Moving Theory and Methods in Southeast Asian Studies

Abstract

Recent discussions on the decentralization of knowledge production have yielded a refreshing shift away from a preoccupation with the limitations of Western discourse to endeavors in pluralizing critical knowledge structures. Revisionist area studies are at the forefront of these debates—a development that is not surprising as area studies have actively sought to transform themselves since coming under attack by the critique of Orientalism and changing institutional politics in the North American academe at the end of the Cold War. This began with the search for “afterlives” of area studies where regional scholarship was identified as a viable site for the denaturalization of Euro-American centric visions (Harootunian 2002, 150–74). More recently, a discourse on “Asia as Method” has emerged from the rethinking of non-Western regions. Advanced by the Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuan-Hsing (2010), “Asia as Method” proposes an “inter-referencing” of social-historical experiences and meanings in Asian contexts as a methodology to build alternate social scientific vocabularies/categories.¹