Histories of Asia Across and Beyond Asia

In the 1950s, major philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation provided significant funding to support groups like the Association of Asian Studies and to foster growth in area studies. In the same period, Title VI of the National Defense Education Act created centers across the country to boost foreign language and area studies programs. By the twenty-first century, the limits of the area studies model had become evident. In his 2020 presidential address to the Association of Asian Studies, Prasenjit Duara examined the “circulatory processes that have been weaving—or entangling—the globe together into the modern era,” including the example of Marxism in China, from points of contact with French, Japanese, and Soviet Bolsheviks to its reemergence, inflected with Maoist populism, in Latin America and South Asia in the latter half of the twentieth century. For Duara, Marxism served as a demonstration of how “circulatory processes are accepted, resisted, and affectively or innovatively vernacularized in particular societies.” A year later, AAS president Christine Yano took on Global Asia as her signature initiative to push out the boundaries of the historical practices of Asian Studies to engage with Asian American and diasporic studies, along with other models of cross-border and transregional scholarship. An organization founded and funded on the principles of area studies, in other words, has moved beyond the theoretical constraints of its founding. At the same time, the traditional federal government funding sources, until their decimation by the current administration, remained committed to the geographical siloes of area studies. In my presentation, I will examine new historical scholarship examining China and Asia’s engagement with the world and how the funding collapse of the last year could also be seen as an opportunity to reimagine theoretical frameworks for the study of Asian countries.