Introduction

Abstract

East Asia has been recognized, researched, and civilized primarily as an Other to the West, and has existed only in this reflected image. A new discourse of East Asia needs to be located outside the dichotomy of Western empire and Eastern colony, and within a critical analysis of the internal and external competitions in which East Asian countries have engaged in the process of constructing the modern nation-state. This chapter discusses, on the principle of de-homogenization, the conditions for establishing an appropriate discourse of East Asia. The identity of East Asia is the process itself in which the whole and the parts incessantly intermingle, change, and generate each other: open, dynamic, and contextualized.