In recent years the conceptual underpinnings and continued validity of area studies in a globalizing world have been severely questioned. Emanating from a critique of Orientalism, but also reflecting changing institutional politics in the American academe following the end of the Cold War, the attack on area studies has spread across the globe. This has resulted in growing pronouncements on the failure of area studies in producing a synthesis of knowledge that transcends disciplinary divides and power hierarchies between the Western and non-Western world. The spread of this critique has led to a common view that area studies is in a state of “crisis”.

Ironically, however, this critique of area studies comes at a time when regional perspectives are gaining ground in defining regions based on local priorities. The critical agendas that propelled the attack on area studies in Euro-America appear to undermine such promising effort. As the crisis of area studies galvanized scholars to deliberate over its fate, some scholars in Asian Studies have sought to find “afterlives” for area studies by pointing to regionally located scholarships as alternative sites from which Euro- American-centric visions could be denaturalized. In the words of Miyoshi and Harootunian:

Yet the prospect of recentring knowledge production back to regions themselves raises its own set of questions. For one thing, regional scholarships have always existed alongside Euro-American social sciences. In fact, strident regional scholarships were contesting the dominance of colonial scholarships during the decolonization era in endeavours to map out national histories. These local voices were often dismissed as “nationalist” if not “nativist” and have remained under-examined and unnoticed, even by scholars located within the regions themselves. The unspoken politics of theory at the time, supposedly speaking on behalf of some universal and objective standard, determined which scholarship could be regarded as theory, and which relegated to more subjective and parochial forms of knowledge.