scholars from their areas of study, the divorce of
return home? language from literature, and hence the segregation of political and insti-
tutional accounts of regions from their sources in and effects on imaginary
What does social relations.
However, this crisis of modernity in area studies is in turn negated by
"home" mean to
the emergence of indigenous Southeast Asian scholars. Mediating between
local and global knowledge formations, indigenous scholars reconfigure
them, and what
area studies in terms salient to their own national-popular conditions. In
does "returning" doing so, they rework colonial and American liberal legacies, relocating
the terminus of Southeast Asian studies in the region itself. Thus they are
entail? invested with the promise of revitalizing Southeast Asian studies, bringing
it "back home," as it were, within the compass of their nations.
But what does it mean for indigenous scholars to return home? What
does "home" mean to them, and what does "returning" entail? If there is
a sense, implied but never quite elaborated in the essays in this volume,
that indigenous scholars go through a rite of passage in acquiring the sta-
tus of a specialist, what and how does that rite signify? What different
routes do such scholars traverse during graduate and/or postgraduate
training in institutions outside Southeast Asia? And do those routes
inevitably loop back to their nations of origin, with occasional invitations
to international conferences?
By posing these questions, I mean to take Anderson's dialectical
account of Southeast Asian studies a step further, pressing on what I take
to be its key argument: the need to examine the relation between agents of
area studies and their institutional and national locations at a given his-
torical moment. Is there a sense in which indigenous scholars are enlisted
here and elsewhere as substitutes for colonial and liberal scholars-in

Vicente L. Rafael
effect as their historical sublation? To what extent do such gestures risk
the idealization of earlier colonial contexts of area studies while homoge-
nizing the diverse situations, the jagged and often indeterminate itineraries
of indigenous scholars and the various contexts within which they find
themselves? What dilemmas confront them en route to becoming area
specialists in the West? And once "home7'-wherever that might be-how
are they pressed to perform as specialists where the notion of "specializa-
tion," much less "professionalization," may be far from settled? Positioned
differently in accordance with local and national categories of status, class,
gender, and ethnicity, whether "here" or "there," how do indigenous
scholars indigenize the modalities of their alienation while often finding
themselves alienated from their indigenous affiliations? In coming to terms
with their plural alienations and the arbitrariness and alterity of their
indigenousness, what identities do they fashion for themselves at "home"?
What relations of exclusions and inclusions, of interests and anxieties, do
such identity formations predicate?
And what if this return "home7' fails to materialize, so that the indige-
nous scholar becomes the immigrant scholar? For indeed, the category of
the immigrant-in transit, caught between nation-states, unsettled and
potentially uncanny-gives one pause, forcing one to ask about the possi-
bility of a scholarship that is neither colonial nor liberal nor indigenous,
yet constantly enmeshed in all these states. How would the consideration
of what I have been calling the immigrant imaginary complicate the
accounts of area studies, making it harder to determine where exactly the
"home" of such scholarship lies and who its privileged practitioners or
audiences might be? What are the languages appropriate to the study of
an area that exists as a bounded territory no less than as a diasporic entity
held together by styles of "dwelling in travellingn?32 Where colonial and
liberal area studies assumed the administrative and disciplinary necessity
of distinguishing between indigenous and foreign, and where indigenous
scholarship might take for granted the "naturalness" of the nation as the
elementary unit of area studies, how would immigrant area studies nego-
tiate what constitutes an area and what counts as expertise in its study?
These are some of the questions that occurred to me as I read these
reflections on Southeast Asian studies, questions that seemed unac-
counted for and left unasked by the essays in this collection. Provoked by
the authors' insights into the historical contingency of the agencies and
locations of area studies, these questions are meant to trace other lines of
inquiry and to suggest the beginnings of a critical genealogy of area stud-
ies specific to our moment. Such a task entails a double gesture: refiguring
the relationship of dependency between area studies and the disciplines
(and by extension between language and literature), and redrawing the
very notion of areas to include the sense of their aleatory appearances and
unstable boundaries.

Area Studies in the U.S.

 Notes

For their comments on and criticisms of this essay, I want to thank Benedict
Anderson, James Siegel, John Pemberton, Marilyn Ivy, Ella Shohat, Suzanne
Brenner, Nancy Florida, Ann Stoler, Nick Dirks, Toby Volkman, Geoffrey
White, and Itty Abraham.

1. Rey Chow, "The Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures in American

Universities," in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural
Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 120-43.
2. Robert Hall, Area Studies: With Special Reference to Their Implications for
Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Committee on World Area Research
Program, Social Science Research Council, 1948).
3. Ibid., 12, 14.
4. For similar uses of the humanities to defend the utility and value of area
studies, especially with regard to general education requirements, see the essays
in Eugene P. Boardman, ed., Asian Studies in Liberal Education (Washington,
D.C.: Association of American Colleges, 1959). The essays of Milton Singer, W.
Theodore de Barry, and John K. Fairbanks on designing undergraduate "Asian
civilizations" courses are especially instructive in the ways by which the hetero-
geneity of "Asia" came to be assimilated or, as I argue below, integrated into the
pedagogical precincts of Western civilization. In effect, "Asia" became a mirror
of and for "Greece" and "Rome" as these classical antecedents took on a new
significance in Cold War America. Hence, learning about the former was seen as
part and parcel of the same process of liberal education, understood as the incor-
poration of the self into a liberal society with potentially limitless boundaries in
space and time.
5. Hall, Area Studies, 14.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Ibid., iii, 2.
8. Ibid., 10, 24-25, 26.
9. Ibid., 26.
10. Ibid., 49.
11. These remarks on the liberal discourse of Cold War area studies are in
part indebted to Michael Geyer, "Multiculturalism and the Politics of General
Education," Critical Inquiry 19 (spring 1993), 499-533; and Christopher New-
field, "What Was Political Correctness? Race, the Right, and Managerial Democ-
racy in the Humanities," Critical Inquiry 19 (winter 1993), 308-36. See also
Edward H. Berman, "Foundations, Philanthropy, and Neocolonialism," in Edu-
cation and the Colonial Experience, ed. Philip G. Altbach (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction, 1984), 253-72.
12. Hall, Area Studies, 49.
13. One wonders if this image of a senior-junior partnership between the
disciplines and area studies was not influenced in Hall's case by his involvement
in helping to lay the intellectual framework for the U.S. occupation and reforma-
tion of the Japanese polity after the war. I owe this insight to Masao Miyoshi.
14. Hall, Area Studies, 32, 34-35.
15. See Barbara B. Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis
and the National Defense Act of 1958 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), for
details regarding the congressional debates on the passage of the NDEA. See also

Vicente L. Rafael
John S. Diekhoff, N D E A and Modern Foreign Languages (New York: Modern
Language Association, 1965); and Charles 0 . Hucker, The Association for Asian
Studies: A n Interpretive History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973),
for the benefits that accrued to area studies programs and graduate students
studying Asia as a result of the NDEA and its subsequent emendations.
16. See David Featherman, "SSRC, Then and Now: A Commentary on a
Recent Historical Analysis," Items: Newsletter of the Social Science Research Coun-
cil48, no. 1 (March 1994), 13-22.
17. In this regard, it is useful to note that some of the most powerful foun-
dations that have funded area studies programs have had a history of investing in
studies of socioeconomic conditions in the southern part of the United States,
especially as these touched on African Americans prior to 1945. The Rockefeller
family's General Education Board, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and the Anna T.
Jeanes Fund, for example, were major contributors to Tuskegee Institute,
designed to provide vocational training to rural blacks. Indeed, the Rockefeller
Foundation funded subsequent attempts in the 1920s to encourage the extension
of the Tuskegee educational approach to the British colonies of Africa through
American and British missionary societies and the African Education Commis-
sion. And by the 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation, along with the Rockefeller
Foundation, was providing grants for a select group of Africans and British colo-
nial officials to study the Tuskegee system in the United States. See Berman,
"Foundations, Philanthropy, and Neocolonialism," 255-59. See also Elbridge
Sibley, Social Science Research Council: The First Fifty Years (New York: Social
Science Research Council, 1974), for an account of the SSRC's interest in the
urban "underclass," as well as the more critical account of the SSRC by Donald
Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller, Philanthropy,
and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993). It is arguable that these modes of interventionist philan-
thropy set the stage for post-World War I1 programs to influence the formation of
Third World intellectuals by way of scholarships and study grants to U.S. univer-
sities, where they would be "dual citizens," housed both in an academic depart-
ment and in an area studies program. What the effects of those grants were on
particular intellectuals in particular settings is, of course, far from unambiguous.
It is the need to revisit the ambiguity of the effects of traveling across colonial and
postcolonial borders that I seek to call attention to in the latter section of this
essay.
18. Hall, Area Studies, 2 1, 23.
19. Again, the essays in Boardman, Asian Studies in Liberal Education, are
illuminating for what they tell us about the liberal project of area studies, at least
where the undergraduate teaching of Asian civilizations is concerned. These
essays are suggestive of the kinds of liberal Orientalism that came to be instituted
in the textbooks and teaching styles demanded of anyone attempting to survey
"Asia" for a new and heterogeneous generation of students yet to be assimilated
into an American society after World War 11. For a contemporary echo of these
liberal concerns over the civic vocation of area studies in the formation of an
"informed citizenry," albeit a concern inflected by a post-Cold War critique of
Orientalism, see Kenton W. Worcester, "Rethinking European Studies," Items:
Newsletter of the Social Science Research Council 48, no. 1 (March 1994), 23-26;
and Sidney Tarrow, Rebirth or Stagnation? European Studies since 1989 (New
York: Social Science Research Council, 1993). These writings reiterate my earlier

Area Studies in the U.S.

point regarding the institutionalized coexistence of Orientalism and its discon-
tents within the framework of liberal pluralism.
20. I owe the term rainbow menace to Newfield, "What Was Political Cor-
rectness?"
21. Charles Hirschman, Charles Keyes, and Karl Hutterer, eds., Southeast
Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Associ-
ation of Asian Studies, 1992). To my knowledge, this volume has yet to be
reviewed in a major journal.
22. Charles Hirschman, "The State of Southeast Asian Studies in American
Universities," in Hirschman et al., Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance, 41-58.
23. Charles Keyes, "A Conference at Wingspread and Rethinking Southeast
Asian Studies," in Hirschman et al., Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance, 9-24.
There is a curious silence around the issue of the Vietnam War in these papers,
though all the writers tacitly agree that it had an enormous impact on the politics
and culture of studying Southeast Asia-and East Asia, for that matter-in the
U.S. What was the impact of the war and antiwar activism on the production of
alternative public spheres? How did these spheres in turn shape different ideolo-
gies, curtail or promote careers, radicalize or contain the very organization of
academic labor as well as the relationships among and between faculty and stu-
dents, and place in doubt the notions of expertise and professionalism within the
liberal academy? What would accounts of Southeast Asian studies look like that
took into serious consideration the local histories of programs-for example,
those at Cornell, Madison, Michigan, and Berkeley-whose faculty and students
actively opposed the war and thus questioned the very divide between the uni-
versity and society?
24. James Scott, "Foreword," in Hirschman et al., Southeast Asian Studies in
the Balance, 1.
25. Ibid., 2.
26. For similar statements regarding the lamentable absence of a classical
Orientalist tradition in American Southeast Asian studies, see Frank Reynolds,
"Southeast Asian Studies in America: Reflections on the Humanities," and Karl
Hutterer, "Epilogue," in Hirschman et al., Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance,
61, 141. One cannot help but wonder about the incipient Orientalism operating in
these anguished reiterations. To begin with, the long history of U.S. intervention in
the region after the turn of the century has, among other things, spurred volumi-
nous writings on Southeast Asians for various tactical and interventionary ends,
whether those of ethnologists cum businessmen like Dean C. Worcester writing on
the Philippines, Cold War fictions on Thailand and Burma, Hollqwood spectacles
set in Siam or Indonesia, the left-wing Orientalisms of antiwar activists bent on
emulating nationalist figures at the height of the Vietnam War, or the body of post-
war ethnographies of the region-the list is endless. In sum, to claim that American
understandings of Southeast Asia are bereft of Orientalist traditions is both to mis-
understand the complexity of Orientalism as a discursive network of practices,
knowledges, desires, and phantasmatic projections and to repress the history of the
United States as a colonial power historically capable of producing its own nation-
ally distinct--one might even say "postclassical"-modes of Orientalist knowledge.
27. Scott, "Foreward," 5.
28. Benedict Anderson, "The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies
in the United States, 1950-1990," in Hirschman et al., Southeast Asian Studies in
the Balance, 25-40. For a reworking of some of the arguments in this essay, but

Vicente L. Rafael
pitched at an autobiographical register, see Benedict Anderson, "Introduction,"
in Language and Power: Exploring Political Culture in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University Press, 1990), 1-16. The link between area and agency is in some
ways already encrypted in Anderson's massively influential work, Imagined Com-
munities: Rejlections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
1983, rev. 1991).
29. Anderson, "The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the
United States, 1950-1990," in Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance, 25-26.
30. Ibid., 27-35. Indeed, it is usually as language instructors that many
(though not all) Southeast Asian scholars find themselves initially positioned in
American universities, simultaneously drilling and disciplining students into
speaking the vernacular and functioning as native informants. Thus Southeast
Asian language instructors double as sources of linguistic authority and resources
for theoretical formulations. If language learning is so marginalized in American
universities, it may well have to do with the relative marginality of native speakers
in the academic community as much as with the more vulgar instrumentalization
of language in the disciplines.
31. Ibid., 36-37. Of course, one of the issues that such an account does not
even begin to raise, and that here can only be mentioned in passing, is the effect
of American women's growing presence in Southeast Asian studies. What differ-
ence did gender make in the study of the region? How did women's entry into
area studies change the nature of training in and focus of these fields? Nancy
Florida and Suzanne Brenner had alerted me to these and other questions when
they told me that they could not find themselves in Anderson's or my rendering
of this account. And if such an account has merely begged the question of Amer-
ican women's involvement in Southeast Asian studies, it does not even begin to
address the place of Southeast Asian women, often reduced to the position of
spouses, language instructors cum native informants.
32. I borrow this term from James Clifford, "Travelling Cultures," in Cul-
tural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992),
96-1 12. For a more pessimistic analysis of some of the nonscholarly forms that
this immigrant imaginary might take (albeit in a non-Southeast Asian context),
such as fostering communal, ethnic, and sectarian violence in the home country
while escaping accountability in the country of one's residence, see Benedict
Anderson, "Exodus," Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (winter 1994), 314-27.

Area Studies in the U.S.