Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective 9781498545143, 9781498545150

Table of contents :
Cover
Necessary Travel
Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgments
I: OVERVIEW
1
Introduction
Contents
Notes
References
II: NEW AREA STUDIES AROUND THE GLOBE
2
New Area Studies in the Borderlands of Asia
New Areas Do Not Make New Area Studies The ‘Zomia’ Debate
Working In The Borderlands Of Asia
Is the Notion of Area Really the Problem that NAS Needs to Address?
TransformING TAS into NAS in the borderlands of Asia
Notes
References
3
Sovietology’s Afterlife
A Context for Regeneration
The New Media Environment
New Agendas, New Paradigms
The Value of Comparison
The Centrality of Language
Notes
References
4
Refugee Studies as Area Studies
Note
References
5
Latin American Studies
Latin American Studies
A Little History, Criticism and Challenges
Latin American Studies
in the Context of NAS
Recommendations
Final Comments
Notes
References
6
Mastering the Current
What is Central Asian Studies?
Constructing Central Asia
Central Asia as a Set of Mobile Societies
The Development of Central Asia
New Area Studies and Central Asia
References
7
Muslim World Studies or Middle East Studies?
Regions and Names
area studies and the International Arena
The Case of the Middle East and Islamic World
Islamic Studies as Religious Studies
9/11, 7/7 and Area Studies
From Middle East to Muslim World Studies
Future Directions
Notes
References
8
Blurring the Boundaries of History and Fiction
Blurring the Boundaries of History, Fiction and the Truth
The Seizure of Mecca
A Turning Point For Women?
Negotiating History, Gender and Religion in Fragmentation
Gender Roles and Female Identity Formation and Reformation
Re-appropriating Religion
Tolerance versus Intolerance
Conclusion
Note
References
III: CANADA IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
9
TransArea Studies
The Difference Space MakesGendered Mobility and New Area Studies
Unruly WomenTrangressing the Norms of Space, Gender, and Genre in North America Literature
TransArea Studies
Notes
References
10
Area and Circus Studies
The Case of and for Québec Studies
The Case of and for Québec Circus Studies
Cirque
More Than Circus
Notes
References
11
Image, Figurations of the Border
Figurations of the border
The border as bureaucratic run-around
The Border as Dialectical Image
Borders are fiction, until they are not
The Everywhere BorderRenaissance of Border Studies
The Institutionally Deep Border: A Dispositif
When the Dispositif Fails, It Tries Again
New Ways to See the Border
Conclusion
The Border as a Making
References
12
The State Against Canadian Studies
Origins of Canadian Studies within Canada
Critiques of Canadian Studies
Celebratory Malaise
Canadian Studies at the International Level
References
IV: REFLECTIONS ON NEW AREA STUDIES
13
What Have We Learned?
Dimensions of New Area Studies
Future Research
Final Thoughts
Notes
References
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Necessary Travel

Necessary Travel New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective

Edited by Susan Hodgett and Patrick James

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-4985-4514-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-4515-0 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

To Frank A. Edgar, CBE, who has travelled all of his life radiating wisdom, kindness and unending optimism.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Part I: Overview

1

1 Introduction: Context – Theorizing the New Area Studies Susan Hodgett and Patrick James Part II: New Area Studies Around the Globe

3 17

2 New Area Studies in the Borderlands of Asia Mandy Sadan

19

3 Sovietology’s Afterlife: New Paradigms and New Area Studies Stephen Hutchings

31

4 Refugee Studies as Area Studies: A Historian’s Perspective Peter Gatrell

45

5 Latin American Studies: What Have We Achieved and Where Are We Heading?55 Christopher Sabatini and Nicol´as Albertoni 6 Mastering the Current: Studying Central Asia in the Twenty-First Century 67 Claus Bech Hansen 7 Muslim World Studies or Middle East Studies? Robert Gleave

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viii

Contents

8 Blurring the Boundaries of History and Fiction: Re-imagining the Past and Re-defining the Present through the Lens of Saudi Women Novelists 99 Zahia Smail Salhi and Ibrahim A. I. Alfraih Part III: Canada in Comparative Perspective 9 TransArea Studies: Gendered Mobility in North American Literature Caroline Rosenthal

115 117

10 Area and Circus Studies: The Case of and for a Boundary-Crossing Quebec 129 Charles R. Batson 11 Image, Figurations of the Border Claude Denis, with Abdelkarim Amengay

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12 The State Against Canadian Studies Colin M. Coates

155

Part IV: Reflections on New Area Studies

167

13 What Have We Learned? Susan Hodgett and Patrick James

169

Index

181

About the Contributors

189

Acknowledgments

Susan Hodgett acknowledges the support and contribution from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK grant AH/N006712/1 in the preparation of this collection and in the context of the new Blurring Genres Network. Charles Batson’s chapter was originally published in Québec Studies 58 (2014) as ‘Pink, Cirque and the Québécisation de l’industries’. Claude Denis and Abdelkarim Amengay’s chapter is adapted, expanded, and transformed from a presentation at the 2012 ISA Annual Conference, ‘Through a North-American Border, with Difficulty: The Crossing Experience Conceptualized and Analyzed’; and from a presentation at the symposium ‘Border Reflections/ Reflections on the Border: Stories and Practices from North America’, Carleton University, Ottawa, June 4, 2014.

ix

I OVERVIEW

1 Introduction Context – Theorizing the New Area Studies Susan Hodgett and Patrick James

OVERVIEW This book is about a particular kind of expert – a type suffering from ‘bad press’ for a long time – namely, scholars who carry out area-based research. The term ‘expert’ itself even comes in for some humor about how it might be defined – someone who knows more and more, about less and less, until eventually they know everything about nothing. Behind the old joke is a grain of truth: Expert standing becomes unimpressive to us, in both intellectual and practical terms, when it is seen as parochial and lacking in vision. This volume will explore Area Studies (AS), a prominent type of expertise, along a range of dimensions. As we move toward the third decade in the new millennium, attention shifts to the somewhat unexpectedly positive future of New Area Studies (NAS) as a resurgent intellectual movement. NAS has departed from what the editors have dubbed Traditional Area Studies (TAS) – commonplace till the millennium. Both the editors of this volume, and its contributors, are leading scholars in area-based work across continents. Together they have participated and observed as area-oriented research struggled to overcome protracted and intense criticism since the Cold War. Thus, the volume marks the resurgence of area-based research in its new guise as NAS – the crux – understanding increasing complexity around a shrinking globe. Recent, unpredictable incidents in diverse locations – Paris, Nice, Ankara, Sinai, California, Manchester and London – reinforce how governments and scholars must look beneath the surface for understanding of the turbulent post-9/11 world. In this we follow the work of other foremost scholars in the field. Clowes and Bromberg (2016, 3), for example, have noted that new approaches in Area Studies have addressed parochialism and been particularly aware of the needs of non-elite 3

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communities in the search for research methods fit to gather real world information. Their focus in Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity (Clowes and Bromberg 2016) is one which we heartily endorse. So, too, the themes within it: ‘the productive re-invention of Area Studies . . . employing social sciences and humanities tools to attend to the subjectivities and experience of people in all kinds of communities across the world’ (xv). Also, an influential part of this renaissance of Area Studies has been the substantial Crossroads Project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which produced the book Area Studies at the Crossroads (Mielke and Hornidge 2017). The collection by Mielke and Hornidge argues that Area Studies is now undergoing its third wave of development, twenty-five years after the end of the bipolar world. Up for reconsideration are both global power relations as well as the changing centres and structures of knowledge production itself. The edited volume addresses in a deep and thoughtful way the definition of Area Studies, its development on different continents, its relations with the disciplines, and its traditional Eurocentric ontology and epistemology. A significant contribution has also been a recent series of seminars supported by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council on Blurring Genres: Recovering the Research Methods of the Arts and Humanities for Political Science and Area Studies. That contribution addressed the future of Area Studies by creating a new research network on the theme of blurring genres and enabled significant and substantial discussions on the topic with an eye to methodological innovation. Many of the talks are available online and can be found on the Ulster University website.1 A groundbreaking book from the seminar series is also forthcoming from Rhodes and Hodgett (2019). This volume builds on that work and strives to do a number of related things. The editors and contributors consider the myth of the crisis of AS from the mid1980s through the end of the millennium. Lambert (1990, 712) offered a representative definition: ‘[a]n area specialist [is] someone who devotes all or a substantial portion of his or her professional career to the study of another country or region of the world’. Suggesting AS is what area specialists do, he argues that such specialists ‘tend to be with a broad region of the world, for narrower and narrower geographic specialization, moving from world region to country to section of the country’ (Lambert 1990, 712). By contrast, this volume asserts that there remains a strong and evident need to understand peoples, cultures and places comprehensively and comparatively in an era of rapid change. It demonstrates how AS continues to be crucial to obtain deep understanding of places and peoples sufficient to address growing complex global challenges. This edition definitively marks the turning of the tide away from any lingering sense of crisis in area-based work. Its contributors jointly demonstrate why areabased research, beloved of North America in the aftermath of World War II, but later belittled as Traditional Area Studies, is resurgent as New Area Studies. Individual chapters consider how those who believed that area-intensive knowledge is necessary have taken on-board the criticisms from positivists and social scientists and created

Introduction

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something new and better. This imaginary sees NAS delving deep into self-examination as to why we must conduct area-oriented work, and what altered forms it may take in the future. The book argues that area-based research is as essential today as it was at the end of World War II, albeit with different points for justification. Respective chapters establish why we have come to this positive conclusion about area-based research mid-way through our personal journeys in space and place. Moreover, contributors to the volume illustrate how these journeys did more than we ever expected; in finding others we found ourselves. This book charts the timely resurrection of New Area Studies in the early twenty-first century; explores the selfexamination of AS scholars and blurs the genres between scholarship from the social sciences and the arts and humanities. The future road of NAS will be laid out for discussion, drawing on the collective expertise of scholars from around the world as they have undertaken their individual journeys. This collection includes academics from many parts of the globe, each already expert in seeking to understand particular regions of the world; and at the same time interested in the evolution of Area Studies in the twenty-first century. In the previous century, it is well recognized that American area-based scholars, in particular, responded to demands from laissez-faire and market-oriented economics and the military while contemplating the gap between area and disciplinary focus, between research and content, and between applied and pure research.2 Area-based work entered a period of decline in the 1980s. Then, Lambert (1990) suggested, AS undertook the ‘ologising’ of subject matter, increasing specialisation and language competency. Barriers between this traditional approach to AS and the social sciences threw up ‘tribes of scholars focusing on the major world areas’ where ‘the interaction is with the tribe and not .  .  . the people outside’ (Lambert 1990, 722). This division accords with the domination of positivist scholarship in American universities as the harder sciences rejected those who did not fit its mission. So, disciplinary histories became set and ‘the heart of AS [lay] in just four disciplines: language and literature, history, political science and anthropology’ (Lambert 1990, 727). A quarter century ago, Lambert described AS as ‘trans-disciplinary . . . [where] scholarly interests [drew] members from many disciplines, but [the] member’s work lies within their own discipline’ (728). This work became identified as a soft social science (historically informed anthropology) too closely related to policy making. This intellectual eclecticism came at a cost (Lambert 1990, 729). Rafael (1999, 121) observed that Area Studies, ‘like other regionalisms . . . sought to come to grips with the dislocations of localities amid new globalizing forces’. Spurred by criticism from a range of ideological and disciplinary quarters and urged on by funding agencies and budget cuts, Area Studies seemed in a state of ‘crisis’ – besieged by calls to reinvent the institutional infrastructure and its intellectual agendas. How and why this re-examination is being undertaken is the subject of this collection, and sheds light on an academic endeavour undertaking solipsism at a time of significant change. Arrival of what we have dubbed in this volume the ‘New Area Studies’ has proven necessary to our understanding of place at a time of unparalleled social, political, and

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economic change. As we write, academics and governments are struggling to make sense of the new millennium in a world no longer demonstrating the certainties of the twentieth century. Gone is the predictability of western superiority borne of the Victorian era and its age of empires; gone too, the unquestioned social, political, economic, and intellectual dominance of the continent of Europe. Lost by default is the certainty of twentieth-century American global leadership and its role as a ‘shining light upon a hill’ (Ronald Reagan quoted in Reich 2017). With this was eliminated the long accepted binary choice of loyalty to east or west. How these transformations have occurred, and whether they were voluntary or enforced, must be the subject of discussion elsewhere. Yet, that major global changes have occurred in the new millennium is beyond doubt. This collection was spawned in an age of profound political uncertainty and to abuse a geographical metaphor, in the midst of volcanic eruptions where white-hot lava flows have scorched everything in their path. But, as the lava has cooled to rock, the unexpected seems, routinely, to have become mundane. Economic, political, social, and cultural paradoxes have racked the globe, overwhelming world leaders with fulsome and protracted, wicked problems. When Naomi Klein wrote the Shock Doctrine in 2007 she could have little idea of what was to come. And, although frequent usage of the word ‘shock’ has demeaned its very meaning – still, shock is what shock feels. So, the west has endured the 2008 economic collapse and ten subsequent years of austerity, Brexit (2016),3 the election of businessman Donald J. Trump to the White House (2017), a new French President (and party) (Emmanuel Macron) (2017),4 as well as Xi Jinping’s ambitious One Belt One Road5 initiative and an increasingly assertive Russia. One wonders what else might be to come? While these tremors have taken place on the world stage at the macro level, we cannot ignore the social consequences for ordinary people at the micro level. Here it seems, rather too often, that the carelessness of the powerful impacts deleteriously on ordinary people and they are forced to react to major negative life events.6 At the end of a century of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ we have plunged into uncertain times. The fundamentals of environment, society and politics appear to be ‘up for grabs’ as the world (dis)order staggers forwards into the twenty-first century and academics struggle to understand what is actually happening (Pikkety 2014; Stiglitz 2017). What, in response, does area-based research have to offer? In 2005 Sharma described ‘[t]he peculiarly American study of the “non-western” world – interdisciplinary “Area Studies” – as in crisis’ (989). Dating back to the post-war Cold War period, Area Studies arose simultaneously with the demise of colonial powers in Europe and Japan and the ascent of the United States to global hegemony. Decolonization, the rise of new nations, and a concern to know and win the hearts and minds of the newly freed for the capitalist economy crystalized into Area Studies programs with generous government and foundation support. Intended to provide an interdisciplinary . . . or . . . multidisciplinary . . . knowledge base about parts of the world deemed critical to the geopolitical interests of the US (Sharma 2005, 990), this scholarship at times proved limited.

Introduction

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These observations describe the troubled world of traditional Area Studies with many unappealing features: post–Cold War security interests; descriptive knowledge lacking rigorous analysis; parochialism devoid of broader contextualisation; a fixation on the state; a hegemonic culture privileging elite cultures over those of the powerless. Then area-based research stood accused of maintaining artificial boundaries reflecting colonial, European, notions of civilization. Western academics undertook study preferencing social science, numerical methods and models, replicability and scientific approaches. TAS became criticised for being overly descriptive, cultural, historical, contextual (Graham and Kantor 2007, 1), and irrelevant. Yet some scholars anticipated new and important contributions.7 Fundamental questions arose: how should we classify areas to study? For example, what is ‘Asia’ in the twenty-first century? How is it formed subject to intensification of flows (capital, labour, transnational networks)? Can the ‘Orient’ still exist? (Sharma 2005, 992). Scholarly networks began considering the challenging legacy of colonialism (993) and the rise of transnational corporations. NAS researchers reassessed a swathe of problems of size and scale, methodological choices, alternative categories, and measurements. Paradigmatic approaches, the interdisciplinary, the comparative, and multicultural were mixed up; questions were asked about where, how and with whom to study and research. Importantly, interplay between and amongst complexity, events and an awareness of power and its capacity to work against the powerless, became significant in the new research agenda.8 Therein lay the core of New Area Studies and its genre-busting ideas.9 Self-examination and criticism within the academy grew as NAS scholars sought to contemplate the future (Rausch 2009).10 Throughout the research community, experts pursued a growing fundamental reflexivity shaping the formation of NAS.11 Graham and Kantor (2007, 18–19) declared ‘[a] true and sophisticated understanding of the world in which we live requires multiple approaches’12 as NAS emerged profiling both the local and the global. And, facts and meaningful content became the building blocks (Rausch 2009, 36) including literature, art, religion, philosophy, politics, architecture, and mathematics. Traditional disciplinary boundaries were breeched as scholars addressed the complexities of life in a globalizing world (Graham and Kantor 2007, 3), seeking theories and methods which more successfully explained the lives of people in it.13 And our understanding of the role that emotions play within research became key (Kay and Oldfield 2011, 1275). Lived experience, interpretive approaches, and emotional subjectivities necessitated time and justification for critical academic reflection. In this New Area Studies scholars have regained their confidence challenging social scientists’ mantras that they have failed to create theory – being overly preoccupied with culture, history, and description (Jung 2014, 248). Taking the local turn, Schierenbeck (2015) argues that context-based methods and interdisciplinary research involving locals must be preferred. The methods of NAS going forward involve institutions but also actors and their goals.14

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NAS is just beginning to plot its future. Within its ambit comes recognition of the state of the world today and its multiple complex challenges. Needed is an understanding of events in a deep and comprehensive manner to avoid the implication, visible since the recession in 2008, of failing to see the future coming. The negative consequences of the Great Recession, what the Economist dubbed the worst in eighty years, remain evident.15 New Area Studies, with its focus on comprehensive and comparative inquiry, may help see off the descent into frequent and ever more serious shocks. Seeing coming remarkable social surprises like Brexit, the election of populist leaders like Presidents Trump and Macron, the expansion of China’s trade routes and influences, or North Korea’s development of nuclear and rocket technology are fervently to be hoped for. This is not to take a given position on any issue but instead to observe that anger and resentment among those on the losing side of such standoffs are likely to be reduced if the outcome itself (for either side) is not a profound and shattering shock. Greater and deeper understanding of peoples and places are necessary now in support of liberal democracy which at the beginning of the twenty-first century may be significantly under question (Friedman 2017; Peters 2018). And to this end, New Area Studies has an important role to play.

CONTENTS This volume makes the case for a New Area Studies. Part I, which contains this overview chapter, introduces NAS as a concept and sets the agenda for the rest of the edition. Part II focuses on Area Studies in its new incarnation around the world. Part III looks at the study of Canada individually and in comparative perspective to provide more depth in understanding of the means of NAS. Contributions of this volume, along with future directions, are presented in the concluding chapter that appears in Part IV. Hodgett and James’ introductory chapter addresses the issue of theorizing the New Area Studies seeking to explain the resurrection of Area Studies from its nadir in the eighties and nineties. It makes the argument for the clear need for a New Area Studies for the twenty-first century, one which moves beyond the Area Studies of the twentieth century limited by parochialism and over-description. The chapter lays out the case for a New Area Studies based on some twenty years of reflection by the academy from those convinced of the need for a deep comprehensive and comparative, genre-­ busting scholarship, meeting the requirements of people in place and paying attention to the ways in which people lead their everyday lives. This newer scholarship marks the resurgence of area-based research seeking to understand the turbulent post-9/11 world. The chapter, and the book itself, mark the turning of the tide away from the crises of traditional area-based works, marking the coming of age of a fundamental reflexivity shaping the formation of the NAS and the arrival of a more sophisticated understanding of the world in which we live. Multiple approaches are used. The building blocks include all of the disciplines from literature and art, to

Introduction

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science and mathematics. Aligned with this breadth comes a deeper appreciation of interpretive approaches and the emotional subjectivities of researcher and researched to address what traditional TAS did not; the failure to see the future coming. Chapter 2, by Mandy Sadan, addresses the idea of NAS by applying it in the borderlands of Asia and revisiting the ‘idea’ of South East Asia. In critiquing the notion, Sadan notes presciently the need to respond to South East Asia itself. She discusses the nub of the change that NAS represents, namely, that academics must ‘at the very least be co-producers of knowledge’. Sadan’s thoughtful chapter lays out the challenges for faculty and students in studying the eleven countries making up Asia as well as the problematic antecedence of the term itself. Reviewing newer and differing ways of conceptualising Asia, Sadan engages with the concept of Zomia, coined by van Schendel, as Google Earth sees the mountainous regions of the Himalaya. As the digital age meets politics and geography in new and unexpected ways, addressing peripheralization and the geographies of ignorance, Sadan explores zones of resistance to the state, to borders and to boundaries. History meets locale from the viewpoint of people in place and ethnohistory is added to methodology. The indigenous, the ecological and the cultural are explored by remodelling the colonial. Disruptions of digital and cyber space challenge traditional elite knowledge. Today, Sadan argues, the intellectual space of South East Asia should be primarily for, and of, scholars from the region; with co-production of knowledge, and ownership of the region by people of that place. Chapter 3, by Stephen Hutchings, addresses ‘Sovietologies Afterlife: New Paradigms, and New Area Studies’. This chapter reviews changes in another part of the world with the challenges faced by Sovietology-related disciplines following the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. Reviewing the global events which led to this regeneration, he sketches out the cross-disciplinary and comparative research that replaced the older ways of studying Eastern Europe. The demise of communism coincided with the perception of a crisis in AS as the twentieth century reached its end. Putin’s role as rescuer of Russia as a ‘Great Power’, authoritarian rule and pariah status in the world provided problems for how to study Russia. These accorded with difficulty for scholars maintaining a career in this field as universalizing theory failed and countries in the region did not follow expected models of development. Problems of identity and scope were evident for the countries and professional bodies of academics as to how to understand the enormous changes. Hutchings notes that the context for regeneration of AS never disappeared and that 9/11 and the Arab Spring demonstrated that we needed to understand areas better. Regional expertise with appropriate cultural and linguistic knowledge was necessary as the abstract models which had traditionally explained the twentieth-century world crashed with the economy in 2008. Unexpected and unpredictable interventions by Russia and worries of a new Cold War after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 provide further evidence of the need for NAS. The arrival of information warfare and malevolent cyber-attacks form the subject of Hutching’s chapter as state propaganda evolves in the 24-hour digital world with the arrival of the ‘post–truth era’. Once again, the

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importance of interdisciplinary approaches is noted for perceiving the emergence of new agendas and new communities within and across national boundaries. Fresh consideration is needed of appropriate units of study beyond the nation or region in the time of global flows of people. Peter Gatrell, in chapter 4, presents a historian’s perspective on the relationship between Refugee Studies and Area Studies and vice versa. In a time of mass population displacement, still, he explores the causes of forced migration. Seeking to demonstrate that neither Refugee Studies nor Area Studies stand still, he contemplates the prospects of incorporating history into Refugee Studies and speculates on what area means in relation to mass population displacement. Exploring the very meaning of refugee, he contemplates engagements with law, government and intergovernmental organisations. Discussing the interdisciplinary character of Refugee Studies which focus on the refugee experience and life stories, he comments that history as a discipline seems absent. Speculating whether history itself had a problem with studying refugees, as transient figures in a big picture world, Gatrell reviews the oeuvre. Substantial in this chapter are his thoughts on where is an area now? Moving to examine newer work in historical monographs which include comparative work over time, he contemplates scale and the role of the state. Speculating on upheaval and war in today’s Europe, he contemplates the role of the sea as space and cultural formation with attendant flows from Africa, Canada, and Estonia. Chapter 5, by Christopher Sabatini and Nicolas Albertoni, considers ‘Latin American Studies: What Have We Achieved and Where Are We Heading?’ Together they review the contribution of Latin American Studies to comparative politics and Regional Studies as well as commonly used and newer methodologies. They glance at the contribution of Regional Studies to the newer Global Studies, considering what this might mean for NAS. Reviewing the history of Latin American Studies, they outline ebbs and flows in educational provision in the US with democracy, new social movements, and indigenous representation. Marking too the diminution of the role of the US as hegemonic power, they explore the challenges facing Latin American Studies more generally. New developments are outlined including collaborative approaches between scholars in Texas and Brazil using social cartography in the Amazon­where controversies rage over territory, rights and resources. Social mapping and policy implications are discussed as well as US isolationism and anti-intellectualism. The contribution of Latin American Studies to the Middle East is then reviewed allied to matters of religion and politics. The chapter closes with a discussion of the relationship between Regional and Global Studies and the shape of things to come. Claus Bech Hansen considers the challenges implicit in ‘Mastering the Current: Studying Central Asia in the Twenty-First Century’, in chapter 6. Stating that Central Asian Studies (CAS) belongs to a set of academic disciplines derogatively called the ‘orchid disciplines’ and that their exotic nature renders them irrelevant to the wider world, he discusses the paucity of students and implications for faculty. He notes the far-sightedness of the German Council for Science and Humanities report on globalization and consolidation of cultural and regional identities and

Introduction

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implications for policymakers. Discussing the progress of Central Asia Studies, their multidisciplinary methodologies and the development of theory, he draws together contributions from the humanities and social sciences marking out how NAS is already flourishing in CAS institutes around the world. Defining CAS, Hansen thinks about today’s interpretation of both the foreign and domestic. Defining boundaries of countries and disciplines, he notes that areas ‘are not facts but artefacts’ outlining the self-reflexive nature of CAS. Considering space in place he looks to Central Asia as a set of mobile societies struggling with matters of belonging, identity, migration, mobility, and power. Reviewing recent criticisms of older ideas of development and progress, Hansen alludes to local adaptation of economic restructuring, business and the post-soviet world economy. Finally, he makes an appeal for the combination of rich contextual knowledge to be combined with theory in the creation of a New Area Studies. Chapter 7, by Rob Gleave, examines ‘Muslim World Studies or Middle East Studies?’ Posing questions as to whether Muslims worldwide feel themselves to be part of a single geopolitical unit (the Muslim world), this chapter considers whether such a category makes sense in the academic context. Exploring the evolution of titles themselves, Gleave outlines the history of academic exploration of this part of the world in both universities and in disciplines. Engaging with the melee of delimitation of regions and names, he debates the importance of naming and its associated terminology – Middle East, Near (to what) East or even Far West. Turning to Africa he discusses many possible ways of conceptualising place and region, linking controversies over how best to study such places. Exploring the evolution of Middle East Studies, he notes the failure to predict the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islam. North American influence is recounted with the study of religion and Islam and the associated tension between Religious and Area Studies. All of this takes a quantum leap with the attack on the US on September 11, 2001, and the consequential breaking down (in the UK) of the monopoly of study of Islam in Middle East Studies departments. The designation of Islamic Studies by the British Government as a strategic subject in 2007 redirected study away from middle eastern matters to the British context of Islam and from language acquisition to religious concepts. Finally, Gleave considers the notion of Muslim World Studies and relations with the non-Muslim world. Zahia Smail Sahli and Ibrahim Alfraih address blurring the boundaries of history and fiction when re-imagining the past and redefining the present through the lens of Saudi women novelists in chapter 8. Arguing that the Orientalist cliché that the Middle East is a static society is nonsense, they tell us that today Saudia Arabia is undergoing a feminist awakening. Delving into Saudi literature to reconnoitre NAS, they combine history and fiction to explore the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and its aftermath. Engaging with women’s literature, gender and religion, they address themes of love, modernity, and social transformation. Together they consider how novelists are writing women back into history from a feminist perspective. Writing becomes the context through which political identities are forged; and

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women negotiate both the past and the present. Through the lens of Saudi female authors, they look deeply at the social transformation of the Middle East and offer up another means to understand New Area Studies through the use of history and fiction. Chapter 9, by Caroline Rosenthal, develops these ideas further by addressing the notion of ‘TransArea Studies: Gendered Mobility in North American Literature’. Taking head-on one of the key criteria of NAS, she argues that Comparative Area Studies have proven resilient in academia. In Germany, for example, she notes Area Studies are undergoing a renaissance promoting interdisciplinary, transcontinental, translocal and transnational work. This is the emergence of new comparative North American Studies, which puts Canadian literature and culture on an equal footing with those from the US. Rosenthal provides a reflective perspective which allows us to see the self through the other and vice versa. This paradigm shift, she believes, has increased transdisciplinary working between the social sciences, geography and literary studies. Concentrating on the semiotics of space and national cultural imaginaries, she investigates the self -conceptualisation of nations. Taking two contemporary novels – van Herk’s No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey and Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing – she explores how women have subverted social norms and gender expectations as well as space and national imaginaries. Rosenthal’s delightful consideration of unruly women in North America feeds into our blurring of genres so central to NAS – using female road novels to challenge embedded ideas of both gender and genre. Chapter 10, by Charles Batson, picks up these themes of movement and shifting meanings. In a superb chapter on Area and Circus Studies Batson challenges the shibboleths of old-fashioned Area Studies to examine the contribution of Quebec’s circus culture to New Area Studies. This gleeful chapter outlines how NAS works in practice, delineating the contribution of the cirques from Quebec (including Cirque du Soliel) as they sally forth around the globe. He reviews the circus artform, appreciating ‘Quebec’s cultural expressions and studies . . . as revelatory of impulses, tensions, and movements not rangebound by the borders of older . . . paradigms’ (129–30). So, cultural production becomes boundary crossing and images and identities constituent of NAS. Such innovation, Batson argues, demonstrates the erosion of spatial boundaries with which Area Studies previously constructed its subjects and its institutions. French Canada (and its literary studies) has broadened the English-Canadian project, eschewing the hegemonic, national borders, the cultural and linguistic concepts for what is not dominant, what is not the majority. Such exploration becomes the very ‘opposite of a universal’ (131). As TAS falls apart, we examine that which has previously been ignored. New complex identities are perused – Northeast America’s Franco-American communities and the French Atlantic. NAS thereby digs deep into unfamiliar ‘gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances’ layering our understanding of peoples and places. Nouveau cirque, for Batson, is both Quebecois (local) and newly global. Through its voyaging denizens the province’s culture literally conquers the world. And NAS enables a full appreciation of

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what Quebec has become: a nation de imagine creating an image of, and for itself, extending well beyond its borders. Chapter 11, by Denis and Amengay, presents us with a plethora of stories, some disturbing, concerning the Canada-US border in the era of Trump. Concentrating on the latest developments, they outline how people have lived and died in this space. Envisaging the border as more than a line, rather a zone, made up of time and space, they see the renaissance of Border Studies as a series of practices and discourses. Figurations of the border include all practices, processes and relations of institutions, including encounters of many types. Referring to Norbert Elias’s civilizing processes, they pay attention to societal interdependencies, imagining the border in several ways. First, as bureaucracy, the interaction between person, time, and space. Second, as dialectic, a way of doing history. Third, the border as a constellation or ensemble of figurations. So, borders can become a fiction (or not), the renaissance of the building of walls, fences and the mass movement of populations. Border Studies become then the world of discourses delineating between those inside and outside, those seen as them and us, safe and the dangerous (Amoore et al. 2008). All of this reveals the twenty-first century border as a deep dispositif encompassing surveillance, identification and risk assessment. Chapter 12, by Colin Coates, tackles a difficult subject close to the heart of the editors. Involving self-examination of Canada in the world, Coates outlines how that state has moved from a position of strongly supporting research and teaching on Canada around the globe to effectively working against the survival of Canadian Studies. An interesting article which sets the context of Canadian Studies within the wider Area Studies, it outlines a history of the development of Area Studies in Canada, where Coates casts a perceptive eye over the main players and, the role of academy and government. Outlining the rationale for setting up the study of Canada within and without the country, he outlines its reception by traditional Canadian disciplinary based scholars and their trenchant criticisms of its multidisciplinary approaches. Revealing the priorities of Canada’s colonial past, Coates notes the ‘basic justification of the Canadian Studies enterprise was the wish to acknowledge, understand and improve the polity in which the scholars and their students lived’ (159). Considering Canada’s relationships with its larger neighbour, the aim was to Canadianize the academy and transform views emanating from the country itself. Reviewing the history of Canada, he considers the ‘celebratory malaise’ of the onehundred-and-fiftieth year as unimpressive. Finally, the sad tale of the removal of Canadian Government support for Canadian Studies itself is laid bare; followed by the experience of an anti-Area Studies sentiment in Canada’s universities. The chapter closes with some comment on what Canada does and does not do well; and a prescient aside on how Canadian Studies facilitates thought and, importantly, useful international comparison for the country. Chapter 13, by Hodgett and James, examines what we have learnt concerning New Area Studies in this new century. It echoes the appeal of Mielke and Hor­nidge (2017:5) that we can realistically ‘no longer justify dividing the world into territorially

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fixed units’. What we need is a call for interdisciplinary and transregional Area Studies research; no less than a demand for a new architecture for Area ­Studies (7). This final chapter pulls together the collected wisdom from our contributors and their deep knowledge of various places and peoples. This concluding chapter makes the case for a New Area Studies grounded in necessary travel, using new and wider methodologies involving reflective practice and production of knowledge with locals. It argues the necessity of such broad and deep approaches in order to appreciate what is going on in the world in the twenty-first century and to help us see off the arrival of more and increasingly nasty unpredictable shocks.

NOTES 1. Ulster University. 2017. July 25, 2018, https​://ww​w.uls​ter.a​c.uk/​facul​ties/​arts-​human​ ities​-and-​socia​l-sci​ences​/scho​ols/a​pplie​d-soc​ial-p​olicy​-scie​nces/​resea​rch/b​lurri​ng-ge​nres.​ 2. Lambert (1990, 714) sees AS concerned with the need to understand countries after 1945 which Americans did not know. 3. For a definition of Brexit and an explanation see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-politics-32810887. 4. For one assessment see https​://ne​ws.sk​y.com​/stor​y/how​-woul​d-an-​emman​uel-m​acron​ -pres​idenc​y-aff​ect-b​rexit​-1084​9659.​ 5. For information on this initiative see https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/wo​rld/2​017/m​ ay/12​/the-​900bn​-ques​tion-​what-​is-th​e-bel​t-and​-road​-init​iativ​e. 6. Londoners, for example, declare their alienation (and anger) at the loss of life from a fire in the Grenfell Tower that did not have to happen. Those in Syria have endured merciless obliteration, millions on the African continent have suffered blockade, war or famine. And in Tunisia, and Iraq, thousands protest on the streets, with no end in sight. 7. Bueno de Mesquita (1985), called for collaboration between scholars who favored quantitative and qualitative methods. Clifford (1997) argued for ethnography to escape the effects of a local focus, Appadurai (1996) focused on circulatory processes and Rafael (1999: 1215) emphasized ‘otherness’. Marcus (1986) argued for a polyvocal and multi-sited ethnography, while Burawoy (2001) saw global ethnography taking account of external forces. 8. Dirlik (2002) outlines the theoretical turns in Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Studies. Aligned with developments in Islamic Studies, Indigenous Studies, Diasporic Studies and Confucian Studies. Wang (2002) considered the ‘global imaginary’ and Hozic (2015, 437) new borderlands and bloodlands. 9. Gibson-Graham (2004) sees research as ‘a rich resource for the theorization, observation and enactment of economic difference’. Hart (2006) considers historical ethnography and Horschelmann with Stenning (2008, 355) a ‘Cosmopolitan Area Studies’. 10. Graham and Kantor (2007) challenge the notion that area work is ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ social science. Rausch (2009) looks at theory building as local and Chen (2010) considers area-based research as method. Heryanto (2013, 437) wonders: can area-based research stand up to the objectifying gaze of American social science? 11. Heryanto concludes that claims for recognition are becoming the norm with indigenous peoples (2013, 313).

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12. Graham and Kantor (2007) argue that ‘insisting on a rigid division between ‘soft’ methods of Area Studies specialists and ‘hard’ methods of social scientists is simplistic. 13. Kubik (2015, 353) argues that ‘today’s political science .  .  . rewards the work by generalists-cum-area-specialists who are fluent in the most recent theorizing and have .  .  . mastered . . . cutting edge methodological tools . . . because they possess a thorough empirical knowledge of their areas’. 14. Kubik (2015) through his theory of contextual holism recommends dialogue with contextualists. Schierenbeck (2015) examines both institutions and agency, questioning the local/global binary dichotomy, creating new methods through inter-epistemological research. 15. See https​://ww​w.eco​nomis​t.com​/news​/scho​olsbr​ief/2​15845​34-ef​f ects​-fina​ncial​-cris​ is-ar​e-sti​ll-be​ing-f​elt-f​i ve-y​ears-​artic​le.

REFERENCES Amoore, L., Marmura, S. and Salter, M. B. 2008. ‘Editorial: Smart Borders and Mobilities: Spaces, Zones, Enclosures’, Surveillance & Society 5 (2): 96–101. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bueno de Mesquita, B. 1985. ‘Toward a Scientific Understanding of International Conflict: A Personal View’, International Studies Quarterly 29 (2): 121–36. Burawoy, M. 2001. ‘Manufacturing the Global’, Ethnography 2: 147–59. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century. Boston: Harvard University Press. Clowes, E., and Bromberg, S. 2016. Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity. Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press. Chen, K. 2010. Asia as Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dirlik, A. 2002. ‘Asia Pacific Studies for the New Millennium’. Address presented at conference on Remaking Asia Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii, December 2–5. Friedman, U. 2017. ‘Is American Democracy Really Under Threat?’ The Atlantic. June, 21. https​://ww​w.the​atlan​tic.c​om/in​terna​tiona​l/arc​hive/​2017/​06/am​erica​n-dem​ocrac​y-tru​ mp/53​0454/​(accessed, January 13, 2018). Graham, L., and Kantor, J. 2007. ‘‘‘Soft” Area Studies versus “Hard” Social Science: A False Opposition’, Slavic Studies, 66 (1): 1–19. Gibson-Graham, J. 2004. ‘Area Studies after Post Structuralism’, Environment and Planning. A 36: 405–19. Hart, G. 2006. ‘Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism’, Antipode 978–1004. Heryanto, A. 2013. ‘The Intimacies of Cultural Studies and Area Studies: The Case of Southeast Asia’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 16: 303–16. Horschelmann, K., and Stenning, A. 2008. ‘Ethnographies of Postsocialist Change’, Progress in Human Geography 32 (3): 339–61. Hozic, A. 2015. ‘Eastern European Studies: A Question and Some Ambivalence’, Eastern European Politics and Societies and Cultures 29 (2): 433–39. Jung, D. 2014. ‘The “Ottoman-German Jihad”: Lessons for the Contemporary “Area Studies” Controversy’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41 (3): 247–65.

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Kay, R., and Oldfield, J. 2011. ‘Emotional Engagements with the Field: A View from Area Studies’, Europe Asia Studies 63 (7): 1275–93. Klein, N. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise in Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador. Kubik, J. 2015. ‘Between Contextualisation and Comparison: A Thorny Relationship between Eastern European Studies and Disciplinary Mainstreams’, Eastern European Politics and Societies and Cultures 29 (2): 352–65. Lambert, R. 1990. ‘Blurring the Disciplinary Boundaries: Area Studies in the United States’, American Behavioral Scientist 33 (6): 712–32. Marcus, G. 1986. ‘Contemporary problems of ethnography in the modern world system’. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by Clifford, J., and Marcus, G. (pp. 165–93). Berkeley: University of California Press. Mielke, K., and Hornidge, A. K. 2017. Area Studies at the Crossroads: Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. Pikkety, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Peters, M. 2018. ‘The End of Neoliberal Globalization and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 50 (4): 323–25. Rafael, V. 1999. ‘Regionalism, Area Studies and the Accidents of Agency’, American Historical Review Oct: 1208–20. Rausch, A. 2009. ‘Creating Tsugaru Studies: The Paradox of Area Studies at the local Level’, Journal of International and Area Studies 16 (2): 35–51. Rhodes, R. A. W., and Hodgett, S. Forthcoming, 2019. What Political Science Can Learn From the Humanities-Blurring Genres, London: Palgrave. Schierenbeck, I. 2015. ‘Beyond the Local Turn Divide: Lessons Learnt, Relearnt and Unlearnt’, Third World Quarterly 36 (5): 1023–32. Sharma, M. 2005. ‘Beyond the Boundaries of Asia Pacific Studies’, Futures 37: 989–1003. Stiglitz, J. 2017. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-globalization in the Age of Trump. London: Penguin Books.

II NEW AREA STUDIES AROUND THE GLOBE

2 New Area Studies in the Borderlands of Asia Mandy Sadan

Academics working within South East Asian Studies must be some of the most reflective and even introspective of all area specialists, at least if the number of conferences, workshops, journal articles, and edited volumes that critique the region as an area is indicative of a genuine, wider academic concern (Kratoska et al. 2005; Chou and Houben 2006). It can of course be argued that this reflexivity adds to the overarching intellectual vibrancy of the field. In part, what makes South East Asia Studies so dynamic and intellectually engaging for those who teach, research, and write about it is precisely this desire, if not compulsion, to be constantly revisiting the ‘idea’ of South East Asia. At the heart of that desire to critique South East Asia over the last two decades would seem to be a concern that the intellectual output of Area-related research and teaching about South East Asia should also be responsive to the needs of South East Asia itself: academics in the region must at the very least be co-producers of knowledge, especially given that the region is conceptualized as a pivotal geography in the unfolding ‘Asian Century’ (Heryanto 2015). This might suggest that there is a large cohort of South East Asian-ists within the region who are ready to rejuvenate the field. While this is true, many of these local scholars nonetheless also face challenges in persuading local students to engage the notion of Area as a prolonged intellectual endeavor. An expanding demographic of young people accessing higher education in Malaysia, or Singapore or Indonesia, for example, sees most students unsurprisingly opt for subjects more likely to secure jobs and careers than the pursuit of Area-based knowledge driven by the humanities and social sciences. A wider knowledge base about individual nations has emerged with local voice, but the notion of an ‘Area’ approach still seems to have less appeal because of the methodological nationalism that has had great influence for many years. 19

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Despite this intellectual vibrancy, therefore, South East Asia is an Area that seems also to be under existential threat in many higher education institutions, both globally and in the region itself. Area programs often struggle to draw in large student cohorts compared to other regions in the pantheon of ‘Asia’. South East Asia programs may themselves partly be at fault, not least because we seem often to be so determined to transfer our anxiety about ‘what’ South East Asia ‘is’ to our students. We often commence South East Asia–focused Area training by confronting our students with the question of whether or not South East Asia can be deemed to ‘exist’ at all, citing its troubling origins in hierarchies of western intellectual traditions, imperialism, militarism, and postcolonial nationalism, and the legacies of these influences upon the Area itself as well as upon region-focused knowledge construction: we somehow expect our students to grapple with this challenge in ‘Week One, South East Asia 101’. The self-imposed pressure to deal with South East Asia as a ‘total fact’ (Mauss 1970) may also complicate things further, both for our students and for ourselves. South East Asia programs typically seek to build knowledge through equal coverage and comparison of the entire region, with the implication that we fail to fulfil the objective of Area Studies if we do not demonstrate the convergences and synergies of all the eleven modern nations of the region equally. However, teaching that demands depth and breadth of coverage about one of the most diverse, populous, and polyglot regions in the world is a logistical challenge for small academic centres or departments that typically constitute the institutional fields, as much as it is an individual intellectual challenge for the faculty and staff tasked with teaching it. Robert Cribb, the former Director of the Southeast Asia Institute at ANU, Canberra, once referenced the lack of realism in the challenge that we have set ourselves when he wrote that ‘we all write in practice about less – or more – than the region as a whole. Southeast Asia is not much more than a convenient geographical and administrative receptacle for our diverse endeavours’ (Cribb 2012: 503–5). Yet Area Studies of South East Asia have had an influence on the field beyond this region and the regional bibliography includes significant and path-breaking works, which transcend its geographical scope and have influenced the disciplinebased humanities and social sciences more broadly (for example, Anderson 1983 and Lieberman 2003). But the fact remains that most general textbooks about the region continue to be multi-authored edited volumes, bringing together specialists of individual nations to speak in parallel conversations with each other, and this approach tends to typify the strengths and the limitations of Traditional Regional Studies: internal fragmentation of knowledge production through parallel conversations about a collective of states within which researchers tend to be individually embedded (Tarling 1999; Steinberg 1987). Of course, this is a characterisation that is increasingly being challenged, but it has defined the region’s academic sense of self for many years. Specialists of other Areas of Asia appear to be less introspective, and the ‘total fact’ of the respective Area is typically considered less of an epistemological problem

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and more of a self-evident reality. Yet methodological nationalism surely underpins any South Asia–focused programme, for example, that focuses almost entirely on India and makes only passing reference to the states and kingdoms constituted by the post-partition framework of ‘the Asian Sub-Continent’. Yet it is relatively common for Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the trans-Himalayan states to be at best subsidiary or more often non-existent in South Asia programs. This lack or absence of attention to the full spread of South Asia may seem surprising for a South East Asian-ist encouraged to confront the discontinuities created by multiple national frameworks and the pressure to cover them all with equal insight. Similarly, East (or Eastern) Asia programs typically divide between a predominant concern with China, Japan and Korea as powerful and distinct alternative sites of knowledge.1 The Republic of Taiwan or Mongolia may be absent or seen as ‘peripheral’, yet without causing an existential crisis in the departments charged with teaching about East Asia. There are undoubtedly internal rumblings of discontent about the myopia of South Asian Studies, but the responses and proposed alternatives have been sometimes intellectually just as limiting. Attempts have been made to popularise a new Area that might be called Trans-Himalayan Studies (of which more will be said later in the context of ‘Zomia’) or, more awkwardly, Northern South Asia (Gellner 2013), to ensure greater inclusion of Nepal, or even as far as Afghanistan within the South Asia+ region. In East Asia Studies, too, the peripheries and margins of East or Eastern Asia have been carved out increasingly as a separate space, as a newly constituted Area Studies bloc called Central Asia. Perhaps one of the most impressive re-positionings of Asia as a globally connected geo-political entity (most importantly providing connected histories with Africa) is that of the frame of Indian Ocean Studies, which has also successfully re-centred places such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, whereas traditional South Asia has marginalised or de-centred them in relation to India. Given the mandate of this volume, which emphasizes New Area Studies, we perhaps should view these recent geopolitical Area permutations as evidence of the challenges faced by Traditional Area Studies (TAS) rather than as anything fundamentally distinctive. More significantly, the fact that these reformulations are occurring at the peripheries and margins of mainstream TAS zones suggests that there may be a common fault-line within the TAS model, which is perhaps being exacerbated by the pace of change in global interconnections on the back of globalization and the ‘borderless’ world of the digital realm, and the various contestations that have arisen in response to this. As outlined in the introduction to this volume, TAS is now confronted by a globalising world that has created new pressures for thinking about the changing contours of interconnectedness. These shifts and demands for recognition arising from the margins of Asia’s dominant TAS frameworks may be one manifestation of that epochal challenge, in which globalization, new regionalisms and sharpened nationalisms all influence and strive to unmake the TAS model but do so largely by creating more and more TAS sub-regions.

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NEW AREAS DO NOT MAKE NEW AREA STUDIES The ‘Zomia’ Debate Clearly, however, the production of a newly named Area does not necessarily reflect or produce a break with TAS; indeed, naming ever more geographically refined Areas does not constitute New Area Studies (NAS) at all. In this case, the debates that have emerged in recent years around the idea of ‘Zomia’ provide insights into the limitations of TAS and the potential distinctiveness of NAS. This debate has been particularly important in my own work, insofar as it relates to the regions that are distributed today between South, East and South East Asia, and even Central Asia in some models – the trans-border regions of Myanmar, northeast India and the eastern boundaries of Bangladesh, southwestern China and Tibet to the north. Re-identifying these through a model of Trans-Himalayan Studies is, to my mind, just as unsatisfactory a response to dealing with the interconnectedness of these places as is the TAS model. However, this is best explored through the recent, and highly influential debates around the concept known as ‘Zomia’. This has been an important intervention in the TAS framework, especially as it relates to South East Asia Area Studies and borderland zones at the meeting point of many ‘Asias’. The term ‘Zomia’ was coined in 2002 by Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam, as part of his path-breaking article ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance’. ‘Zomia’ is a concept that van Schendel developed and applied to the upland and mountain regions of the extended Himalaya. It therefore encompasses a contingent but broadly interconnected set of ecological and geographical zones and spaces, enabling a case to be made even for extending its boundaries deep into western China, or in some models to reach as far west as the Caucasus. Nonetheless, the original idea focused on the extended Himalaya up to the mountainous regions of western Yunnan. Insofar as Zomia was ‘created’ largely to demonstrate a point rather than to name a new region, being any more precise about what its boundaries might be is largely irrelevant for the purposes of this chapter, notwithstanding that it initially provoked considerable debate around whether the ecological boundaries of the new region should be drawn at elevations of 200m, 500m, or 2000m (Michaud, 2010). A key element in how the Zomia concept gained credibility and support so quickly is related to its geophysical visibility in the new global digital realm created by Google Earth from 2001 onwards. What makes this ‘region’ appear to be a contiguous geophysical zone – a good candidate for a newly designated Area – is its characteristic features of elevation and the ecological continuities that arise as a consequence, which are brought out sharply in the colour calibration of Google Earth imagery. Satellite images show a dull brown contiguous feature dominating a vast area of Asia, cutting across TAS regions, with a white-flecked inner ridge running into a plateau of considerable size: this is the Himalayan range with the Tibetan plateau to the north and, eastwards, the montane zone recently termed the South East Asian Massif (Michaud, 2006). From the perspective of geography alone, here

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was a region that deserved to be recognised as much as the Asian sub-continent, and certainly more so than the geo-political unit Central Asia. Van Schendel floated the idea that in naming this hypothetical Area, an indigenous term could be deployed, which might evoke this sense of commonality and of local ownership of the knowledge of the region – ‘Zomia’. This was derived from a term that circulates within some communities in the Chittagong and Chin hills regions, spanning the borderlines of India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar – ‘Zo’, a general term that has broad connotations with the notion of ‘man/human’. Yet Zomia was intended to be entirely polemical to highlight some of the deficiencies of Area Studies as institutionalized in post–World War II higher education, especially in the US. Van Schendel’s article brought attention to the apparently absurd situation in which places on the map where the Area Studies fault lines of South, East and South East Asia meet become entirely discontinuous in academic discourse and knowledge production defined by TAS. The key example he gives is that of the eastern reaches of the Himalaya, along the boundaries that demarcate the international borderlines of India, Tibet and Burma (Myanmar). There, communities in regular communication with each other become almost entirely disconnected through the institutionalised framework of academic Area Studies, which ignore the trans-boundary interactions and ‘life’ of this zone. Furthermore, the villages at these borderlines are in areas that are highly marginalised within their own national contexts: they exist at the margins of post–World War II states, have frequently experienced endemic levels of low-level conflict and, because of their ecological characteristics, have been also at the core of global opium production since World War II. Van Schendel extrapolated from this micro-context to Area Studies more generally, but with particular reference to Asia. Methodological nationalism, he argued, dominates Area Studies even while it claims to offer up trans-national perspectives to counter this tendency. These micro-regions at the margins of many ‘Asias’, while lacking economic development or much local infrastructure, but being also home to non-national or sub-national communities with distinct languages, cultures and historical sensibilities, were doubly marginalised by the TAS model. Dis-connectivity created by Area-focused academic approaches is, in van Schendel’s model of Zomia, just yet another part of a common experience of peripheralization, in which national policies and institutionalized academia at national and international levels converge to produce and confirm the same outcome: Areas which may be defined by being ‘Geographies of Ignorance’. Following van Schendel’s incisive critique, which was essentially intended as a critique of the limitations of TAS, the idea of ‘Zomia’ was taken up with fervour, but with a different intention and orientation, by the political scientist James C. Scott. Scott deployed the idea to great effect in his work The Art of Not Being Governed (2009). However, Scott’s take on Zomia was that the peripheralization and political problems of these zones at the upland boundaries of modern states did indeed render them a real, rather than hypothetical region, the naming of which was justified beyond the purely polemical intentions outlined by van Schendel. Scott’s treatise is

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of Zomia as a zone of resistance to the state, and that the social and cultural formations that are found in this area as a unified whole are consequences of ecologically framed, state-evading strategies. Scott’s Zomia has become one of the most influential works of the last decade in promoting South East Asia as a site for intellectual experimentation – but for those of us who are critical of much of the analysis, as well as the underlying evidence base of the work (and there seems to be a notable rupture between historians and political scientists on this matter), this new fetishism around the Area focus of Zomia as ‘an-Other’ place merely consolidates some of the problems of TAS that van Schendel was seeking to highlight, without actually rectifying them. A new ‘tribe’ of scholars is privileged, bringing attention to some regions that had been marginalized through methodological nationalism, while also exceptionalising them rather than seeing them as interconnected with worlds / regions / states / villages / cultures / languages /ecologies beyond. Critically for many of us who question the impact of the work in promoting genuine interdisciplinary enquiry about these places, Scott’s Zomia constructs the meta-narrative of the new Area in a pre-determined way. While South East Asian-ists struggle to find the inner echt of the region (Wolters 1999), ‘Zomianists’ already have the ‘meaning’ of Zomia as a total fact laid out before them as an integrating model envisioned by Scott: it has been created to evade the expansionist power of the state and all of its cultural, economic and political history and formation is rooted in this singular proposition, with all exceptions explained as merely ‘proving the rule’. The ‘Zomia’ concept as promoted by Scott, although it draws its primary references from debates within political science, is heavily reliant on a limited and largely colonially produced evidence base interwoven with more modern ethnographies (particularly from the Karen region on the borderlands of Myanmar and Thailand) that are heavily oriented to political experiences of oppression in recent decades. As such, it tends on the whole to encourage a rather traditional form of ethnohistory methodologically, despite the apparent radicalism of its conclusions. It can even to some extent be considered a post-colonial if not a post-modern reinvention of a British imperial perspective relating to the interconnections of frontier upland zones that were constructed as the North West and the North East Frontiers of the British Empire in India. Certainly the corpus of colonial-era documentation about this space presently constitutes a large part of Zomia’s historical source and reference material, and especially its historical ethnography.2 It is undeniable that the perception that highland geographies and the communities that inhabited them had distinct characteristics had traction from a range of vantage points that pre-dated interventions from western imperial powers: British officials (especially those operating on global scales overseeing military developments and strategy) identified and sharpened the perception of underlying convergences and divergences between ‘hills’ and ‘plains’ rather than created them from nothing. Some of these local or ‘indigenous’ models combine notions of ecological and cultural inter-relationship, producing distinctions between highland and lowland, the

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‘raw’ and the ‘cooked’, the civilised and the ‘barbarian’ (Fiskesjö 1999). These were local, or trans-local concepts rather than unifying notions of a broad geopolitical space of difference and disconnection. However, none of these local constructs had the same panoptic capabilities for constructing the trans-Himalaya ‘frontiers’ as both an imaginary and an administrative function as did the British Empire in India at the peak of ‘High Imperialism’. The Qing dynasty and its Republican successor was the main challenger to the panoptic capacities of the British trans-Himalayan view, but the history of ‘proto-Zomia’ as constructed by Scott is in a very real way primarily a remodelling of the colonial archive through the lens of anarchist idealism. The editors of this volume describe TAS as ‘soft social science’ that works by blending disciplines, being descriptive, cultural, historical, and contextual, and this is probably a good description of the methodological underpinnings of Scott’s Zomia, albeit with a hard-edged, political agenda at its heart. Scott’s Zomia also does not engage the methodological dilemmas of research in this new Area in ways that are inclusive or innovative: it sets up a set of methodological strategies that propose the boundedness of the Area and which create new forms of blindness or ‘ignorance’. If we wish to see signs of NAS in the concept of ‘Zomia’, we should return to the proposition made by van Schendel and consider where those arguments may lead us in terms of methodological insight.

WORKING IN THE BORDERLANDS OF ASIA Is the Notion of Area Really the Problem that NAS Needs to Address? At this point, it may be well to return to my own ‘Necessary Travels’ in this part of Asia. Despite working across the region of northern Myanmar that sits between India and Bangladesh (South Asia), China (East Asia), Thailand and Laos (South East Asia), I feel increasingly forced to question whether it is still really accurate to say that US/Western-dominated Area Studies create the primary impediment to learning about this space, or whether Area Studies specialists have perhaps become too used to this trope, such that a proper critical evaluation of it as an explanatory model of the present is rather lacking. Perhaps we need a revised and more detailed consideration of the issues that now stand as impediments to knowledge of spaces zones Areas such as this. This will also need to include the challenge that the new digital infrastructure of global connectedness creates to notions of elite academic knowledge as well. Van Schendel’s notion of Zomia and its provocation towards knowledge hierarchies came at the cusp of Web 2.0. This development in itself has brought new communities of interpretation into the mainstream discourse; academics are now no longer so privileged in their claims to singular forms of knowledge and insight as they might previously have been, especially when wider commentaries and often deeper experiences break down boundaries of ‘knowing’ through the interactive and immediately responsive web. Yet to date, this vital facet of the

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post-Web 2.0 world has not yet been fully incorporated into the challenge of Zomia as configured by van Schendel – but it surely extends van Schendel’s arguments into new and significant directions with regard to the limitations of TAS. Yet on the ground, there are challenges, as well as the broader disruption created by cyber space. Working across this space from western Yunnan to northeastern India and spaces in all other compass directions, certainly presents very real and often logistical challenges. Not least these challenges arise because of the realities of the local political situations that continue to make this a fragmented space in which conflict is, sadly, an everyday reality. I would contest that the real problem is no longer TAS and the regional dividing up into different Asias per se, but rather this political reality – and that the new digital realm of academia has helped us to move beyond simply saying that it is an academic ‘problem’. A decade or so ago, TAS and the boundedness of knowledge-region was certainly still a concern, and for some who are still embedded in methodological nationalism or retain myopic views of their own region, there is still a difficulty in bringing together knowledge about northeast India with that of southwest China, for example.3 However, the development of the internet has transformed academic communications and interactions - including with a wider range of audiences and communities of interpretation; the most interesting developments in academia have flourished in this new globally interconnected technoscape. If I wish to find out more about Yunnan in China to support my research, I can contact local institutions, attend conferences, read papers, and there are no particular constraints upon this. There may still be institutional limitations with regard to Area Studies teaching and cross-regional interactions, but it would be a misrepresentation to state that this in any way constitutes a solid barrier to knowledge development anymore. Some of us may engage in regional boundary crossing more than others, but the stereotype of rigid TAS boundaries – certainly as it is stereotypically represented in South East Asian Studies – is challenged sufficiently to mean that TAS as a set of bounded academic regions that are not in conversation with each other is not perhaps the ‘problem’ to be overcome in pursuing this research; it is not the impediment that it once was. What then are the main impediments to shared knowledge construction about these areas at the margins of many Asias? We should perhaps return again to the characterization of South East Asia Studies with which this chapter began. In recent years, TAS in South East Asia has been critiqued as a framework of outsiders looking into the region, rather than being defined and constructed through local knowledge production. As Cribb states, ‘Academic research on Southeast Asia – probably more than in South Asian or East Asian Studies – has been dominated by scholars from outside the region: from the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. This external dominance is ethically unsatisfactory: why should Southeast Asians not speak for themselves instead of depending on foreign spokespersons?’ (Cribb 2012). Ariel Heryanto has been at the forefront of efforts to reclaim the intellectual space of South East Asia as one that should be primarily of and for and by scholars from the region (Heryanto 2015). This is clearly imperative and at the least, both

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TAS and NAS knowledge needs to be co-produced. There is general recognition that the tanker is starting to turn in this regard, and the recent conference of the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 10 held in Chiang Mai University) is evidence of this. The conference panels were full of local and Asia-based regional scholars, and the prestigious book prize was also extended to cover major languages other than English, including Chinese and Korean.4 These challenges to the western-dominant model of TAS reflect on the ownership of the region and of knowledge about the region, and for the need to decolonise knowledge structures and institutional frameworks. This is not very different from the position that van Schendel took in delivering his polemic on ‘Zomia’. However, there must still be space for co-production and to reflect that knowledge is multi-sited and must incorporate a greater range of reference points, especially in its decolonised model. Aihwa Ong calls for ‘inter-Asian referencing’ as one way of dealing with this issue (2011), and Chen Kuan-Hsing states that western (EuroAmerican) reference points should be incorporated as one of a multiple framework of reference points (2010). However, this, too, is not necessarily the key issue with regard to the problems experienced in developing knowledge at the margins of Asia. The reorientation towards the co-production of knowledge, and even the ‘ownership’ of the region by the people of the region, does not by itself remove the problems inherent to methodological nationalism that has delimited TAS to date and which has produced ‘Geographies of Ignorance’. Scholars from the TAS regions are themselves part of the hierarchies that lead to the exclusion of areas such as those where I work from the central discourse. An example where this hierarchization even among local scholars predominates is where ASEAN has been used to construct a central program for delivering Asian regionalism supported by academic endeavor. From the perspectives of the places where I work, this is hardly scratching the surface of how their integration into new knowledge patterns of Area Studies scholars within the region may be facilitated, or how regional academic elites and institutions can adapt to the post Web 2.0 disruption of norms of ‘knowing’, especially in collaboration with those who still, largely and often, remain excluded as contributors to regional knowledge other than as ‘objects’.

TRANSFORMING TAS INTO NAS IN THE BORDERLANDS OF ASIA The inclusion of regional scholars who do not yet challenge the significance of methodological nationalism within their own institutions, learning and teaching is now a more significant problem than the broader framework of TAS as a set of Western-defined discontinuous regions. One of the most noticeable lacks in the areas where I conduct my own research now, rather than ten years ago or more when the Zomia concept was first presented, is the framing of these issues within the regions

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concerned. An example here might be the way in which Myanmar has become so disconnected from ‘South Asia’. Despite the fact that Burma was incorporated as a province of British India for most of its time under colonial rule, the legacy of that fraught relationship is still evidenced in the fact that, despite sharing such an extended formal history of integration, and an even longer one of informal bi-lateral relationships and influences, it is very apparent that it is rare for courses on India taught within India to include the history of Burma. Likewise, the history of South Asia is approached as a separate entity within Burma, even though the integration with the histories of many Indian states is deeply intertwined with the historical Burmese kingdoms, and as Burma’s ‘near abroad’ exerts a continuing influence upon its political and especially its economic development. This pattern can be repeated in many places. It also tends to assume that in creating new frameworks of collaboration and interaction, facilitated by the new global digital framework of TAS, that the pieces fall into place and that TAS will simply renew through these revisions. Clearly this is not enough. The control of research through national bodies that define what is or is not ‘appropriate’ learning, academic censorship, the capacity to listen openly to a range of perspectives that have been marginalised from the narrative of the production of the nation, are all things that are necessary to enable new kinds of learning that is multi-vocal, includes multiple Asian and global reference points and which may enable the creative formulation of different forms of connection in a range of mobile and fluid new Areas. The key to understanding this problem requires introspection not only or even primarily within institutions and frameworks of the EuroAmerican knowledge hub, but also within the region itself, where methodological nationalism remains a primary delimitation on greater inclusion. The decolonization of Area Studies – the human relationships that constitute research and academic disciplines – needs also to focus on Area Studies as a set of practices that lead to exclusion of certain kinds of knowledge and of certain knowledge communities as much as they might offer avenues of inclusion. New Area Studies in South East Asia must be based on this kind of internal reconfiguration within the region, and not just in its external relations. It still has to engage with the core of van Schendel’s polemical exposé of the limits of TAS in relation to understanding these regions at the intersections of many Asias, and that the problem today is as much an internal regional one as it is a construct of post-war and Cold War western academia.

NOTES 1. See http:​//ica​s.asi​a/en/​call-​books​-and-​disse​rtati​ons-i​cas-b​ook-p​rize-​2017.​ 2. Assessing this is made more difficult by the fact that Scott has not included a bibliography in the book, and relies instead entirely on chapter endnotes. See Lieberman in Michaud (2010). 3. The Asian Borderlands Research Network was set up specifically to deal with this issue. See http://www.asianborderlands.net/. 4. See http:​//ica​s.asi​a/en/​call-​books​-and-​disse​rtati​ons-i​cas-b​ook-p​rize-​2017.​

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REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chou C., and Houben V., eds. 2006. South East Asian Debates and New Directions. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Cribb, Robert. 2012. ‘South East Asia: A Good Place to Start From’. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkendunde 168 (4): 503–5. Fiskesjö, Magnus. 1999. ‘On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China’. Inner Asia 1 (2): 139–68. Gellner, D., ed. Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013 Heryanto, A. 2015. ‘Asia Literacy: A Deeply Problematic Metaphor’. In The Social Sciences in the Asian Century, edited by C. Johnson, V. Mackie and T. Morris-Suzuki (pp. 171–89). Canberra: ANU Press. Kratoska, P., Raben, R., and Nordholt, H. S., eds. 2005. Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space. Singapore: Singapore University Press. Lieberman, Victor. 2003. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, C. 800-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1970. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen & West. Michaud, Jean. 2006.  Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Michaud, Jean. 2010. ‘Editorial – Zomia and Beyond’, Journal of Global History 5 (2): 187–214. Ong, Aihwa. 2011. ‘Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global’. In Worlding Cities: Asia Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (pp. 1–26). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Sadan, Mandy. 2013. Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Steinberg, David Joel. 1987. In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History. Revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Tarling, N., ed. 1999. Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolters, O. W. 1999. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University.

3 Sovietology’s Afterlife New Paradigms and New Area Studies Stephen Hutchings

THE SLOW, PAINFUL DEATH OF SOVIETOLOGY Focusing primarily on the United Kingdom (UK), this chapter will provide a brief overview of the challenges faced by Sovietology and related disciplines following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, to show how the field is being regenerated, and to identify key priorities for the future. I first outline the difficulties that Sovietology’s successors encountered in the aftermath of 1991, then recall the global events that created the momentum for their regeneration. Via developments in my own specialist area, I sketch an exposition of New Area Studies (NAS) agendas and paradigms, stressing the importance of cross-disciplinary and comparative research. I conclude by underlining the compelling need for NAS to be language-based. Throughout, I adopt an institutional as well as an intellectual perspective, touching upon the university context in which Area Studies is practiced in the UK including its vulnerability to student recruitment patterns. Sovietology was a key subfield within Area Studies, providing one of the strongest rationales for the latter’s continuing importance. Its heyday coincided with the Cold War period, when western policy makers were thirsty for scholarly insight into the workings of a nation whose hold over the communist world and its sympathisers seemed to threaten the very foundations of the post-colonial ‘Free World’ (Wang 2002). This was also a time when public interest in the different sub-branches of Soviet Studies was underpinned by a fascination for what lay behind the Iron Curtain, occasionally tinged with the remnants of left-wing revolutionary romanticism, but more often combined with a belief that the principle of Know Thine Enemy accorded the study of the Soviet Union particular value.1 Unsurprisingly, perceptions of a looming ‘crisis’ in Area Studies more broadly coincided with the demise of communism in Eastern Europe as the twentieth 31

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century neared its end. Bolstered briefly by Gorbachev’s glasnost2, the rationale for Sovietology receded as quickly as Gorbachev himself disappeared from the public eye after 1991.3 Nor did any benefit derived from the democratic, free-market credentials of Russia’s charismatic (and still sober) new president, Yeltsyn, guarantee Sovietology’s afterlife. Russia succumbed first to economic humiliation in the mid-to-late 1990s, then to authoritarian rule and an increasingly provocative foreign policy from 2000 when Putin assumed the presidency. Putin may have rescued Russia’s status as a ‘Great Power’, but his country’s near-pariah status throughout the western world has barely enhanced institutional support for post-Sovietology legacy disciplines.4 The situation was compounded by developments in the academy. In some corners of the social sciences, a turn to abstracted empiricism and grand theory was supplanting careful study of individual geographical regions.5 As social scientists specializing in the economical, (geo)political and social aspects of the Soviet Union and the ‘Eastern bloc’ were absorbed by departments in which such trends prevailed, it became difficult to sustain careers founded on dedication to regional specificity. A vivid example of the deleterious influence of universalizing theory is the fate of ‘Transitology’ – a theory founded on the notion that regime change (principally, from forms of authoritarianism to democratic models) can be studied as a single process conforming to common patterns.6 It soon became apparent that several countries stubbornly failed to follow the prescribed models of development, that the assumed trajectory is not universally guaranteed and that Transitology had suffered a ‘glorious failure’ (Agh 2005). Transitology’s replacement has not been helped by issues of identity and institutional support affecting Sovietology’s legacy disciplines. The identity problem is encapsulated in the naming of the associations that provide them with a national voice, for example the ‘American Association for the Advancement of Slavic and East European Studies’ (AAASS) and the ‘British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies’ (BASEES). Even during the Soviet period, the assumption that (i) Slavic/Slavonic ethnicities and languages should prevail over a homogenised ‘Eastern Europe’, and (ii) the occlusion of Central Asia (which as part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, henceforth USSR, fell within the scope of the two associations, but was neither ‘Slavic’ nor ‘East European’ was problematic. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, these contradictions crystallized. AAASS responded by rebranding itself as the ‘Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies’ (ASEES), doing nothing to address the first issue, and resolving the second by introducing a notion that is itself ideologically fraught; ‘Eurasianism’ is tainted by the imperialist aspirations of some of that movement’s founders and latterday proponents, who, nostalgic for the loss of imperial Russia’s former Central Asian territories, portray contemporary Russia as the dominant power in an emergent new geopolitical configuration bridging Europe with Asia (Laruelle 2012). BASEES decided, for want of a plausible alternative, to keep its previous name and remit. However, retaining the loyalty of scholars working on Central Asia, let alone non-Slavic Romania or Hungary, proves difficult. Nor does the introduction of the

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term ‘post-Soviet’ offer a solution, begging questions about whether the nations to which the term refers wish to be forever defined by their communist pasts (Moore 2001). Problems of identity and scope are compounded by the withering of large concentrations of disciplinary specialists, including the near demise of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES), established in 1963 as a full departmental unit, and downgraded to network status in 2013. This precipitated the dispersal elsewhere of political scientists, economists, sociologists, historians and linguists with regional expertise. Meanwhile, the teaching of Russian and other languages of the region (inasmuch as they are offered at all), and research into the relevant cultures, remain in hollowed-out Russian Sections, within larger Schools of Modern Languages, themselves vulnerable to student recruitment and related pressures.7 Frequently hosted in different faculties, with competing priorities and divergent resourcing levels, social scientists and literary/cultural studies specialists in the former Soviet region encountered hitherto unthinkable barriers to cross-disciplinary collaboration; bifurcating intellectual priorities and methodological cultures, for example, have led to each branch of the formerly unified discipline seeking collaborative research grants from separate funding bodies, rather than combining efforts. The bifurcation was reinforced by the incremental foregrounding in Higher Education in the UK, and to an extent, North America, of market and policy-led trends. In Britain, the arrival of ‘Knowledge Exchange’ and ‘Impact’ agendas for research in the early 2000s was eventually embraced across the humanities (including its ‘soft’ end).8 But, with Russia resurgent under Putin, Politics and Economics scholars found the adjustment easier. Prior to 1991, researchers in the literatures and cultures of the Soviet region rarely needed to concern themselves with doubts about their ‘relevance’, benefiting from public perceptions that everything relating to our Cold War adversaries was significant. With the introduction of tuition fees under the first Blair government of 1997 to 2001 in the UK, teaching, too, became subject to unfamiliar external pressures. The realization that degree curricula must keep pace with the growing emphasis on career needs was accompanied by anxiety that, cut adrift from the social sciences, staff in Russian language and literature departments lacked the training or the inclination to imbue courses shaped by the historical canons of High Culture with policy relevance. The diminishing number of students registering for Modern Languages degrees (including Russian), by contrast, could ill afford what many of them perceived as the indulgence of Lermontov’s poetry, or the finer points of Slavonic morphology. What they wanted were insights into contemporary Russia of value to future employers and, above all, intensive training in practical language skills. The general crisis in UK Modern Languages departments was exacerbated by the health of University language centres offering precisely the no-nonsense, practical language training which students from non-languages disciplines, and members of the general public, desired. The very success of such centres, combined

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with declining recruitment to languages degrees, placed in question the need for research-led departments and schools of Modern Languages, nothwithstanding the best efforts of the UK’s research councils to offset the trends by allocating funding to support five ‘Language-Based Area Studies’ centres during the 2000s.9

A CONTEXT FOR REGENERATION During the same period world events began to furnish a rationale for the renewal of Area Studies which, in fact, never really disappeared from the intellectual map, but had, below the radar, been tracking the roots of these events. Responses to the 9/11 attacks marked the beginning of the painful recognition that the apparent vacuum created by the end of the Cold War was now being filled by radical jihadist threats emanating from regions of the world in which informed policy expertise at the highest levels of government was sadly lacking.10 At the end of the decade, the first stirrings of the ‘Arab Spring’ hit news headlines. Subsequent disappointment at its failures, and the disastrous western military interventions that took place around the same time, only underscored the urgent need for in-depth regional expertise and cultural and linguistic knowledge. The first decade of the new century also saw the world economy rocked by the financial crash of 2008 which few had predicted, least of all mainstream academic economists within whose abstract models such crises simply no longer occurred. Ensuing scepticism about the economic orthodoxy brought with it a questioning of the universalism that underpinned it – the same universalism which had supplanted traditional Area Studies emphases on understanding specific regional histories, political cultures and socio-economic conditions. Finally, in the 2000s, Russia’s re-emergence as a belligerent, and possibly paranoid, ‘Great Power’ under the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin and the challenge it posed to the US-led post–Cold War settlement was not envisaged by transitologists. Putin’s reaction to the ‘Colour Revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia (the latter precipitating a short, sudden war in August to September 2008) gave pause for thought to anyone assuming Putin’s regime was an aberration in Russia’s tortuous path to democracy. When, in reaction to Ukraine’s efforts to re-align with the European Union (EU), Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, subsequently conducting covert military operations in East Ukraine, western commentators began talking earnestly of a ‘New Cold War’.11 It is in this context that some of my own media-focused work comes into play, providing an insight into paradigms that NAS is urged to embrace.12

THE NEW MEDIA ENVIRONMENT The concern over Russia was not limited to its newfound propensity to assert its military might. Born into the new media environment (the failed coup against

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Gorbachev in August 1991 signalling the imminent collapse of the USSR, and the first posting to the internet, occurred within two weeks of one another), Putin’s Russia proved adept at working with the grain of that environment. Its use of ‘hybrid warfare’, ‘information warfare’, ‘cyber attacks’ and ‘internet trolling’ demonstrated a profound, if malevolent, understanding of the potentials offered by new technology, and of the changing nature of post–Cold War conflict. But that understanding rested on a realisation that instrumental approaches to exploiting new media possibilities were not always appropriate. Thus, reducing Russian interventions in the online world to ‘state propaganda’, as many continue to do, is misleading.13 A growing number of viral YouTube videos, seemingly emanating from online bloggers and activists at the outer fringes of official patriotic discourse, endorse Russian actions on the international stage in a curiously self-parodic form of hyperbole. One such example is blogger Evgenii Zhurov’s provocative but acutely hyperbolised ‘I am a Russian Occupier’ video, released in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and indulging in jingoistic sentiments so comically extreme as to raise questions about its seriousness.14 Those questions are unanswerable, but the fact that a link to the video was tweeted by Dmitrii Rogozin, Russia’s deputy prime minister, indicates the Kremlin’s willingness to embrace the ambiguities of online culture. Peter Pomerantsev argues that the primary purpose of much recent Kremlin ‘disinformation’ is not to propagandize, but to disseminate confusing, unverifiable speculation derived from multiple online conspiracy theories (see Pomerantsev 2014). Nonetheless, Putin invests in more traditional modes of state propaganda, principally international television channel RT (formerly, ‘Russia Today’), which broadcasts in English, Spanish, Arabic and French. In the west, RT elicits a mixture of outrage (it has little regard for verifiable truth or journalistic standards) and ridicule (its viewership remains relatively small, its news values low and its ideological line opportunistic).15Again, such views disregard the environment in which RT operates. It does not engage in public diplomacy of the kind perfected by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), whose reliability and accuracy subtly enhances Britain’s reputation with the publics of other states. Instead, via its ‘Question More’ mantra, RT strives to use any available means to undermine what it terms US-led ‘mainstream media’ narratives, and to highlight stories which portray Russia’s antagonists in a negative light. Aligning itself with other ‘counter-flow’ broadcasters like Al Jazeera (Painter 2008), RT portrays itself as a beacon for the new, ‘multi-polar’ world in which the United States (US) worldview no longer prevails and other, ‘alternative’ voices assert themselves (Powers and Youmans 2012). It also recognises that global news values are changing and that standards of objectivity and impartiality in journalism, and in political discourse more generally, are under assault (Hutchings et al. 2015). Only recently, the world’s largest democracy, India, launched the ‘India Today’ channel, whose partial perspective on that country’s tensions with Pakistan is modelled on ‘Russia Today’.

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Closer to home, UK and US commentators have referred to the advent of a ‘posttruth era’ to explain phenomena like the astonishing ascendancy to the US presidency of Donald Trump, who, in his first month in office, continued with his cavalier approach to accuracy, and his willingness to adduce ‘alternative facts’ in the face of hostile evidence against him, to tar respectable press outlets as ‘fake news’, and to embrace all manner of conspiracy theories. The wildly distortive approach to news taken by both sides in the Brexit debate can be seen in the same context. Katharine Viner is among those to have linked the trend to the emergence of online cultures thoroughly alien to long-held democratic principles, cultures with which RT is fully at ease (Viner 2016). For these cultures, what matters is the ‘truth’ of affect (that of the sentiment that a news story generates) not that of a correspondence to empirically verifiable facts, an approach not unrelated to the Marxist notion of the underlying ‘truth of the epoch’ which explained the frequent deviations from western journalistic standards of balance, objectivity and verifiability observed within the press organs of the Soviet Union, such as Pravda. RT makes overtures both to the progressive left (endorsing the global ‘Occupy’ movement and gifting maverick British left-winger George Galloway his own show), and the far right (Marine le Pen of France’s Front National and the United Kingdom Independence Party’s leader, Nigel Farage, are frequently given platforms). Despite the political chasms between them (Galloway enjoys support from Muslim minority populations which Le Pen opposes), these forces share an antipathy to US-style liberal democracy and, along with Trump, openly admire Putin’s strong leadership. The European anti-immigrant right makes common accord with the traditional Christian values agenda embraced by American neoconservatives (and now being enacted as US policy through President Trump’s various anti-immigration initiatives) whose voice is often heard on RT, and of which Putin’s Russia portrays itself as the flagbearer (Laruelle 2013). Such political inconsistency illustrates RT’s ability to build small, but vocal and potentially influential, audience constituencies, within and across national boundaries (ethnic minority diasporas; global anti-capitalist movements; transnational right-wing groupings) (Hutchings et al. 2015). It demonstrates an intuitive feel for the changing place of nations in the global order. It suggests an understanding of the fading of national news agendas and the fragmentation of the public sphere into multiple ‘microspheres’, corresponding to the rise of online facilitated ‘personalised’ news feeds to satisfy individual ‘consumption’ patterns and tastes through ‘echo chambers’ in which everyone is comforted by hearing their own views repeatedly played back to them (Liebes and Curran 1998, 105).

NEW AGENDAS, NEW PARADIGMS This brief digression, reflecting my own journey through Post-Soviet Studies, signals the continuing importance of regional expertise in the motivations of countries like

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Russia which remain major, albeit disruptive, world players. Without such expertise, policymakers fall back into comforting, but misleading, ‘Cold War’ paradigms. A case in point is Russia’s undoubtedly illegitimate intervention in Eastern Ukraine. Ignorance of the complex historical intertwinement of the Russian and Ukrainian states and populations, and of the place that Crimea occupies in the Russian national imagination, has, however, led to erroneous attributions of the intervention to Putin’s renewed thirst for imperial expansion.16 Compounding the problem, post-2008 austerity budgets have affected the capacity of both academic and the UK Foreign Office expertise to provide such knowledge; drastic cuts to the BBC Monitoring Service are one example (BBC July 5, 2016). Crucial, too, is the need for that expertise to be language-based. Public comprehension of the Ukraine situation was hampered by consistent media confusion over terms used to refer to the Russian-speaking population in Eastern Ukraine (‘Russian citizens’; ‘Russian speakers’; ‘ethnic Russians’; ‘pro-Russian population’ occurred interchangeably). In fact, the most common term in Russian public discourse is ‘sootechestvenniki’, a deliberately ambiguous word that translates as ‘compatriots’). Even the BBC’s otherwise laudable effort to test whether Russia had a case for its actions in Crimea referred within a few lines to ‘pro-Russian civilians’, ‘Russian citizens’ and ‘Russian-speaking regions’ (BBC 2014). As this brief excursus demonstrates, a renewed NAS enterprise must take full account of the meaning for our notion of nations and regions of the networked world, with its attendant potentials and dangers. It must also address the hitherto latent geopolitical configurations and transnational identities associated with that world. Such phenomena demand interdisciplinary approaches that acknowledge the emergence of new communities within and across national boundaries, and recognise that, whilst nations stubbornly refuse to fade, the multiple global flows traversing the world have created fresh building blocks with which to interpret it. Appadurai’s five ‘scapes’ (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes) are a case in point (Appadurai 1990: 296). Study of their interrelationships demands an integration of empirical and quantitative methodologies with qualitiative and theoretical paradigms drawn from cultural studies. This offers a further rationale for the reinvigoration of Area Studies, which has traditionally hosted expertise that cuts across the arts/social sciences divide. Another important theoretical development that has arisen in the wake of the same trends is Critical Geopolitics, which, as two seminal practitioners put it, seeks to illuminate and explain the practices by which political actors spatialize international politics and represent it as a ‘ world’ characterized by particular types of places. (Tuathail and Agnew 1992)

Since geopolitical knowledge under this approach is conceived to be partial and situated, nation-states are not the only ‘legitimate’ unit of geopolitical analysis. Instead, geopolitical knowledge is seen as diffuse and cutting across national divides,

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with popular geopolitical discourse considered alongside formal and practical geopolitics, and critical discourse analysis open to integration with empirical methodologies characteristic of the traditional toolsets of geographical analysis. A productive variant on Critical Geopolitics is the Popular Geopolitics illustrated by Robert Saunders in his work on the Popular Geopolitics of the Soviet successor states: In the current era of postmodern geopolitics defined by globalization, deterritorialization, and cultural fragmentation, mass media’s role in shaping geographical imagination and making sense of the geopolitical order is steadily increasing, making popular geopolitics as important in international relations as its elite and academic counterparts. (Saunders 2016, 3)

There is a vital space, too, for ‘the regional’ – a traditional unit of Area Studies analysis – within the new thinking that has swept the humanities in the path of accelerated globalization. W. J. T. Mitchell (2015) describes the region as ‘the excluded middle which tends to be left out in the polarising concepts of the global and the local’ (104). Noting the regional entity’s productive ambiguity, he characterises it as ‘what is ‘ ruled’ but also what is free of central rule, contesting the power centres, often in a struggle between country and city’, noting its ambivalent status as ‘part or whole, fragment or totality’ (105) and emphasizing that ‘the region is a more potent factor in global politics than ever’ (104). The applicability of these new developments to Sovietology’s successor discipline(s) is self-evident. Russia is the world’s second largest recipient of labour migration, most of it from the former Soviet space (Minkin 2014). It is also imagined homeland to many vast diasporas (around 25 million Russians live in former Soviet republics alone), displaced either by geopolitics, or by economics. Russia is therefore no stranger to the reconfigured identities, spaces and conflicts generated by ‘global flows’. Meanwhile, at first derided, the Kremlin’s recent efforts to make common cause with worldwide proponents of ‘traditional conservativism’ congenial to Russia’s official values, are now taken seriously. Putin’s rapport with France’s extreme right leader, Marine Le Pen, has belatedly woken European policy makers up to the prospect of Kremlin influence on western politics, especially in light of the ‘Brexit’ and Trump victories that shocked elites in the UK and the US respectively. The fact that the brands of conservatism and populist anti-elitism embraced by these leaders differ markedly only confirms the value of the transnational discourse analysis frameworks promoted within Critical Geopolitics. Finally, the enduring significance of the region (in both intra- and transnational variants) is illustrated by the rise in cultural and political influence of resource-rich areas of Russia such as the Urals city of Perm (Rogers 2015), and by the memory wars raging throughout the former USSR (Lowe and Joel 2013). These wars are fought within the Russian-speaking online domain where complex identities combine shared nostalgia for a common past with divisive nationalisms which had lain dormant under communism. Such phenomena cannot be understood without a profound knowledge of Soviet histories, linguistic practices, ethnic identities and

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official and unofficial mythologies. They also represent a prime opportunity for the application of interdisciplinary methodologies synthesising the latest quantitative techniques of ‘big data’ analysis (to identify broad trends) with linguistically and historically informed qualitative readings of micro-events within those trends – the ‘panoramic statistical analyses combined with precisely executed case studies’ that Jan Kubik (2015, 353) invokes in arguing for the benefits of Area Studies to ‘mainstream disciplines’.

THE VALUE OF COMPARISON I continue with two points. First, the case I am making holds firm across the entire Area Studies domain, but not just because the regions covered by the discipline’s other branches are important. Globalization means neither that a triumphal neoliberal hegemony has precipitated ‘the end of history’ and the death of regions and nations, nor that the Cold War geopolitical map has not undergone transformational change. Rather, we now live in an interconnected, networked world in which newly configured and ever-shifting transnational spheres of influence clash, collude and intersect in ways previously unthinkable. It is incumbent upon NAS to conduct collaborative research to address these phenomena. Given their historical centrality to the discipline, East European Area Studies specialists have the potential, as Kubik (2015, 362) acknowledges, to make ‘major contributions to the general knowledge, whilst remaining attentive to the specificities of their region’. Central to such collaboration, comparative study must involve more than the juxtaposition of discrete geopolitical entities.17 It needs to be geared towards tracing the inter-regional flows, identities and tensions that the networked world has generated. In my recent collaborative work on media coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (Hutchings et al. 2015), that coverage was viewed less in terms of its correspondence to, or deviation from, the Kremlin’s vision of the Russian nation’s place in the world, than within the framework of the global ‘media event’, defined by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp as ‘situated, thickened, centring performances of mediated communication that are focused on a particular thematic core, cross different media products and reach a wide and diverse multiplicity of audiences and participants’ (Couldry and Hepp 2012, 12). This required a comparison between two very different international broadcasters, RT and BBC World, involving collaboration with British media anthropologists. We conducted close, qualitative analysis of the broadcasting and internet-based output of both broadcasters in the context of the worldwide responses the games generated via social media, to which we applied ‘big data’ tools. Through this multi-modal approach we identified key trans-national nexuses of meaning and emergent ‘cosmopolitan’ audience constituencies to which international broadcasters now appeal. Our analysis exposed deep contradictions at the heart of both broadcasters’ requirement to promote ‘national interests’, whilst competing with growing numbers of global players. It helped in

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assessing the significance of these phenomena for shifting post–Cold War geopolitical configurations.

THE CENTRALITY OF LANGUAGE Finally, I must re-emphasise the vital role of language. A renewed case for the importance of region-specific knowledge reflects recognition that humans are embodied beings rooted in specific circumstances whose complexity and diversity do not submit to universalising generalisation. Key to such complexity are the languages spoken by particular communities, along with the different modes of conceptualising the world encoded within those languages. Lack of relevant linguistic skills is an impediment to gaining an in-depth understanding of particular regions. Language is also fundamental to the identities both of the new communities forged across national borders, and of the increasingly ‘super-diverse’ communities (Vertovec 2007) inhabiting urban spaces within those borders. In my field, the promotion of the ‘Russian-speaking world’ as a major Russian foreign policy plank is one example of the ties linking language to ideology and politics.18 Area Studies scholars have a track record in acquiring the intensive language skills their research requires. However, there are also powerful arguments for maintaining a commitment to specialist degree programs combining high-level language training with the study of relevant histories and cultures. Knowledge of the latter gained through training in the former provides the ‘thick’ contextual understanding of the socio-political and economic phenomena studied by social scientists. Unfortunately these programmes, particularly low-recruiting ones like Russian, remain under threat from university administrations driven ever more by bottom lines and the need for efficiency; since the 1980s, UK Modern Languages degree programmes have been progressively cut to the point that they barely exist at all outside the elite, Russell Group institutions, where they are also being scaled back. Survival strategies should embrace two principles: (i) curricula must be based on a full integration of language and ‘non’-language study, whether through selective ‘target-language teaching’ of content, or the alignment of language and non-language themes; otherwise universities will relocate language training to non-academic language centres, redistributing remaining staff to other disciplines (History, English, and so on); (ii) Modern Languages units should recognise that universities cannot sustain declining staff-student ratios indefinitely, and be prepared to scale back their offerings, working with colleagues in other humanities subjects to create research-led courses with crossdisciplinary appeal. A course on ‘New Media and the Politics of Protest’ co-taught across Russian and Arabic Studies, and Political Communication, for example, would appeal far more than one on Russian Silver Age Literature (my own research career’s point of origin). It would also capture the essence of the NAS, simultaneously helping to secure the legacy of generations of Sovietologists.

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NOTES 1. In the 1960s, UK University Russian Departments featured a number staffed by exBritish army officers, and several by previous British Communist Party members. 2. Glasnost (derived from the Russian word for ‘voice’) was the policy of greater political openness and tolerance of political difference which Gorbachev introduced in 1985 along with Perestroika (economic restructuring) as the main planks of his efforts radically to liberalise and modernise Soviet society, without, however, destroying its socialist foundations. 3. For an account of the demise of Sovietology and the landscape it left, see Rutland (1993). 4. John Dunn’s Higher Education Academy-funded Review of the discipline depicts a continuing slow decline in the number and status of dedicated UK Slavonic and East European Studies units through the Putin years (Dunn 2013). 5. For a critique of this trend, see Steinmetz (2005). 6. One of the classic early works that helped to establish Transitology is O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead (1986). 7. The Dunn Review (Dunn 2013) indicates that degree-level teaching of Russian has fallen to 15 (overwhelmingly Russell Group) universities, with other Slavonic languages undergoing a still more precipitous decline (24). 8. The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) of 2014 was the first of the nation’s regular research assessment exercises formally to attribute scores for impact, broadly defined as an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia. In the next REF (scheduled for 2021), impact is likely to account for up to 25 percent of overall scores. 9. The centres, supporting research and postgraduate study in Arabic, Russian and East European Studies, Chinese and Japanese, were funded at diminishing levels between 2006 and 2016, primarily by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council. 10. See Goodman 2006 for an analysis of the role played by a lack of area expertise in determining why the US was so ill-prepared for 9/11. In 2006, President Bush announced a national initiative to increase funding for strategically important languages under the ‘Title V’ program. 11. For the most influential articulation of the ‘New Cold War’ thesis, see Lucas (2008). 12. See in particular Hutchings and Miazhevich (2009), Hutchings et  al. (2015) and Hutchings and Szostek (2015). 13. For a critique of this tendency, see Hutchings and Tolz (2015, 259–62). 14. The video may be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65 SwzHAbes. 15. For a characteristic example of this approach, see O’Sullivan (2014). 16. That approach is critiqued in Hutchings and Tolz (2016). 17. Hauser and Luginbuhl (2012) recognise that, whilst in a globalising world of transnational flows and identities, the straightforward comparison of one national culture or media system to another loses validity, for as long as difference drives cultural meaning, comparison and juxtaposition remain valuable analytical tools. 18. For an analysis of Putin’s ‘Russian-speaking World’, see Gorham (2014, 131–66).

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REFERENCES Agh, A. 2005. Institutional Design and Regional Capacity Building in the Post-Accession Period. Budapest: Hungarian Centre for Democracy Studies. Appandurai, Arjun 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy’, Theory, Culture and Society 7: 293–310. BBC News. 2014. ‘Ukraine Crisis: Does Russia Have a Point?’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-europe-26415508 (accessed November 23, 2016). ———. 2016. ‘About 100 BBC Monitoring Jobs to be Axed Amid £4m Cuts’, http:​//www​ .bbc.​co.uk​/news​/uk-e​nglan​d-ber​kshir​e-367​12151​ (accessed November 23, 2016). Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2010. ‘Introduction: Media Events in Globalized Media Cultures’. In Media Events in a Global Age, edited by N. Couldry, A. Hepp and F. Krotz (pp. 1–20). New York: Routledge, 2010. Dunn, John. 2013. Review into the Present State of Slavonic and East European Studies in the Higher Education System of the UK. Higher Education Academy: Heslington, York. Goodman, Melvin. 2006. ‘9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 18 (4): 59–71. Gorham, Michael. 2014. After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics from Gorbachev to Putin, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hauser, Stefan, and Martin Lugunbuhl. eds. 2012. Contrastive Media Analysis. New York: John Benjamins. Hutchings, Stephen, Marie Gillespie, Ilya Yabolokov, Ilya Lvov and Alexander Voss. 2015. ‘Staging the Sochi Winter Olympics 2014 on Russia Today and BBC World News: From Soft Power to Geopolitical Crisis, Participations 12 (1): 630–58. Hutchings, Stephen, and Vera Tolz. 2015. Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2016. ‘Ethnicity and nationhood on Russian state-aligned television: Contextualising geopolitical crisis: ‘Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism’ 2000–2015’. In The New Russian Nationalism, edited by Pal Kosto (pp. 298–335). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hutchings, Stephen, and Joanna Szostek. 2015. ‘Dominant Narratives in Russian Political and Media Discourse During the Ukraine Crisis’. In Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives, edited by Richard Sakwa and Agnieszka Wilczewska (pp. 183–97). Bristol: E-International Relations. Hutchings, Stephen, and Galina Miazhevich. 2009. ‘The Polonium Trail to Islam: Litvinenko, Liminality and Television's (Cold) War on Terror’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 2 (2): 219–35. Kubik, Jan. 2015. ‘Between Contextualisation and Comparison: A Thorny Relationship Between East European Studies and Disciplinary “Mainstreams”’, East European Politics, Societies and Cultures 20 (2): 352–65. Laruelle, Marlene. 2013. ‘Conservatism as the Kremlin’s New Toolkit’, Russian Analytical Digest 138 (8): 2–4. ———. 2012. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Liebes, Tamar, and James Curran. 1998. Media, Ritual and Identity. London: Routledge. Lowe, David, and Tony Joel. 2013. Remembering the Cold War: Global Contest and National Stories. London: Routledge.

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Lucas, Edward. 2008. New Cold War: Putin’s Threat to Russia and the West. London: Bloomsbury. Minkin, Mary, Elizabeth. 2014. ‘Russia: The World’s Second Largest Immigrant Haven’, The National Interest, August 10, http:​//nat​ional​inter​est.o​rg/bl​og/th​e-buz​z/rus​sia-t​he-wo​rlds-​ secon​d-lar​gest-​immig​ratio​n-hav​en-11​053 (accessed November 24, 2016). Mitchell, W. J. T. 2015. Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Moore, David. 2001. ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA 116 (1): 111–28. O’Donnell, Guillermo, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead. eds. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives. London: Johns Hopkins Press. O’Sullivan, John. 2014. ‘Russia Today is Putin’s Weapon of Mass Deception: Will it Work in the UK?’, The Spectator, December 6. Painter, James. 2008. Counter-Hegemonic News: A Case Study of Al Jazeera English and Telesur. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Pomerantsev, Peter. 2014. ‘Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is Revolutionizing Information Warfare’, The Atlantic, September 9, https://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/. Powers, Shaun, and William Youmans. 2012. ‘A New Purpose for International Broadcasting: Subsidizing Deliberative Technologies in Non-transitioning States’, Journal of Public Deliberation 8 (1): article 13, http:​//www​.publ​icdel​ibera​tion.​net/j​pd/vo​l8/is​s1/ar​t13. Rogers, Douglas. 2015. The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power and Culture after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rutland, Peter. 1993. ‘Sovietology: Notes for a Post-Mortem’, The National Interest 31: 109–22. Saunders, Robert. 2016. Popular Geopolitics and Nation Branding in the Post-Soviet Realm. New York: Routledge. Steinmetz, George. (2005) The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Tuathail, Georoid, and John Agnew. 1992. ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’, Political Geography 11 (2): 190–204. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. ‘Super-Diversity and its Implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–54. Viner, Katharine. 2016. ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’, The Guardian, July 12. Wang, Ban. 2002. ‘Cold War, Imperial Aesthetics and Area Studies’, Social Text 10 (3): 45–65.

4 Refugee Studies as Area Studies A Historian’s Perspective Peter Gatrell

In the following remarks I want to reflect on what Area Studies might mean in relation to Refugee Studies, and vice-versa. My approach to this topic is that of a historian who is interested in the global manifestations and repercussions of mass population displacement in the modern world. Although my specialist ‘area’ was originally Russia and Eastern Europe (Gatrell 1999), I have more recently adopted a much broader comparative and transnational focus in order to gain a better understanding of the multiple causes of forced migration and the measures adopted to alleviate its consequences (Gatrell 2011; 2013). In each of these projects – I like to think of them as journeys of discovery (see the editors’ introduction) – I have engaged with the interdisciplinary literature in Refugee Studies, without which I would have found it impossible to interpret the intricacies and subtleties of the historical source material. Hence I feel I owe a great deal to Area Studies and Refugee Studies alike. But I am also acutely aware that neither Area Studies nor Refugee Studies stands still, and in the following pages I want to develop an argument that takes account of their dynamism and their prospects. Specifically I explore the scope to incorporate history into the disciplinary mix of Refugee Studies and to reflect on what ‘area’ means in relation to the history of mass population displacement. The history of Area Studies and the history of Refugee Studies are not my main concern here. However, both fields emerged and derived their significance (and claims to resources) on the basis of a close concern with government policy towards which academic specialists might adopt either a supportive or critical stance. Area Studies, certainly in the United States, developed in conjunction with the Cold War and received funding from the US government and think-tanks that were connected to American foreign policy (Cumings 2002). Refugee Studies can trace its formal antecedents to the 1980s with the establishment of the renowned Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford (1983) together with its flagship Journal 45

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of Refugee Studies (1988–present). An analogous Centre for Refugee Studies was established at York University, Toronto, in 1988, supporting another journal, Refuge, which began publication in 1981. Significantly, these developments coincided with the end of the Cold War and an increase in the global refugee population that challenged existing institutional provision and conceptualisation (Chimni 1998). Like Area Studies, Refugee Studies cannot but engage with policy to some degree, but the connection between policy and scholarship creates particular difficulties for Refugee Studies since the very definition of ‘refugee’ is closely tied to legal constructs and political imperatives that change over time. To put it very bluntly, scholars who study refugees face the dilemma that the people they study are created and categorised by states and by international law; the framework for analysis is thus predetermined (Bakewell 2008). Refugee Studies has been responsible for significant work on specific areas (see below) and has also reflected critically on the categories and concepts that dominate policy decision-making – above all, the very meaning of the term ‘refugee’, particularly as understood in the foundational 1951 UN Refugee Convention. It is not surprising that academics have pointed to the limitations and exclusions in relation to foundational ideas of the individual who has suffered persecution (or who can demonstrate such persecution) in relation to political opinion, membership of a social group, etc., and who has crossed an international frontier. Thirty years ago, Andrew Shacknove asked ‘Who is a refugee?’ and answered that it was impossible to conceive of forced displacement in the narrow terms of the 1951 Convention (Shacknove 1985). This position is important in reflecting on the object of study, and the need to avoid reification of the label ‘refugee’ (Zetter 2007). It is also worth adding that scholars who work in Refugee Studies regularly engage with governments, with inter-governmental organisations (such as UNHCR) and with NGOs. Sometimes scholars and practitioners move between the academy and the world of policymaking (Black 2001). But there is a tension. Indeed the founder of the RSC, Barbara Harrell-Bond, wrote a highly critical and influential book in 1986 on the shortcomings of governments, UNHCR and NGOs in managing refugees in camps in Sudan (Harrell-Bond 1986). Nevertheless, many scholars who are active in Refugee Studies regard their work as having the potential to modify policy in a direction that will improve the prospects of displaced persons. For example, scholarship on gender-based approaches to displacement has contributed to developing new policy guidelines, although this also owes a great deal to activists rather than to scholars. Other scholars advocate programmes designed to assist refugees in situ, prior to or instead of their repatriation or resettlement (Betts and Collier 2017). More broadly, in terms of making refugee and asylum policy more liberal or altering public perceptions towards refugees and asylum seekers, it is doubtful that Refugee Studies has made a significant positive impact on refugees (Chimni 2009). As a field of study, Refugee Studies began and has continued to be interdisciplinary in character. It draws upon sociology, social anthropology, political science, human geography, law and other disciplines (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. 2014). One important strand of Refugee Studies was the focus on refugees’ experiences, or what one social

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scientist insisted on calling ‘the refugee experience’ (Stein 1981). In this respect, a great deal of important work has been contributed by social anthropologists, beginning with the pioneering scholarship of Elizabeth Colson (Colson 1971), followed in the 1980s by Renée Hirschon and Peter Loizos, and by Liisa Malkki in the 1990s (Loizos 1981; Hirschon 1989; Malkki 1995). They chose specific sites of displacement – in Hirschon’s case the Greek port city of Piraeus, where she tracked the life stories of people who had been abruptly removed from their homes in Anatolia under the auspices of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. It is thus the work of an historicallyinformed ethnographer. Malkki’s work was particularly innovative because she compared two sites in Tanzania where Hutu refugees had settled after fleeing Burundi: this comparison – a refugee camp and a township – generated insights into the relationship between incarceration and ethnic identity. Although her conclusions were not universally accepted, Malkki’s work was hugely influential. Area Studies, in other words, mattered in so far as social scientists concentrated on a discrete place or places, and on the spatial connections between ‘home’ and destination. However, history has often been an unwelcome and certainly an invisible guest at the interdisciplinary feast (Gatrell 2017; Kushner 2006; 2017; Marfleet 2013). Social scientists would probably respond that history is implicit in Refugee Studies. It is true as already indicated that the best ethnography is historically informed (and it is also true that as the ethnography ages, so it contributes to the material record available to the historian). Besides, there are signs of change – the Journal of Refugee Studies recently published a couple of special issues that were entirely historical – but the problem remains. Specialist journals and calls for conference papers either mention history sotto voce or not at all. It is entirely characteristic that a recent major conference sponsored by the Refugee Studies Centre included dozens of papers but the single panel devoted to history was cancelled. To some extent, therefore, the absence of history from Refugee Studies can be laid at the door of its gatekeepers. And yet, is it the other way round – does history have a problem with refugees? This point is not very difficult to substantiate. Most of the big books in modern European history devote little or no space to refugees (Hobsbawm 1994; Judt 2005; but see Mazower 1998 for an important exception). Why this gap in historiography? Gérard Noiriel complained many years ago that historians paid scant attention to the history of migration in general, and this is certainly true of forced migration (Noiriel 1988). It may be because history is still dominated by national historiography, although there is a close correspondence between the actions of nation-states and the creation of refugees, and between refugees and the making of nation-states. It may also have a lot to do with the implication that refugees are transient figures – the flotsam and jetsam of war and revolution who flit across the stage without making much impact on the big decisions. Refugees, so to speak, are the by-product of wartime crises, and crises come and go. But this sense of transience is very strange, given that refugee crises have often lasted for decades, as in the case of Palestinian, Tibetan and Afghan refugees, not to mention Sahrawi refugees in the Western Sahara, and Cypriot refugees.

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What does all of this have to do with historians, refugees, and Area Studies? First and most obviously, Area Studies directs attention to different instances and sites of displacement. It draws upon specialist and in-depth knowledge of places, cultures and languages. But, in relation to refugees and Refugee Studies, where is the ‘area’ now? Nowhere more than in Refugee Studies is it true to say that the area is a protean object. It is impossible to understand the current ‘refugee crisis’ without tracing the contours of political upheaval in Syria – but its manifestations are apparent not only in the Middle East, but in Europe too. Syrian refugees, so to say, pose questions about ‘Europe’, particularly in relation to ideas of cooperation and integration (secure external borders for EU member states; the externalisation of ‘protection’), and the insistence of member states on sovereignty when issues of asylum are concerned. We can think about European Studies in relation to displaced populations – what is ‘Europe’, where is Europe, and how is Europe connected to other parts of the world? Whether talking of mass migration from Syria and adjacent states, or mass migration in and from sub-Saharan Africa, it is difficult to speak of Europe without thinking of historical inter-continental connections, particularly the colonial connections to which historians are closely attuned, as in the case of Italy and its colonial legacies (Ballinger 2016). There are other kinds of connection too. A remarkable monograph by Catherine Besteman puts two sites of displacement alongside one another: the economically marginal region of the Jubba Valley in southern Somalia, consumed by civil war shortly after she carried out fieldwork in the late 1980s, and the city of Lewiston, Maine, where Somali refugees arrived under US sponsorship schemes in the new millennium – and where she re-encountered her informants more than two decades after her original fieldwork. There is also a third site as part of the equation – the vast refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, where refugees found shelter for years. Besteman’s study is a great example of how Refugee Studies can be enriched by a multi-sited Area Studies approach, and by history too – the history of a little-known civil war, but also the history of Lewiston’s de-industrialisation and demographic transformation (15 percent of its current population is Somali). In terms of politics – the politics of humanitarianism – it is also interesting to see how Somali refugees represented themselves as victims in order to garner international assistance, but they were active participants in planning for resettlement, not passive objects of UNHCR intervention (Besteman 2016). Second, an Area Studies perspective forces us to think about scale. In relation to refugees it helps us to think about different incarnations of the refugee regime at the local, national, regional, and international level, and how these levels intersect. This matters politically – for example, Maurizio Albahari demonstrates how humanitarian initiatives by residents of Lampedusa supported refugees who negotiated the Mediterranean, but led local people to complain about feeling that the Italian state and the EU had failed to provide significant assistance, being more concerned with pushing refugees back to their country of origin (Albahari 2015). Third, it is about the relationship between refugees and the area of the state – how states constitute themselves by engaging with and managing refugees, particularly

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when states are forging a sense of capacity and asserting sovereignty over people and territory – the work of Vazira Zamindar on Partition is very important here (Zamindar 2007), and Ben White has recently argued the same case in relation to Syria between the two world wars, noting how the arrival of Armenians from Anatolia, Assyrians fleeing the Turkish military, and others required the fledgling state to engage in the management of people, the policing of borders, the development of ‘peripheral’ areas, and so forth (White 2017). In short, Area Studies connects to Refugee Studies because the ‘area’ is always in flux, and it is the moments of political and social transformation that make things interesting. In thinking about how the area changes in Area Studies, I have in mind the great political upheavals connected to war, revolution and state formation – the processes evident in Europe after the two world wars, but not confined to Europe; the transformation of the Middle East following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the end of the Japanese empire in East Asia, the formation of the People’s Republic of China, independence movements that triumphed in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Gatrell 2013). Think, too, of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc and its implications for what seemed like a stable area, ‘Soviet and East European Studies’. During the protracted Cold War, it was easy to portray Russian refugees as escapees from Soviet oppression. The end of communism in Eastern Europe played out on the ground not so much as a mass exodus (fears of an ‘invasion of the West’ never materialised), but rather as migration within the Former Soviet Union. As well as the fate of ‘Russians abroad’ (in Central Asia, for example), former Soviet citizens had to get accustomed to the rupture of established ties of kinship, trade and labour. An important book by Madeleine Reeves looks at the conduct of everyday life in this ‘new’ area, noting inter alia the hope on the part of some political leaders that Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan would be able to get along as a ‘community’, rather than go to the trouble of forging hard borders, hopes that evaporated as they were accused of turning a blind eye to the ease with which Islamic fundamentalists moved around the region (Reeves 2014: 26). My point is that upheavals associated with war, revolution and decolonisation created new states and new frontiers that rendered people ‘out of place’, raising questions about who belonged, and where. The most interesting aspect of the relationship between historians, refugees and Area Studies may therefore be in problematizing the ‘area’. Is the ‘area’ now the sea? A great deal of work has been inspired by Paul Gilroy (a sociologist by training), whose path-breaking study of (counter)cultural production in the ‘Black Atlantic’ transcended national boundaries, approaching the sea as space and as cultural formation, with an attendant interest in flows, currents, networks, connections and interactions (Gilroy 1993). His work helped inspire a growing interest in ‘thinking through oceans’ (and even an ‘oceanic turn’) as well as reconceptualising issues of political subjectivity and territoriality, and encouraging ideas of clandestine versus legal routes from Africa to the European Union (Wigen 2006). This is not about

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nautical metaphors (‘waves’, ‘tides’, ‘floods’), however, but about negotiating real challenges, constraints and dangers (Green 2014; Mannik 2016). In this connection I refer to anthropologist Lynda Mannik’s book, which draws upon the surviving photographic record of 350 Estonian refugees who fled to Canada in 1948. In contrast to those who attempt the much shorter journey across the Mediterranean and place themselves in the hands of people whom they barely know, these refugees formed an incorporated company to pay for the refitting of the old minesweeper, the SS Walnut, to transport them from Sweden to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they were held for a month in a detention centre before being granted asylum. The Canadian media construed this group as ‘docile, northern, and white’, and as victims of communism arriving in ‘little Viking boats’, in contrast to refugees who faced a more hostile reception, including Jewish refugees on the St Louis, which was turned back in 1939, and Tamil refugees in 1986. This has not prevented Canadian politicians and others from incorporating the experience of Estonian refugees into a narrative of Canadian humanitarianism and multiculturalism. We have therefore multiple historical connections. One is the association made by Estonian refugees with other episodes of displacement, as in ‘We were the first boat people’. Another connection is with the discourse of generosity that rests upon a selective appropriation of history, and even with the idea of porous borders, as in the reference to ‘Viking boats’. Mannik thus locates the experiences of Estonian refugees in a larger framework of cultural representation and immigration policy. She demonstrates how Estonians were quite capable of holding a negative opinion of subsequent refugees whom they deemed to be ‘economic migrants’, whereas they were ‘political’ refugees, even though this was not in fact an accurate depiction of their own status, since they had the option of remaining in Sweden. The idea of describing themselves or being described as ‘boat people’ was contested. Some elderly Estonians and their children rejected the analogy: ‘I think [said one] of the Vietnamese who came, and we were not like that’. The Atlantic crossing thus conveyed ideas of a heroic expedition, but it also carried an unfortunate association with those who in their opinion had a less genuine claim to asylum (Mannik 2013: 55, 153–57). Think too of the people who look out from the land to the sea; people who cross the Mediterranean. Recall the documentary, La traversée (2006) by Elisabeth Leuvrey (b. 1968). Dedicated to Abdelmalek Sayad, the film is shot entirely on a boat, L’Ile de beauté that plies between Marseille and Algiers, and focuses on passengers who are mainly Algerians who make the journey at least once a year. Her informants speak of finding it ‘impossible to lead a whole life’ and of living an ‘in-between’ life. A young Algerian girl born in France speaks of being mocked by Algerians as ‘the immigrant’. Children grew up being separated from their fathers when they left Algeria to find work in France. They are accustomed to making return visits, but these are emotionally draining: Algeria is like a sick old aunt that you go and visit, but you stay for the weekend and then on Sunday evening you clear off because otherwise you’d kill yourself [parce que

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sinon tu te suicides]. But when you get back home to your little studio in Neuilly or wherever you feel ashamed at having left your aunt in such a hurry . . . so you quickly organise your next visit. It’s a permanent indecision. (Hollis-Toure 2015: 42)

Other migrants speak of the difficulties in securing an entry visa (Hollis-Toure 2015: 35-47). At least as promising in terms of generating new insights, therefore, may be work on the area that is oceanic rather than terrestrial – seas that connect states, but seas that are also navigated by refugees, and by others such as people smugglers, traffickers, pirates, and also guardians and gate-keepers acting on behalf of governments. Although it is not about refugees per se, but about people in motion in a broader sense, Sunil Amrith’s important book on the Bay of Bengal charts the economic, political and social history of this vast space criss-crossed by migrant workers, traders, seafarers and others, and how it became the site of imperial and nationalist claims. One of his arguments is that the Bay was its own ‘area’, but that its unity was undermined as it became ringed with nation-states – home not only to the titular national majority but to ‘minorities’. The Cold War promoted a concept of Southeast Asia – neither East Asia nor South Asia – but it was an area or collection of nation-states rather than a region defined by commercial and labouring networks as well as cultural and religious interactions. As a result, he says, ‘Burmese and Malaysian history, both firmly on the side of ‘Southeast Asia’, were completely separated from the study of India; they were studied in different departments, by scholars who attended difference conferences. The deep, intensive connections that so significantly shaped their history were lost from view’. What may reinvigorate the sense of a unified Bay, he says, is the challenge posed by climate change and the need for sovereign states to manage resources in common (Amrith 2013: 245, and passim). In relation to Europe, Pamela Ballinger does not discount the continued valency of ideas of ‘the East’ or the salience of the notion of a periphery as a ‘local category of meaning and practice’. Herman Van Rompuy spoke of the end of the Cold War as bringing an end to divisions in Europe: ‘there is no East anymore’ (Ballinger 2017: 45). Ballinger suggests that temporal distinctions (‘post-communist’) have replaced spatial distinctions, in order to dramatise ideas of political transformation along supposedly ‘western’ lines. She raises questions about borders and borderlands, particularly their material incarnation. See also the EastBordNet project (2011–2013)1 where the emphasis is on identity and performance, as well as regimes of bordering. Ballinger also discusses the idea of a ‘virtuous middle’ (that is, ‘Central Europe’) in the work of writers such as Milan Kundera and Timothy Garton Ash. But she insists that the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ retains importance in denoting cultural, political and economic difference. It is a durable portmanteau term that gained currency at moments of political transformation (notably in 1945–1949 and 1989–1991), along with more specific terms such as ‘The Balkans’, to describe Western/Orientalised views of ‘the other’ (Case 2009). It is particularly rewarding to reflect on the complication of the East-West binary by considering the Third World as reflected in

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Eastern European politics, discourse and practice: a kind of triangular relationship was significant during the Cold War. And yet, we cannot escape the nation-state when we talk of history, refugees and areas . . . progressive lawyers and non-governmental observers who contributed to and witnessed the debates in the late 1940s and early 1950s that culminated in the 1951 Refugee Convention ruefully acknowledged that arguments around state sovereignty trumped all other considerations. As Madeleine Reeves points out (Reeves 2014: 51–52), the problem with much of the literature on borderlands – its playful emphasis on transgressive behaviour and de-territorialisation – is that it sits oddly with the reality of barbed wire and security checks. So problematizing the ‘area’ in terms of Border Studies, let alone in relation to an ‘oceanic turn’, may yield only partial dividends so far as Refugee Studies is concerned. Greater dividends are probably available from Diaspora Studies, where a rich literature draws attention to political mobilisation: not just in the obvious opposition of exiled refugees to the persecuting state of origin, but also the mobilisation of the diaspora by the state – I am thinking here of Victoria Bernal’s study of the Eritrean diaspora which documents how the Eritrean government expects its members to contribute remittances to sustain the state: remittances account for one-third of the country’s GDP (Bernal 2014). Is there then such a thing as refugee history, and if so, what is it? It is a history of displacement, obviously, but more than this, it is a history of categorization and categorical distinctions: what the philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘making up people’ (Hacking 2006). It is a history of refugee regimes at a local, national, regional and international level, and how refugees negotiate them. It is about the multidirectional relationship between refugees and state formation. It is a history of interaction between refugees and non-refugees, including those who did not or could not flee. It is about how people ‘on the move’ might use the language of international refugee law to assert claims to protection, or how by means of daily practice and vernacular language they turned ‘refugee’ into a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. It has to have a strong comparative focus in order to establish what is common and what is distinctive about state practices, humanitarianism, and refugees’ experiences of displacement. I have tried here to raise questions about the why and wherefore of Area Studies and Refugee Studies – what is meant by these terms, why have they appeared on the scene, where they might be heading (whether travelling together or separately), and whether history is a good travelling companion. My conclusions are that history is essential to Refugee Studies, not only in terms of tracing the causes of displacement, but in understanding the choices that were made – and by which actors – in managing the consequences of displacement, and in crafting a bureaucratic category, ‘refugee’. If there is a field worth calling refugee history, it is surely one in which we also need to factor in the capabilities of refugees who negotiate the label and the regime. New Area Studies draws attention to the constitution and re-constitution of the ‘area’, a process in which refugees as well as policymakers participate, and it sensitizes us to the connections between areas, connections in which refugees are active participants.

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NOTE 1. Manchester University. 2018. Social Anthropology Past Projects, July 25, 2018 https​:// ww​w.soc​ialsc​ience​s.man​chest​er.ac​.uk/s​ocial​-anth​ropol​ogy/r​esear​ch/pr​oject​s/pas​t-pro​jects​/.

REFERENCES Albahari, Maurizio. 2015. Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Amrith, Sunil. 2013. Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakewell, Oliver. 2008. ‘Research beyond the categories: the importance of policy irrelevant research into forced migration’, Journal of Refugee Studies 21 (4): 432–53. Ballinger, Pamela. 2016. ‘Colonial Twilight: Italian Settlers and the Long Decolonization of Libya’, Journal of Contemporary History 51 (4): 813–38. ———. 2017. ‘Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries’, East European Politics and Societies 31 (1): 44–67. Bernal, Victoria. 2014. Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace and Citizenship, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Besteman, Catherine. 2016. Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Betts, Alexander, and Paul Collier. 2017. Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System, Allen Lane. Black, Richard. 2001. ‘Fifty Years of Refugee Studies: From Theory to Policy’, International Migration Review 36 (1): 57–78. Case, Holly. 2009. ‘Being European: East and West’, In European Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein (pp. 111–31). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Chimni, B. S. 1998. ‘The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the South’, Journal of Refugee Studies 11 (4): 350–74. ———. 2009. ‘The Birth of a ‘Discipline’: From Refugee to Forced Migration Studies’, Journal of Refugee Studies 22 (1): 11–29. Colson, Elizabeth. 1971. The Social Consequences of Resettlement. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cumings, Bruce. 2002. ‘Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies During and After the Cold War’, In Learning Places: the Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (pp. 261–302). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, https​://ww​w.mth​olyok​e.edu​/acad​/intr​el/cu​mings​2.htm​. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena, Gil Loescher, Katy Long and Nando Sigona. eds. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gatrell, Peter. 1999. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2011. Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2017. ‘Refugees – What’s Wrong With History?’, Journal of Refugee Studies 30 (2): 170–89. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso Books. Green, Nile. 2014. ‘Re-thinking the ‘Middle East’ after the Oceanic Turn’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34 (3): 556–64. Hacking, Ian. 2006. ‘Making up people’, The London Review of Books, August 17. Harrell-Bond, Barbara. 1986. Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirschon, Renée. 1989. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: the Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. New York: Berghahn. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. The Age of Extremes: Europe’s Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph. Hollis-Touré, Isabel. 2015. From North Africa to France: Family Migration in Text and Film. London: IGRS Books. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945. London: Heinemann. Kushner, Tony. 2006. Remembering Refugees: Then and Now, Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2017. Journeys from the Abyss: the Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Loizos, Peter. 1981. The Heart Grown Bitter: a Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Mannik, Lynda. 2013. Photography, Memory, and Refugee Identity: the Voyage of the SS Walnut. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ———. (ed.). 2016. Migration by Boat: Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival. New York: Berghahn. Marfleet, Philip. 2013. ‘Explorations in a Foreign Land: States, Refugees and the Problem of History’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 32 (2): 14–34. Mazower, Mark. 1998. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Allen Lane. Noiriel, Gérard. 1988. Le creuset français: histoire de l’immigration XIX-XX siècle. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Reeves, Madeleine. 2014. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shacknove, Andrew. 1985. ‘Who is a Refugee?’, Ethics 95 (2): 274–84. Stein, Barry. 1981. ‘The Refugee Experience: Defining the Parameters of a Field of Study’, International Migration Review 15 (1–2): 320–30. White, Benjamin Thomas. 2017. ‘Refugees and the Definition of Syria, 1920–1939’, Past and Present 235: 141–78. Wigen, Kären. 2006. ‘Introduction: Oceans of History, an AHR Forum’, American Historical Review 111 (3): 717–23. Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. 2007. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, and Histories. New York: Columbia University Press. Zetter, Roger. 2007. ‘More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization’, Journal of Refugee Studies 20 (2): 172–92.

5 Latin American Studies What Have We Achieved and Where Are We Heading? Christopher Sabatini and Nicolás Albertoni

This chapter’s main goal, in continuing with this Necessary Travel, is to show how Latin American Studies has evolved and advanced into the twenty-first century. We review the contributions to Latin American Studies, not just in terms of improving understanding but also with respect to contributions to comparative politics and Regional Studies generally. The chapter also analyzes methodologies commonly used, the new methods in examining this region and the challenges for Latin American Studies, which remains a much-needed field of study and discipline. And we conclude with a discussion of how (and why) Global Studies should include the rich intellectual and institutional foundation of Regional Studies with Global Studies. Latin American Studies is no different from research on other regions in that there has been a shift away from Regional Studies to Global Studies. For example, one of the authors of this chapter, Christopher Sabatini, has seen Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) pass responsibility of its Regional Studies programs, including the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS), to the college of Arts and Sciences. The regional programs now operate separately from the professional master programs at SIPA. The move is more than mere bureaucratic reshuffling. It is part of a broader vision of downplaying Regional Studies in SIPA in favor of a more globalist approach to International Studies. What do these intellectual and structural changes in how universities and research programs manage Regional Studies mean for the future of New Area Studies (NAS)? Can – and even should – a new, modern emphasis on Area Studies overcome these shifting trends in academia? Below we argue they should, but not without better framing and basing Latin American Studies in the methodological changes underway in social science research and within the broader global changes and pressures affecting the region we study. 55

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Latin American Studies in many ways cast the mold for not just the study of the Western Hemisphere but also for other regions. Many theories and approaches to Regional Studies have been strongly connected with Latin American and Regional Studies. These include: • Modernization theory – which led to the Alliance for Progress but also influenced the view of the Rockefeller Foundation and other foundations in their search for developments that would create a global middle class and political stability; • Dependency theory – the idea popularized by Prebisch (1950; 1959) that developing countries faced particular hurdles to compete in the global economy and that states needed to guide national development strategies;1 • Bureaucratic authoritarianism – O’Donnell’s (1973) thesis that Latin American – particularly South American – countries need to suppress wage demands and workers to restore economic growth argued that the political economic logic required authoritarian intervention; • Social movements and change – concerns over political and social upheaval and their relationships to economic conditions and inequality which led to a series of studies that focused on Liberation Theology, populism, revolutionary movements, unionization, indigenous movements and nationalism; • Democratization – starting in many ways with the seminal work of O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead (1986), Latin American Studies focused after the 1980s on examining the phenomenon of democratic transition and consolidation, and many of their component parts: civil society, party systems, voting patterns, the rise of competitive authoritarianism and new-institutionalism. Much of the US-based research grew out of a rich network of Latin American Studies centers. In a back-of-an-envelope calculation, there are more than two dozen centers or institutes of Latin American Studies in the United States, not including the inter-university consortia.2 If these streams of study and writing in Latin American Regional Studies are summarized – at the risk of being too reductionist – they could be distilled into matters of economic development, comparative politics, history, and sociology. Those subjects largely dominated Regional Studies over the past four decades. Most of the literature dedicated to issues of foreign policy and international relations from US scholars working on the region centered on the notion of US hegemony, and during the Cold War, the proxy ideological battles between the US and Soviet Union.

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES A Little History, Criticism and Challenges While scholarship shifted with the transitions to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s and the end of the Cold War, the bulk of research in the social sciences, and

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political science and sociology in particular, remained dedicated to issues of political, social and institutional development. Over time, research tended to become even more focused, examining issues of social movements and indigenous representation (Yashar 2005; Van Cott 2005 and 2008), party development and change (Mainwaring and Scully 1995: Keck 1995; Levitsky 2005), electoral volatility (Roberts and Wibbels 1999), economic reform (Haggard and Kaufman 1992 and Nelson and Kaufman 2004; Murillo 2009), populism (Weyland 2001), civil-military relations (Goodman, Mendleson and Rial 1990; Hunter 1997; Pion-Berlin 2001), civil society (Keck and Sikkink 1998) and democratic institutions such as legislatures and judiciaries (Carey and Shugart 1992), as well as drug trafficking, political violence and citizen security (Chernick 2008; Wickham-Crowley 2001). Many of the recent studies mentioned above were focused more on details of institutional workings, individual movements, communities and voter behavior. Much of that literature stands in contrast to the larger political-economic studies that had dominated much of the field of Latin American Regional Studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Examples from that era would be Cardoso and Faletto’s classic Dependency and Development (1979) and O’Donnell’s earlier work on bureaucratic authoritarianism (1973), both of which influenced comparative research beyond the region. But beyond the diminished influence of Latin America research on the work and methodology of Regional Studies more broadly, the focus on narrower topics has tended to miss many of the broader global economic/political shifts that have influenced geopolitics and the international and domestic political economy. Issues such as the effects of the commodities boom on the political economy of domestic politics and the shifting geopolitical role of Latin America and the Global South have not received the depth of research attention they deserve. In the case of foreign policy and international relations, until recently US study of Latin America remained stuck in an overwhelming focus on Washington’s hegemony in Latin America. The emphasis tended to be on US policy toward the region – notably, subjugation of the region’s agency in matters of foreign policy. Scholars within the region, along with some from outside, produced a large body of work with a degree of contrast to the studies just noted. This line of research analyzed individual country’s foreign policy and international relations as independent actors. A series of more recent studies – both on Latin America and individual country’s foreign policies – no longer place the US as a hegemonic regional power. Nevertheless, Latin America remains understudied and under-theorized in the world of international relations and foreign policy and many of the Traditional Regional Studies centers listed above have been slow to adjust to these new, promising research questions. Linked partially to the situation described above is one of the main critiques of Latin American Studies programs in US universities: the notion of a hierarchical preponderance in the North, and thereby of the region’s racial and cultural inferiority. Those criticisms pointed to an air of condescension and of a lack of incorporation of scholars from Latin America itself into the debate within US universities. Indeed,

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even the overwhelming attention of US policy toward the region and country foreign policies as objects of that policy – rather than subjects in their own right – reflected that condescension. For those reflecting on the future of Latin America as a region for study, other issues arise. Hale (2014), for example, identifies two additional challenges. The first is the rise of Global Studies, as both ‘an area of teaching and as a force of institutional reorganization (e.g., Global Studies institutes that displace Traditional Area Studies centers)’ (81). That view devalues the attention and focus on one region, based on a belief that ‘scholars bound to a particular region are ill-prepared to grasp increasingly globalized processes of historical change’ (Hale 2014). The natural adjunct to this is that Regional Studies themselves are a relic of the past and it is now Global Studies that will bring the innovative conceptual models necessary to understand the world today. The second, Hale (2014, 81) writes, is ‘the monumental shift from book to byte’. That shift ‘has called into question the structure and function of libraries, and transformed priorities for the acquisition of global scholarly resources’ (ibid). The net effect is to reduce the importance of extensive archives that the libraries of esteemed Regional Studies libraries, like the University of Texas Austin’s Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) – which Hale used to head – have built up over decades. In short, Latin American Regional Studies in the United States face two somewhat linked challenges. One is the need to shift from its traditional regional, comparative politics focus and its recent descent into narrower research topics to address the region in a broader global context, along with the international relations and domestic political and economic implications of that shift. The second is the overall trend in academia and in social science research to structurally and intellectually give shorter shrift to Regional Studies programs – not just Latin American Studies – in favor of more Global Studies programs and analyses. This change has led to a wholesale shift in academic departments pushing aside or even downgrading Regional Studies programs in favor of trendy global, broadly comparative initiatives and centers. But do these historical and transitional weaknesses and academic fashions spell the end of Regional Studies themselves? And should they? On both counts we think not.

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES In the Context of NAS Then there are the broader criticisms to consider. These critiques pertain to the relevance of Regional Studies to academic, scholarly and policy debates today. Here, Hale (2014) makes a powerful case for the ongoing need for the sort of deep, nuanced scholarship and understanding that comes with Regional Studies. As Hale (2014) argues passionately – and correctly – the need for ‘deep contextual understanding of a region’s language, culture, history remains a requisite for investigating’ a region or country. This is a level of understanding that only comes from the study

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of a region and living and conducting research there – the sort of intellectual and personal experiences that Latin American Studies programs have provided solidly for decades. For example, many Latin American Studies centers require that their students take one semester abroad to have a better immersion and understanding of the cultural context of their studies. A second reason for the enduring need for Regional Studies program is the ‘collaborative approach’ (Hale 2014, 82) across disciplines that these centers bring together ‘to take full advantage of the methodological tools and cumulative theoretical wisdom of a number of disciplines’, while still ensuring academic rigor. The third main principle mentioned by Hale is collaboration, which can come in many forms, some self-evident and already widespread, others more unusual. The main point here is the depth of dialogue and collaboration with colleagues from across the Americas that occurs in Latin American Studies programs. A good example of this trans-hemispheric collaboration is the University of Texas’ participation in a network devoted to the study and practice of social cartography. While many of these cartographic techniques originated in North America, one of their most advanced applications today is in South America, specifically in the Amazonian region of Brazil. Their driving research questions – related to rights to territory and resources, sociopolitical conflict, alternative development models and the like – have emerged from close dialogue with Brazilians and other Latin Americans on the front lines of this emergent field of study.3 Beyond the academic importance of the effort, the social mapping project also has powerful policy implications. One of the areas that Regional Studies programs are particularly well-placed to focus on is the issue of offering positive policy initiatives. That has long been a goal of Latin American Studies programs – for better or worse. But growing US isolationism and the increasing anti-intellectualism and disregard for expertise and cultural empathy makes the need greater than ever before. The last principle proposed by Hale is an emphasis on teaching and scholarship that advances the frontiers of knowledge while making a positive impact on the world. As we mentioned, Latin American Studies in many ways cast the mold, not just for the study of the Western Hemisphere but also for other regions such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and its new political dynamics. This new political juncture in the MENA region has opened up a new comparative sub-area of study that explores what the Latin American political history suggests about the current political context in MENA.4 For instance, a volume edited by Haynes (2016) considers the case of Latin America and the Middle East to study the relationship between religion and political culture in the Third World using a comparative and thematic approach. Specific issues of religion-politics interaction in the Third World in recent times include the political factors that explain the weakening of Catholicism and the rapid growth of Protestant evangelical sects in Latin America. The common effect of such developments is to challenge current forms of relationship between societies and states with religion used as a political resource (Haynes 2016).

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Taking Hale’s (2014) four principles as our point of departure, Latin American Studies still faces a number of challenges in the context of New Area Studies. First, Latin Americanists need to continue working to show that, although Global Studies has grown substantially in the last decade, the study of regions remains a prerequisite for substantive, rigorous Global Studies. Second, we need to continue to adopt, adapt and innovate the research methodologies used to study the region. One example of this just blossoming is the use of big data, or multi-sited research, to capture transnational processes. Specifically, it would be interesting to revisit longstanding questions related to Latin American politics in the context of such new research tools. Two instances are covered briefly here. One example is da Mota Ueti et al. (2016), who analyze how big data are changing not only companies but also governments in Mexico and Brazil. For instance, they show how the government of Brazil is trying to decrease spending and use public money better by grouping public information with stored information on citizens in public services. In another case, with new reforms in education, finances and telecommunications, the government of Mexico is taking on a bigger role to channel the country’s economic policy to improve the quality of life of its citizens. This has included the famous and now much-replicated conditional cash transfer programs that have become the rage, not just in Latin America but globally, as well as efforts to build ‘sustainable cities’ through the adoption of bike sharing programs and more green space and policies intended to improve the accountability of teachers in the educational system. Similarly, from the policy side, there is a second example. In coordination with the academic and the public sector, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) presented a project in 2017 that seeks to improve national capabilities for measuring the digital economy in the region to enhance policy analysis and policymaking.5 This project of the ECLAC aims to show how the management and analysis of the great quantities of data produced by the use of digital technologies (such as mobile telephones, electronic transactions and social networks) can be effective instruments for innovating in business administration, the provision of public services, and the design and implementation of development policies. It is research in progress that involved the coordination of the ECLAC, the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (CETIC.br), which is based in Brazil. The same is occurring with the adoption of new conceptual approaches, such as efforts to better understand and measure the effects of social media on institutions and politics of the region, as well as how the region is dealing with global climate change. And in Latin American Studies programs within the United States, as with any Regional Studies program, a new generation of scholars is becoming prominent, bringing broader comparative perspectives to the field. Recent books by Mares and Trinkunas (2016), Denoon (2017), and research by scholars such as Bertucci, Ellis, Gallagher, Malamud, Long, Mora, Schenoni and Spektor are delving into issues of

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international relations and the globalization of Latin America using modern, rigorous research methods. Academic disciplines always pass through generational and methodological transitions, or at least they should. Fortunately, that change appears to be underway in Latin American Studies.

RECOMMENDATIONS Let us start with an initial question: is there still a need for Regional Studies, including Latin American Studies? To that, as Hale argues, the answer is clearly ‘yes’ (though full disclosure: the authors here are clearly biased, but we believe the case can be made objectively). Unfortunately, the reality is that Regional Studies programs in universities across the United States and abroad are falling out of favor for broader Global Studies programs. That does not make Regional Studies irrelevant, only at risk of being marginalized, academically or in policy discussions. The diminishing prominence of Regional Studies programs then threatens to reduce the numbers of promising students who might otherwise enroll but find departments distant from more ‘trendy’ fields of study or professional masters programs. Is there an answer to this problem? Yes. Latin Americanist scholars and centers should continue to produce quality research that rises to the standards of the new Global Studies. Part of that effort should involve fostering greater collaboration across other Regional Studies programs to build a deeper, more-nuanced, cross-regional perspective to Global Studies. It is not that this has not been done before; see, for example, the monograph by Africanist Robert Bates and Latin Americanist John Coatsworth on the state and the economy in historical perspective. Such efforts need to continue and expand. Only by doing so can Latin American Studies, and Regional Studies generally, demonstrate what it can contribute to broader Global Studies. On a different tack, Latin American and other Regional Studies programs should not yield on funding for more avant garde global programs. Yes, for now there is greater attention and, with it, funding, dedicated to Global Studies, but many of the Latin American Studies programs today grew out of a dedicated foundation and individual support. Some of that has dried up as intellectual and academic attention has moved on. But there are still individual donors and corporations who remain committed – either intellectually or through personal commitment or business interest – to regions and Regional Studies. While obtaining funding today requires considerably more effort than a block grant from the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, pursuing individual and corporate support does not have to mean compromising academic principles and integrity. In fact, many sources are proud to attach their names to prestigious universities and scholars—both established and up-and-coming. There is also the deep reserve of Latin American technocrats and business leaders that have benefited from the decades-long history of Regional Studies that could be tapped, not just financially but also intellectually, for their perspectives on the shifting research and policy challenges in the region. In short, there is a

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reserve of interest and intellectual talent that is ready to help shape a new agenda of Regional Studies regarding Latin American and, likely, other regions. Regional Studies programs also have a responsibility to incorporate new approaches. As mentioned above, a new generation of methods and international relations scholars are arriving in the field. More should be done to incorporate other regional scholars in Latin American Studies centers. The modern, more nuanced and substantive approach to Global Studies should start with building from and bridging the rich history and foundation of Regional Studies for a more global perspective. The idea, quite frankly, that Global Studies can yield meaningful insights without the grounded, deep understanding of the individual relations is facile. Ultimately, understanding the global system in comparative perceptive requires a deep understanding and appreciation of the different perspectives, foundational legacies and potential affinities and clashes of cultures amongst regions. To this end, Latin American and other Regional Studies programs need to incorporate scholars from elsewhere, much in the same way that programs have for decades strived to include other disciplines within the region. The incorporation of other regional scholars in Latin American programs is key to a newer Regional Studies. This should – indeed must – include incentives, such as cross-regional funding, for research programs. Imagine if Columbia University or University of Southern California (our respective academic institutions) were to provide research grants to support cross-regional research on Latin America, the Middle East and Asia that focused on trade flows, diplomatic integration or migration, for example? Such efforts would draw on not just the academic expertise of the respective regional departments but also create meaningful bridges to help students and the world understand the cultural, political, economic, and geopolitical foundation of globalization and Global Studies. In short, the idea would be to build on the rich tradition of Regional Studies while also directing them to a more comparative, global analysis. Now that would be a grounded Global Studies program, one that embraces and draws from the regional expertise for rigorous study and research programs and by doing so builds on decades of fruitful academic tradition. Let us hope it happens.

FINAL COMMENTS In short, the future of Latin American Studies depends on its ability to adapt by bringing in new methodologies, extra-regional expertise and international, global perspectives. The good news is that much of this is already underway as part of a generational shift. But part of it also requires re-conceptualizing interdisciplinary research and cross-Regional Studies. It is not impossible. But given the fragmentation of Regional Studies programs in academia – at least in the US – it demands an extra effort by those who work in and who believe in Regional Studies. Ultimately, as Hale argues, truly, deeply understanding the world in a global age requires deep, sophisticated understanding of regions and actors that act collectively and

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independently. Focusing only on Global Studies without that foundation risks – at best – undervaluing deep understanding and – at worst – engaging in superficial and frivolous research. This should serve as a call to Regional Studies and Latin American Studies programs to embrace modernization. Global Studies bereft of the depth, expertise and interdisciplinary approaches of the older and fuller Regional Studies is just not an intellectually satisfactory option.

NOTES 1. Those conclusions shaped a generation of scholarship and international understanding of development and also led to the creation of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, known as ECLAC (or in Spanish, CEPAL). 2. While not an exhaustive list, some of these entities include the American University Center for Latin American and Latino Studies; Columbia University’s Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS); Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS); Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; Florida International University Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center; Tulane University’s Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies; University of California, Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies; University of Chicago’s Center for Latin American Studies; University of New Mexico’s Latin American and Iberian Institute; University of Texas at Austin’s Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, or LLILAS; the University of California at San Diego’s Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies; University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill Institute for Latin American Studies; Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American Studies. 3. The organization is called Nova Cartografia Social: http://novacartografiasocial.com/.  4. Some examples of these studies/dialogues are: Haynes (2013; 2016); Wedeen (2016); Afshar (2016); Spring (2016); Pevehouse (2016), among others. To see another interesting insight on this approach read: Rut Diamint’s piece in The Conversation entitled ‘Latin American history suggests Zimbabwe’s military coup will turn  violent’, full text: https​://th​econv​ ersat​ion.c​om/la​tin-a​meric​an-hi​story​-sugg​ests-​zimba​bwes-​milit​ary-c​oup-wi​ ll-t​urn-v​iolen​t-876​ 48 (accessed November 2017). 5. For more information about ‘Big data for measuring and fostering the digital economy in Latin America and the Caribbean‘, read: http:​//www​.data​4sdgs​.org/​news/​big-d​ata-a​nalyt​ ics-s​ustai​nable​-deve​lopme​nt-la​tin-a​meric​a-and​-cari​bbean​ (accessed November 2017).

REFERENCES Afshar, Haleh, ed. 2016. Women and empowerment: Illustrations from the Third World. New York: Springer. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Enzo Faletto. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Chernick, M. 2008. Acuerdo posible: solución negociada al conflicto armado colombiano. Bogotá: Aurora.

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Goodman, Louis, Johanna Mendelson and Juan Rial. 1990. The Military and Democracy: The Future of Civil-Military Relations in Latin America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Haggard, Stephan and Robert Kaufman. 1992. The Politics of Economic Adjustment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. International Constraints, Distributive Conflicts and the State. Princeton; NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995. The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hale, Charles. 2014. ‘The Future of Latin American Studies’. Americas Quarterly 8 (3): 80–83. Haynes, Jeff, ed. 2016. Religion, Globalization and Political Culture in the Third World. New York: Springer. ———. 2013. Democracy in the Developing World: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Hunter, Wendy. 1997. Eroding Military Influence in Brazil: Politicians against Soldiers. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keck, Margaret. 1995. The Worker’s Party and Democratization in Brazil. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Levitsky, Steven. 2005. Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, Tom. 2015. Latin America Confronts the United States: Asymmetry and Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mainwaring, Scott and Timothy Scully, eds. 1995. Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Murillo, Maria Victoria. 2009. Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Joan and Robert Kaufman. 2004. Crucial Needs, Weak Incentives: Social Sector Reform, Globalization and Democratization in Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1973. Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics, Politics of Modernization Series No 9. Berkeley, California: Institute for International Studies, University of California. A Second edition was issued in 1979. O’Donnell, Guillermo, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, eds. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Prospects for Democracy. Volumes 1-4. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pevehouse, Jon C. 2016. ‘Regional Human Rights and Democracy Governance’. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pion-Berlin, David. 2001. Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press: 2001. Prebisch, Raúl. 1950. The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems. New York: United Nations. ———. 1959. ‘Commercial Policy in the Underdeveloped Countries’.  American Economic Review 49: 251–73. Roberts, Kenneth, and Erik Wibbels. 1999. ‘Party Systems and Electoral Volatility in Latin America: A Test of Economic, Institutional, and Structural Explanations’, American Political Science Review 93 (3): 575–90.

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Shugart, Matthew Soberg and John M. Carey. 1992. Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Spring, Úrsula Oswald, et al., eds. 2016. Regional Ecological Challenges for Peace in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Vol. 5. Berlin: Springer. Ueti R. M., Espinosa D. F., Rafferty L., and Hung, P. C. K. 2016. ‘Case Studies of Government Use of Big Data in Latin America: Brazil and Mexico’. In Big Data Applications and Use Cases. International Series on Computer Entertainment and Media Technology, edited by P. Hung (pp. 197–214). Berlin: Springer. Van Cott, Deborah. 2005. From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Radical Democracy in the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wedeen, Lisa. 2016. ‘Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle . Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge: 31. DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479827787.001.0001. Weyland, Kurt. 2001. ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics’ Comparative Politics 34 (1): 1–22. Wickham-Crowley, Timothy. 2001. ‘Winners, Losers, and Also-Rans: Toward a Comparative Sociology of Latin American Guerrilla Movements’ In Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, edited by Susan Eckstein. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Yashar, Deborah J. 2005. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6 Mastering the Current Studying Central Asia in the Twenty-First Century Claus Bech Hansen

In 2002, German Defense Minister Peter Struck noted that ‘the security of the Federal Republic of Germany is . . . being defended at the Hindu Kush’ (Strutynski 2007). The statement was part of the governments’ justification for conducting an unpopular war in Afghanistan – a country that had garnered little attention before 9/11 and one hidden away in a region most Western Europeans know only through a mediated narrative of Silk Road romanticism and fear of Islamist extremists (Heathershaw and Megoran 2011). Little in the perception of Afghanistan and Central Asia has changed over the past fifteen years: the region typically wins the limelight of world media only when autocratic leaders make eccentric statements, (ethnic) strife erupts, or, as in 2001, when it became the centre of geopolitical battles. General Western interest in Central Asia is reflected in the academic landscape. Central Asian Studies (CAS) belong to those academic disciplines that are derogatively called ‘orchid disciplines’ in Germany; those of an exotic nature, producing specialized knowledge to such a degree that it renders them ‘irrelevant’ to the wider world and generally attracts fewer students for expensive professors than do the more mainstream social or natural sciences. There is a grain of truth in the unfavourable appraisal of CAS – as well as of Area Studies (AS) disciplines more broadly, for since the early 1990s in particular, they have been the subject of a long-drawn debate over their means and ends. In Germany, several science policy agencies have been involved in assessments of AS disciplines, speaking in a crucial report by the German Council for Science and Humanities in 2006. The report concluded that ‘the process of globalization on the one hand, and the consequential increasing consolidation of cultural and regional identities on the other, have led to a growing interest in regional-specific expertise’ (Wissenschaftsrat 2006, 5). In contrast to AS critical voices, the report saw a need to provide expert knowledge to policy makers in times of globalization 67

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and argued that the ‘existing range of regionally defined disciplines must also in the future be preserved and structurally strengthened’ (29). The decade-old report must be applauded for its foresight. For if the past decade serves as a yardstick, it is clear that globalization has not mainstreamed the world into one homogenous whole; that diverse political, economic, and ideological interests incontrovertibly still characterize international relations; and that national and religious differences persist, which are abused by extremists to dangerously stereotype communities and minorities for their own gain. There is, in other words, an urgent need for area-specific knowledge, pointing toward the value of New Area Studies (NAS) as envisioned in this volume. This chapter is written against the background of critical discussions over AS and focuses on how CAS have adapted. Perhaps more than other regions, Central Asia has served as a theatre of international geopolitics throughout the past twenty odd years: the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to independent states and birthed bloody civil wars; authoritarian leaders quashed dreams of democracy and rule of law, and international military engagement threatened to completely destabilise the region. All the while that political and military attention turned to Central Asia, CAS scholars began an important self-reflexive process on the heritage of their disciplines, revealing partly unpleasant truths, which have, however, ultimately benefitted their research. Inspired by theoretical and methodological advances in the humanities and social sciences, CAS scholars with rich contextual knowledge have since implemented cutting-edge, multidisciplinary methodological tools and related their findings to sophisticated theoretical paradigms, thus contributing to our understanding of transformation processes, socio-spatial and power relations, and investigations on identity. As a result, New Area Studies research has already begun to flourish at CAS institutes around the world and in the following sections, I discuss recent research nodes and how they can inform meta-discussions (e.g., on space, mobility and development) and at the same time provide insight for policymakers.

WHAT IS CENTRAL ASIAN STUDIES? All area-specific disciplines are faced with the question of how they should delimit the area they study. Geographically speaking, Encyclopedia Britannica (2017) tells us that Central Asia comprises of the five former Soviet republics – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. By contrast, however, CAS disciplines typically use a broader definition and bundle CAS with a larger group of Area-specific Studies, as, for example, at the University of Bonn where they are included in the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies, covering a region stretching from ‘Asia Minor and Japan, Southern Siberia and Mongolia to Southeast Asia’ (Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies 2017). At times it is also divided into a northern and southern part, comprising the five above mentioned states but also Afghanistan as well as parts of Iran and Pakistan, while yet other conceptions expand it even further south to include India and Myanmar (United States Department of State 2017, 1945).

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Some scholars prefer to perceive of Central Asia in terms of ethnicity or according to linguistic boundaries of the Turkic speaking peoples. Canfield and Rasuly-Paleczek (2010) include not only the northern and southern parts but also the Xinjiang Province of China, home of the Turkic Uyghur. Hann (2016) pushes the boundaries even further and speaks of a somewhat dubious ‘supracontinental unity’ connecting Europe and Asia so that Central Asia becomes an integral part of a Eurasia that extends from China to Portugal and includes not only Japan and Great Britain but also the northern African countries. Hann’s concept has rightfully been challenged (Schlee 2015) for its weak boundaries and is reminiscent of a 1980s discussion over the concept of the German ‘culture nation’ – a heavily criticized concept due to its expansive nature (Alter 1997). The process of defining the boundaries of their research subject, whether geographically, culturally, or ethnically, points to one of the core critiques directed at AS disciplines. Based on a dual interconnected argument pertaining to the artificial, constructed nature of AS disciplines’ subject matter it contends, on the one hand, that AS institutes were by and large products of imperial interests of domination, as they arose during the era of European empires and following the Second World War in the United States and the Soviet Union. On the other hand, it holds that AS arbitrarily divided the world into regions based on Othering processes, often developed for the purpose of political and economic domination or Cold War alliances (Burgess 2004, 125; Chou and Houben 2006). This is no less true for CAS disciplines, which became strongly influenced by political developments during the twentieth century – in the East and in the West. In Russia and later in the Soviet Union, CAS built on a philological tradition of oriental institutes founded in the nineteenth century hand in hand with Imperial Russia’s military expansion south- and eastward. These institutes typically focused on the ‘foreign’ Orient (Turkey, Iran, etc.) as well as on the ‘domestic’ Muslim states in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Kemper 2011, 2–4). With the upheavals of the early twentieth century and the establishment of the Soviet Union, CAS disciplines were infused with a dose of Soviet political theory, which has marked the disciplines in some cases up until the present day. With its theoretical foundation in materialism, Leninist and later Stalinist political theory saw class struggles (and productive powers) as fundamental forces driving the development of society. Advancing through different development stages – from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism to socialism – society would eventually reach communism as a final stage. The theory was based on developments in western European societies, however, and saw in their industrialization and technological advance ‘later’ or ‘higher’ stages of development compared to other world regions such as Central Asia. Moreover, when Russian and Soviet revolutionaries and scholars were confronted with the almost complete absence of industrialization and of westernstyle nations as well as with cultural-religious idiosyncrasies in Central Asia, they by and large orientalised the region. In their view, it was ‘backward’ and in need of a civilizational push toward modernity and so in a curious ideological compromise

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the socialist Soviet Union became an empire of nations (Hirsch 2005) and created national polities in order to spark the inevitable teleological forces which would lead Central Asia through the different stages of development (Said 2006; Khalid 2006). ‘Areas are not facts but artefacts’, Appadurai critically argues, ‘built on our interests and our fantasies as well as on our needs to know, to remember, and to forget’ (2000, 8). The Soviet reading of Central Asia fabricated not only the nations in Central Asia and thus the area we know today. It also produced an epistemic regime of the kind Appadurai alludes to, which was enormously influential for the study of CAS worldwide. Given limited access to the region and the meagre scholarly exchange taking place during the Cold War, much of the critique from postcolonial scholars directed at AS disciplines rang true for CAS disciplines as well. In particular, studies of contemporary society remained tainted by the prevalent Marxist doctrine. The self-critical process of CAS scholars over the past twenty-five years has in no small part been one in which they have sought to remove the reminiscent Soviet orientalist blinkers. It belongs to the irony of history, of course, that the Soviet discourse remains strong at many CAS institutes in the former Soviet region today, precisely because the Soviet logic preached to free the oppressed peoples from the imperialist West, erroneously absolving itself of any orientalist intentions. Moreover, they have ‘simply managed to ignore much of the critique that Western Oriental Studies have learned to cope with’ (Kemper 2011, 21). While the self-reflexive journey of CAS scholars has thus in some sense been ‘anti-Soviet’, it has been no less mindful of demands calling for AS to become better equipped to analyse a world that is becoming increasingly intertwined and interdependent (Houben 2004). Calls such as these have been influenced by various disciplinary ‘turns’, theories, and methods in the social sciences and related disciplines. Each in their own way, these discussions have contributed to a century-old debate over the relationship between agency and structure and the forces that direct the ‘stuff’ of the social world. More or less satisfactory paradigms have emerged, aiming to provide key theoretical and methodological tools that allow us to overcome the dichotomous view on structures and agency, and analytically perceive them as mutually constituent (Dunning and Hughes 2013, 8). Operating within the purview of holistic theories, interdisciplinary, relational approaches have been advocated in different forms such as figurational sociology (Elias 1970; 2000), structuration theory (Giddens 1984), strategic-relational theory (Jessop 2001), reflexive sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), the Time, Place, Space, Network (TPSN) approach (Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008), and scholars are still unlikely to agree on a one size fits all paradigm. The drive towards inter- and even post-disciplinary scholarship, the linguistic, cultural, spatial, Anthropocene turns, as well as poststructuralism, postcolonialism, constructivism, new institutionalism, transnationalism, are amongst the results this process has yielded. They have altered our views on the social world and called new voices into the scholarly arena that challenge and provincialize existing epistemic regimes, methodology and theorization (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006;

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Grosfoguel 2015; Quijano 2007). In reference to AS disciplines, particularly the cultural turn (Lackner and Werner 1999; Bachmann-Medick 2007), spatial turn (Lefebvre 1992; Massey 2005; Soja 1989), and post-structuralism (Jackson 2003) have been instrumental. CAS has not gone unmarked from these meta-discussions. In fact, CAS researchers continue to find ways to disentangle and analyse the reciprocal effects that global and local forces have on one another to better understand how these interdependencies shape the reality in Central Asia. Studies in the areas of space and spatiality, mobility, and development have produced insightful results providing New Area Studies with powerful methodological and theoretical foundations.

CONSTRUCTING CENTRAL ASIA Central Asia, as we conceive of it today, is the result of processes of ‘making sense of’ the social world’. Discussions over the space and area that CAS covers reveal the compound nature of their subject matter. It is a social construction, an imagined community (Anderson 1983) – a property it shares with nations, ethnic communities and borders, all of which carry meaning and provide a sense of belonging (Smith 1987). Such spaces are social spaces that, although imagined determine not only the lifeways and practices of individuals and communities but also identities and social hierarchies because of spatialization processes, i.e. the production of social space (Pries 1999, 26; Lefebvre 1992, 27). Nationalism and the construction of nations have been at the centre of attention of a swathe of studies on Central Asia since 1991, when five independent nations were established across the heartlands of Central Asia (Roy 2000; Smith 1999; Hirsch 2005). How viable would these nations be that, contrary to those in the western regions of the former Soviet Union, had never been independent nation states, how ‘sticky’ are the national identities? Heavily influenced by Soviet development theory, older scholarship had suggested that the Central Asian nations’ constructed character did not resonate psychologically and emotionally with the people they targeted who, purportedly, instead felt a pan-Turkic consciousness (Bennigsen 1979; Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay 1967). This view was later refined with studies arguing that national identity was undermined by strong regional, clan identities based on kinship (Collins 2006; Carlisle 1986; Schatz 2004). This argument was often combined with a religious component that saw Islam as the dominant source of identity in the region. Instead of playing a part in developing new identities, Poliakov (1992) argued, Islam ostensibly nullified attempts to generate national or even a supranational Soviet identity and began a process of ‘re-traditionalization’. Poliakov essentialized religion and his views have rightfully been contested by other scholars (Rasanayagam 2011; DeWeese 2002). Others too have argued that it was the very promotion of local national identity that ‘nationalised’ religion, resulting in its revitalization during the Soviet period (Northrop 2001).

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With the successful claim for independence and the subsequent nation-building process, controversy has to some extent settled the uncertainty concerning the salience of identities. Central Asians generally have a healthy, proud national consciousness. At the same time, scholars now seem largely to agree that people do not hold one singular identity but rather a conglomerate of various identities that are created by a sense of belonging (national, regional, supranational, etc.), ethnic markers, professional life, gender and culture (etc.) that may at times conflict but not necessarily negate one another (Donahoe et al. 2009; Finke 2014; Adams and Rustemova 2009; Hierman 2015). In the ethnically and culturally inter-mixed societies of Central Asia this is particularly true, underlining the importance of going beyond specific national and regional containers and eschewing ‘methodological nationalism’, i.e. the practice of assuming that the territorial limitation of nation-states defines and delimits the analysis of social processes (Wimmer and Schiller 2003, 578). Needless to say, human beings are always products of and act within concrete places and are thus influenced by a web of spatially defined relations (Lewis and Wigen 1997; Sheppard 2002). But these go ‘beyond the social context of national societies’ (Pries 1999, 26), and studies should focus on transnationalism (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc 1995; Mintz 1998), transregionalism and regional orders (Hentschke 2009; Godehardt and Lembcke 2010), scale (Novak 2014; van Schendel 2002), as well as translocality (Freitag and Oppen 2009) to relativize the importance of nationality and national borders, religion and cultural boundaries. This underscores the constructed nature and the multitude of factors influencing human identities. Recent CAS has gone in this direction, for example, focusing on the legacy of the Soviet Union in regards to identities and feelings of belonging (Todorova and Gille 2010; Bassin and Kelly 2012). Interestingly, they suggest that the Soviet experience has left a legacy that continues to influence both self-identification and identity ascription, allowing us to speak of a distinct post-Soviet transnational identity, but more research is needed in this area to better decipher the implications of these processes (Hansen and Kaiser 2017; Boym 2001). The compound, flexible nature of identities entails a spatial dimension that provides orientation and stability for individuals within the borders of their social world. In turn, the social world is marked by manifestations of communities’ spatialities, reflecting self-perception, social relations and power hierarchies (etc.). When the former Soviet states of Central Asia claimed their independence and embarked on their nationalizing process (Brubaker 2011), the space and territory they ruled simultaneously became a laboratory for producing new national identities (Finke 2014). Researchers have shown how the new states appropriated and remoulded space, often in a crass primordial fashion based on a newly discovered thousand-year-old narrative of nationhood that aimed to uproot the socialist heritage to ensure stability and support from their people (Denison 2009; Dagiev 2013; Adams and Rustemova 2009; Kudaibergenova 2014). Such processes of generating feelings of belonging are not straightforward. While ruptures, political conflicts, and bordering or re-bordering processes often result

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in changing spatial entities, they may not always produce the intended results but instead muddled relations that care little for official categories of ethnicity, religious belonging, or nationality (Reeves 2014; Megoran 2007). Bouzas (2012) has shown how the people of Gilgit-Baltistan, caught in a political conflict between Pakistan and India, have developed a distinct sense of belonging in their community and region because ‘statehood in a modern sense (after partition) has not been experienced much in everyday life’ (875). Self-identification with Pakistan remains nebulous at best and shows that spatial layering (e.g., in the form of political orders) does not always resonate with identification processes and feelings on the ground. The appropriation of space is not a property belonging exclusively within the purview of the state. Individuals and groups are part of a spatializing, relational process of their social worlds, given the threefold dimension of place as locale, location, and a sense of place, as rightfully argued by Agnew (1987, 25–47). Moreover, the analysis of space ought to be relational, processual and constructivist as suggested by Alff and Benz (2016) in their work on migrant networks. They show how space, place, identity, and power is appropriated, disrupted, and negotiated by various actors, providing an understanding of gendered, national, and religious space. Joniak-Lüthi (2015) has uncovered similar processes in her analysis of China’s Uyghur population in Xinjiang, who struggle with ethnically defined spatial layering due to changing government policies. As a result, power hierarchies have been altered through new spatial practices and language, marginalizing the traditional Uyghur spatialities (Joniak-Lüthi 2015, 437–40). Thematically and analytically CAS scholarship on space and spatialization, identity and identification, as well as on bordering processes has broken the conceptual straight-jacket generated by epistemic regimes and socially constructed boundaries and borders that have been uncritically reproduced. These are essential elements of New Area Studies, which need to critically examine how these processes form and develop in view of the complex social reality that only thick description (Geertz 1973) can convey.

CENTRAL ASIA AS A SET OF MOBILE SOCIETIES With the end of the Cold War and the abatement of national borders, in particular in international financial affairs, scholars have increasingly questioned the role of traditional pillars of society (Spivak 1996). Among those especially influential are Urry (2002), Castells (1996), and Appadurai (1996; 2000; 2013), each of whom has produced seminal works that have profoundly shaped views on mobility, interconnectivity, and networks in the age of globalization. Arguing that the globalizing world defined by high levels of mobility of humans, resources, and knowledge crucially influences not only the way we experience and act in everyday life but also the ‘traditional’ borders of state and society, Urry (2002; with Sheller, 2006) maintains that the state has become a regulator rather than an arbiter of change, outdating its

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role as sociology’s core object. Castells (1996) argues for a reconceptualization of society to suit the information age, in which it increasingly flows between (worldwide) networks and networked spaces that direct it. Finally, Appadurai (1996) sheds light on the global from the local, and the ‘Global Now’ with its disrupted patterns of social relations that have upset identities and boundaries but created new spaces, famously captured in his -scapes typology. All of these analyses – Urry’s ‘social as mobility’, Castells’ ‘flows’ and Appadurai’s ‘theory of rupture’ – consider mobility one of the primary forces not only defining modern society but also capable of altering its conventional pillars. Yet, how do these conceptualizations fit a region like Central Asia that has traditionally been marked by high levels of mobility? Consider trade and migratory movements. Located at the heart of the trade routes between Europe and Asia, movement and exchange of goods, knowledge and ideas were factors that fundamentally marked Central Asian societies for centuries. And while traditional trade routes along the Silk Road subsided during the Cold War, the north-south axis between Central Asia and Moscow strengthened tremendously. Hence, migration in today’s Central Asia has turned into a ‘rite of passage’ – predominantly of the male population – resulting in large numbers of Central Asian labour migrants in Moscow, who venture to Russia in the hope of earning higher wages. Mobility has not changed traditional roles of state and society as Urry suggests. In Central Asia we see instead how mobile societies have adapted to the altered circumstances by establishing well-functioning ethno-cultural networks that assist in providing social security, housing, jobs, etc., abroad while remaining critically grounded in their home countries (Hansen and Kaiser 2017, 200). Migrant networks based on common experience often also persist among returnees in home countries (Kaiser and Schönhuth 2015). Indeed, Massey’s contention that migrants rarely act alone but are part of a network seems particularly true for Central Asians (1993, 439). Reeves (2011) has further refined this argument by contending that current Central Asian migration for the purpose of labour or education is often realised against the immobility of members of a solidarity group, such as when extended family members help financially support migration projects as is also seen in sub-Saharan contexts (Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat 2016). In the meantime, immobile populations do not necessarily remain immobile. By contrast, Werner and Barcus (2009) show that decisions fluctuate and that they are often based on well-informed considerations about success chances. Mobility does not merely circumscribe movement of people from one place to another, however. In his study of the Wakhi of Gojal in Gilgit-Baltistan, Benz (2014) highlights how changes in education, employment, income, and financial resources have turned on its head the social stratification of local society. Migration and the mobility of ideas have resulted in that social position in today’s Gojal is less determined by ‘family origin (class) and agricultural resources (irrigated land, livestock) and instead on formal education, knowledge, skills, and professional careers’

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(Benz 2014, 132). Success in migration projects buys social capital, to borrow a term famously coined by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992). The connection between migration/mobility and the emergence and power of ideas through exchange has been shown in equally compelling evidence across the world (Adaawen 2016; Massey 1998; Castles and Miller 2009; Nieswand 2011). At the same time, these processes are rarely straightforward and CAS scholars have found that ‘movers’ habitually land in a mobilization ‘trap’, where the host society deprives them of upward mobilisation, while, paradoxically, upward social mobility of the immobilised is achieved through remittance payments (Skeldon 2012). Whichever way we turn it, recent CAS research points to the fact that when people, ideas and goods move from A to B, they are part of a greater processual movement of change of environments – be it through economic possibilities (e.g. remittances, economic investment), human and social capital (e.g. education, ideas, networks), or the exchange of ideas and goods (Dittrich and Schrader 2015). Mobility and movement are not independent variables. Despite the challenges that confront states in the face of mobility, they possess extraordinary powers to influence social, political, economic, cultural, and geographic mobility potentials (Sökefeld 2016; Evans et  al. 1985). This has been seen many times over (e.g., through the Iron Curtain) and persists in several authoritarian regimes today. In Turkmenistan, for instance, whose government ferociously tries to curb the movement of its people and their exchange with the outside world, dreams and imaginations about the world among the youth are undergoing fundamental change. Eloquently captured in a statement by a young Turkmen blogger, this change is reflected in their mental maps: ‘the main difference between [the older] and the younger generation is the way they perceive the world. While for the young people Turkmenistan is the entire world, for the older ones it is the former Soviet Union, where they were born and grew up’ (cited in Schwartz 2014, 198). States, in other words, still possess, to some degree, the power to curtail relations in the social world. Mobility as a lens allows us to discover relationships and dynamisms between individuals and communities across vast distances through the entanglements of the virtual and non-virtual worlds. Meanwhile, this Global Now is characterised by opposing forces: we observe a de-territorialization of space, while place and space continue to impact people’s lives and opportunities. ‘Globalization may well have eliminated space, but it has by no means undermined the significance of location, of place’ (Martin 1999, 15–16), precisely because spatialization needs concrete places (Crossroads Asia 2012b, 11; Harders 2000, 28). Global and local factors merge in communities around the world, a circumstance eloquently captured by the concept ‘glocal’ (Robertson 1995). CAS research on mobility against the backdrop of it in the face of the time-space collapse has informed our view on the forces of an increasingly globalised and hybrid world, and NAS should further develop these approaches.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF CENTRAL ASIA Modernity, its adverbial derivative as well as the development theory that grew out of it, are some of the most controversial concepts in the social sciences and related disciplines. Meant to capture the political, economic and sociocultural ruptures in Europe that produced the pillars of liberal democracy, resting on the rule of law and a capitalist mode of production, the term is sculpted from a quintessential European development and cannot simply be applied as a measurement of developments in other world regions (Cooper 2005, 113–51). Meanwhile, the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989) and with it, the end of the dualistic system conflict that kept the world on tenterhooks for the better half of the twentieth century, unleashed seemingly indomitable forces toward homogenous modernity. Any critical voices to this particular version of development theory were quickly smothered by a forceful neoliberal narrative that celebrated the free-market economy and financial deregulation. The manifestation of this worldview in former socialist countries of Central Asia took the form of a ‘shock-therapy transition’ to overcome traces from the socialist yoke, while interventionist western foreign policy has sought to bring countries such as Afghanistan out of their ‘backward’ stage and push them toward liberal democracy (Schetter 2016; Schetter 2013). Twenty-five years on, the debate has sobered up. The initial neo-liberal infatuation with development has withdrawn, given the ‘apparent failure of ‘transition’’ (Heathershaw and Cooley 2015, 1), and a more solemn, less ideological tone has been marking debates over modernity, transition and development. The development paradigm has been shelved and like Verdery (1996, 205), most CAS researchers now deny the ‘notion of a progress (from sickness toward health, from nothingness to being, from backwardness to development) and purposely [mock] the very idea of evolutionary stages’. Development has, moreover, been deconstructed and is no longer understood as a movement by which any sociocultural, economic, and political process leads to the same outcome of modernity. As a result, transition has made way for the more open-ended and flexible term ‘transformation’, inherently suggesting that system trajectories are contingent processes dependent on multiple factors (Verdery 1996). The trajectories of the Central Asian states are a case in point. Far from reflecting a unilinear development process, the countries have each embarked on different paths leading to different scenarios from disintegration in Tajikistan and relative liberal developments in Kyrgyzstan, to rigid authoritarian regimes in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Following the waning importance of development theory, CAS scholars have approached the novel systemic, sociocultural and economic configurations and developments in Central Asia in a more open-minded manner. A series of studies have found that traditional governance agents such as clans have proven highly adaptable to the changed structural conditions of the post-1991 world, which combined with insufficient state action have allowed them to survive in altered form and to become political actors (Collins 2006, 16; Ilkhamov 2007; McGlinchey 2009). We witness a situation

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where the classic liberal democratic governing structures may exist, but do not exercise their intended power. These studies allude to similar developments in India, which were famously captured as ‘modernity of tradition’ by Rudolph and Rudolph (1984), and are indicative of the hybridity of any society in more general terms. Other studies have focused on adaptation under the condition of economic restructuring and have provided equally strong evidence of similarity between other world regions and Central Asia. Hence, scholars have proven wrong the prevalent notion of Central Asia’s detachment from the global economy and successfully shed light on local elites’ integration into a global web of offshore accounting to evade tax burdens and responsibilities (LeVine 2007; Nakaya 2009; Heathershaw 2011). Moreover, in the world of the semi- and illegal offshore economy, Central Asia emerges not as the publically perceived secluded region but as a well-connected player in the global economy ‘often via post-Soviet business networks and global legal institutions’ (Heathershaw and Cooley 2015, 1). The offshore business is not a phenomenon only of the private sector but intimately entangled with state incumbents – a trend Central Asia shares with much of the low and middle income countries, where the lines between business and distributive power often become blurred (Helmer 2017), although scandals such as the ‘Panama Papers’ show that similar trends can be seen in high-income countries (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists 2017). The often criminal post-1991 conflation between state and private interests was built on fertile soil in Central Asia and relates to a more general feature of informality, which constitutes another fruitful research node. The Soviet shortage economy, notoriously plagued by scarce resources, gave rise to a flourishing informal sector, as Party Secretaries dispensed vast resources and funds (Khalid 2007, 87; Roth 2007). Given the virtual lack of elite exchange following the collapse of the Soviet Union and continued scarcity, informal structures perpetuated, while oligarchs ruthlessly divided among themselves the countries’ wealth. As a structuring element of economic and political transformation, informality does not only feature on the top-levels of society (Helmke and Levitsky 2004; Giordano and Hayoz 2013). Throughout Central Asia, people turn to blat (informal networks based on kinship, friendship or patronage) and corruption to access universities, for job allocation, for food and commodity security, and in earning money on the side or to successfully migrate to other countries (Leontyeva 2013; Wheatly 2013; Nee 1992; Sik 1994). Informality, in other words, is a structural element that reproduces ‘tactics of the habitat’ (Johnston 2011; Ehrhart et al. 2009), understood as a set of resources or coping strategies, to which citizens in all walks of life turn in order to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and improve their livelihoods. Transformation in former Soviet Central Asia has largely been a story of adaptation to radically altered circumstances in the economic, social and political affairs and a tense stability currently marks the countries. Such deadlock is not exclusive to the Central Asian region but one we see in various forms throughout the world. CAS research suggests that this is not so much a dysfunction of system transformation

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nor can it be essentialized in terms of ‘backwardness’. Against the background of the tumultuous post-1991 years, it seems that many Central Asians have engaged in a bargaining process and struck a ‘social contract’ with their leaders, by which they choose stability and accept the leadership as long as economic and political policies allow them to pursue their livelihoods in peace (Hansen 2016). In researching development and transformation in Central Asia, CAS scholars have tied their analyses to structures and circumstances globally, allowing us to draw broader conclusions about transformation processes, political systems and livelihoods (Cooley 2012). Yet, these are but some of the themes that they have produced in relation to the recent development of the region. Intriguing studies on subjects, for example, such as youth movements (Kirmse 2013; 2010), gender (Tlostanova 2008; Kandiyoti 2007; Cooper and Traugott 2003) and conflicts (Crossroads Asia 2012a; Ismailbekova 2013) could easily have been included here. For they reveal how CAS research can deepen our understanding of the consequences that systemic ruptures result in, how local particularities develop, and how these localised circumstances are part of a larger story of development in human society. Ideally, NAS should continue work in these areas, which policy makers around the world are strongly advised to take into account when they devise polices towards various regions.

NEW AREA STUDIES AND CENTRAL ASIA The twenty-first century constitutes an opportunity for CAS. Unlike most other world regions, it has for better or worse been in the limelight of worldwide attention, which has resulted in a growing demand (and need) for knowledge about the region. Combined with the critique of AS writ large, CAS researchers are facing two distinct possibilities: on the one hand, they face the situation that their research is much desired, offering them a chance to inform foreign and local policies in the region. On the other hand, they should use the justified critique of AS to ‘think bigger’ and combine their rich contextual knowledge with general theories from systematic disciplines such as the social sciences. In the foregoing, I have tried to highlight the kind of fruitful results that these research processes can yield, pointing toward how CAS can contribute theoretically and methodologically to New Area Studies. The research I have outlined above merely covers some of the main avenues of recent research, but they are sufficient to give an insight into how deep knowledge of certain societies can inform meta-theoretical discussions on space, identity, mobility, and transformation. In their own ways, many of the studies I have mentioned contribute to worldwide debates on epistemic regimes, hybridity, constructivism, relational theories, and space and spatiality. These are discussions that need to be furthered by going beyond the quantification of human beings and their actions, which too often simplify a highly complex social reality, the forces of which we can only uncover if we engage in time-consuming qualitative research and discuss our results.

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Armed with such an approach, CAS will not only do great service to the interests of those people being researched, but hopefully also exert influence on western foreign policies toward a region that for too long has been based on stereotypes and alarming levels of inadequate information.

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Nieswand, Boris. 2011. Theorising Transnational Migration: The Status Paradox of Migration. New York: Routledge. Northrop, Douglas. 2001. ‘Nationalizing Backwardness. Gender, Empire, and Uzbek Identity’. In A State of Nations. Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, 191–220. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Novak, Paolo. 2014. ‘Tracing Connections and Their Politics’. In Tracing Connections: Explorations of Spaces and Places in Asian Contexts, edited by Henryk Alff and Andreas Benz, first edition. Berlin: wvb Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin. Poliakov, Sergei P. 1992. Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia, trans. Anthony Olcott. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Pries, Ludger. 1999. Migration and Transnational Social Spaces. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 168–78. Rasanayagam, Johan. 2011. Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reeves, Madeleine. 2011. ‘Staying Put? Towards a Relational Politics of Mobility at a Time of Migration’, Central Asian Survey 30 (3–4): 555–76. ———. 2014. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat, and Save the Children. 2016. ‘Young and on the Move Children and Youth in Mixed Migration Flows within and from the Horn of Africa’. 10. Mixed Migration. Explaining People on the Move. Robertson, Roland. 1995. ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’. In Global Modernities, edited by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, (pp. 25–44). Washington, DC: Sage Publications. Roth, Klaus. 2007. ‘Trust, Networks and Social Capital in the Transformation Countries. Ethnological Perspectives’. In Soziale Netzwerke und soziales Vertrauen in den Transformationsländern: ethnologische und soziologische Untersuchungen, edited by Klaus Roth (pp. 7–20). Wien; Zürich; Berlin. Roy, Olivier. 2000. The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations. Library of International Relations (Series) 15. London: I. B. Tauris. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1984. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward W. 2006. Orientalism. New York: Penguin Books. Schatz, Edward. 2004. Modern Clan Politics. The Power of ‘Blood’ in Kazakhstan and Beyond. Seattle - London: University of Washington, Press. Schetter, Conrad. 2016. Schetter, Kleine Geschichte Afghanistans. Munich: C. H. Beck. ———. 2013. Local Politics in Afghanistan: A Century of Intervention in Social Order. New York: Columbia University Press. Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1995. ‘From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, Anthropological Quarterly 68 (1): 48–63. Schlee, Günther. 2015. Civilisations. Field Notes and Research Projects / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Department Integration and Conflict 2012- 11. Halle (Saale): Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Schwartz, Christopher. 2014. ‘The Relics of 1991: Memories and Phenomenology of the Post-Soviet Generation’. In Social and Cultural Change in Central Asia: The Soviet Legacy,

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edited by Sevket Akyildiz and Richard Carlson (pp. 188–200). Central Asia Research Forum. London; New York: Routledge. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–26. Sheppard, Eric. 2002. ‘The Spaces and Times of Globalization: Place, Scale, Networks, and Positionality*’, Economic Geography 78 (3): 307–30. Sik, Endre. 1994. ‘Network Capital in Capitalist, Communist and Post-Communist Societies’, Cambridge Political Economy Society Digital Archive (International Contributions to Labour Studies) 4: 73–93. Skeldon, Ronald. 2012. ‘Going Round in Circles: Circular Migration, Poverty Alleviation and Marginality’, International Migration 50 (3): 43–60. Smith, Anthony. 1987. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford; New York: Blackwell. Smith, Jeremy. 1999. The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923. Studies in Russia and East Europe. New York: St Martin’s Press. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London; New York: Verso. Sökefeld, Martin. 2016. ‘Crossroads Asia and the State: Anthropological Perspectives. Paper Presented at the 5th International Crossroads Asia Conference, Bonn, September 22-23, 2016’. Crossroads Asia Working Papers, no. 35. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1996. ‘Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World’, Textual Practice 10 (2): 245–69. Strutynski, Peter. 2007. ‘Deutschlands Am Hindukusch Verteidigen? 21.05.2007 (Friedensratschlag)’, May 2017, http:​//www​.ag-f​riede​nsfor​schun​g.de/​theme​n/Bun​deswe​hr/we​ issbu​ch/st​rutyn​ski.h​tml. Tlostanova, Madina. 2008. ‘The Janus-Faced Empire Distorting Orientalist Discourses: Gender, Race and Religion in the Russian/(post)Soviet Constructions of the ‘Orient’.’ Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (Spring): 1–11. Todorova, Mariia Nikolaeva, and Zsuzsa Gille. 2010. Post-Communist Nostalgia. New York: Berghahn Books. United States Department of State. 1945. US Department of State Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis. Index Map: H300 - South Central Asia, and H500 - Southeastern Asia. May 2017. Cornell University Library Maps and Geospatial Information Collection. http:​ //www​.ssco​mmons​.org/​openl​ibrar​y/sec​ure/V​iewIm​ages?​id=4j​EkdDA​tJzI4​SkY6f​j Z3Qn​ JPNXQ​jeV1w​&​userI​d=gDF​B&​;zoom​param​s=&am​p;fs=​true.​ ———. 2017. ‘South and Central Asian Affairs: Countries and Other Areas’, US Department of State Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. May 2017. https://www.state.gov/p/sca/ ci/index.htm. Urry, John. 2002. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Taylor & Francis. van Schendel, Willem. 2002. ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 20: 647–68. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Werner, Cynthia, and Holly R. Barcus. 2009. ‘Mobility and Immobility in a Transnational Context: Changing Views of Migration among the Kazakh Diaspora in Mongolia’, Migration Letters 6 (1): 49–62.

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Wheatly, Jonathan. 2013. ‘Informal and Formal Institutions in the Former Soviet Union’. In Informality in Eastern Europe: Structures, Political Cultures and Social Practices, edited by Christian Giordano and Nicolas Hayoz (pp. 319–3335). Bern: Peter Lang. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2003. ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology’, The International Migration Review 37 (3): 576–610. Wissenschaftsrat. 2006. ‘Empfehlungen Zu Den Regionalstudien (Area Studies) in Den Hochschulen Und Außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen’. Drs. 7381-06.

7 Muslim World Studies or Middle East Studies? Robert Gleave

It is taken as axiomatic that Muslims worldwide feel themselves to be part of a single geopolitical unit of the ‘Muslim World’. It is also assumed that the Muslim world can form a unit of analysis in academic contexts. There is, as a consequence, a respected academic journal titled The Muslim World (operating since 1911); there are academic centres and study programmes of ‘Muslim World Studies’ at various universities in Europe and North America; recently there have been suggestions that academics should dispose of the old titles (Islamic Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Oriental Studies) and adopt new titles which reflect the global nature of the Muslim community (such as, ‘The Study of Islam and the Muslim World’).1 Now, the idea of a ‘Muslim world’ has recently come under sustained, monographic attack by Cemil Aydin. He argues that the idea of a ‘Muslim world’ is a colonial product (perhaps even part of the colonial project – or at least a byproduct of it). It emerged as an element in the reaction to colonial penetration into the Muslim world in the nineteenth century, and became an undisputed and assumed category both in colonial discourse and inside the colonized territories. (Aydin 2017) One may take issue with Aydin’s methodology, or his use of sources, but the hypothesis is an interesting one. In this chapter, I investigate the interaction of the various titles given to the overlapping disciplines or fields in which Muslims, their religion, culture, political systems and societal structures become the focus of scholarly investigation. This has traditionally been the domain of ‘Area Studies’ – collections of scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds who are bound together (administratively and intellectually) by an interest in a (more or less) delimited geographic area. There is, inevitably, a hint of exceptionalism in the establishment of such units within universities, and disciplines within the academia. That is, ‘Area Studies’ specialists argue that they bring a deep knowledge of the area under examination, developed through years of 87

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exposure to the peculiarities of the region. This deep knowledge is often missing from more superficial, comparative studies, particularly in some branches of the social sciences, where particular knowledge is seen as preventing the scholar from identifying broader trends and universal features of political systems and societal interactions.2 An underlying premise in the argument I make here is that area specialism produces a sophistication of analysis which cannot be gained without sustained familiarity with the region in question. This form of knowledge may, or may not, be viewed as ‘better’ in terms of higher education policy, or (to put it more grandly) the development of human knowledge. Notwithstanding these assumptions, the experience of the ‘Middle Eastern’ / ‘Islamic’ / ‘Muslim World’ Studies over the past two decades has revealed divisions within the field as to whether an area determined by religious adherence (specifically Islam), or ethnic identification (such as the Arab world), or some arbitrary but historical set of boundaries (‘The Middle East’, ‘Central Asia’, etc.) can be a proper unit of study.

REGIONS AND NAMES The recurrent debate in Area Studies circles around how one delimits the ‘Area’ of study has given rise to numerous overlapping appellations in the study of the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed, terming the area ‘the Middle East’ (rather like the debates over the use of Far East) has caused some consternation in Anglophone circles. So often the debates about naming and terminology are specific to a single language and hence scholarly discourse. Anglophone debates form the focus of my deliberations below; debates around terminology in the Francophone and Germanophone areas have obviously taken on a specific flavour. In the Anglophone context, the argument goes that the term ‘Middle’ East is confused on various levels. (Tessler 1999) First, logically, it appears to assume a ‘Near’ East which is nearer to ‘us’ than the Middle East. This is further complicated by the fact that the same geographic region referred to as the Middle East is sometimes also referred to as the ‘Near’ East. This leads to the rather difficult notion that the area currently divided between the countries of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel/Palestine, Egypt and Turkey is both ‘Near’ and ‘Middle’. Second, and building on these logical issues, the Middle East could have just as much claim to being the Middle West, with Europe and North America being the ‘Far West’. The terminology reveals of course the European imperial origins of both the academic study of the region and also the nomenclature used to refer to the World’s geographic regions. Thirdly is the complicated issue of whether North Africa, or indeed African countries (or more accurately, the areas currently consisting of the African countries Mauritania or Sudan) might be bracketed together with the ‘Middle East’. The North African countries occupy the southern Mediterranean littoral, are part of the African continent, but are intimately linked culturally, linguistically and politically with the so-called ‘heartland’ of the Middle East. Collectively they are often described with the Arabic term Maghrib

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(‘The West’), encompassing Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Confusingly, the Kingdom of Morocco is also called al-Maghrib, since it is the westernmost country of the Maghrib. There have also been arguments made that the West African and Saharan countries, and the East African countries of Sudan and Somalia fall within this region, since their language is Arabic and they supposedly form a single cultural space with the countries to their north, rather than to their south. What to call this geographical unit has led to many formulations, aside from the now-standard ‘Middle East’, including the ‘Near East’, ‘Middle East’ and ‘North Africa’ (political scientists increasingly refer to the ‘MENA’ region); these leave the inclusion of nonMediterranean African, Arabic-speaking regions ambiguous. The academic study of this geographic area has not necessarily aided the general public in determining the most appropriate appellation. What is clear is that the loss of ‘Oriental’ Studies as an acceptable label for the academic study of these areas has not meant a uniformly accepted replacement (Irwin 2006). In the UK, for example, only Oxford maintains the use of the term ‘Oriental Studies’; its Oriental Institute is a bureaucratic unit (a ‘department’), but also an intellectual amalgamation of the East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern and (to a lesser extent) Central Asian Studies. SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) keeps the name primarily, one suspects, for branding purposes rather than a commitment to the bracketing of ‘Oriental’ as an appropriate geographic marker. The perceived ‘otherness’ of these various disciplines, linked with European colonial heritage, may have given rise to the use of the term ‘Oriental’, but since the various sub-disciplines of ‘Oriental Studies’ have for some time now been trying to free themselves from this legacy, the notion of the ‘Orient’ has been intellectually discredited. In North America, Oriental Studies, when it is used, is almost entirely restricted to premodern, philological study.3 It is often associated with archaeology and ancient history, as a sort of mirror to Classics (which focuses on Graeco-Roman Civlisation). The American Oriental Society, for example, covers a wide geographic area, but it rarely strays into study after 1800. The rejection of the label of Oriental Studies in the 1980s led the emergence of the increasingly popular terms ‘Middle East Studies’, ‘Middle Eastern Studies’ and sometimes ‘Near and Middle Eastern Studies’. The first was generally considered more focused on social science methodologies applied to the Middle East (as evidenced by journal titles such as Middle East Policy). The second appeared to embrace both social science methodologies, but also traditional historical studies, and sometimes philology, literature and religious studies. The third is perhaps rather ambiguous (what is ‘Near’ and what is ‘Middle’ in the title?). ‘Near Eastern Studies’ (and ‘Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations’), which remains a popular departmental title in the United States, was rarely taken up in the UK. There has emerged no agreed, single term for the subject area: departments in different institutions opt for different variants of the pool of terms mentioned above. Journals favour one formulation or the other. Learned Societies and associations similarly have not adopted a single title for the field of study.4 At times, the need to be distinctive has clearly played a role

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in the multiplication of names. As competition between institutions (for students, for research funding, for hiring of academics), departmental units have needed to develop unique selling points and marketing strategies. In this special attention has been paid to branding and self-description. Over the past thirty years, the aforementioned plethora of terms has expanded both inside academia (that is, as universities and departments have restructured and renamed themselves), and outside of academia (in the media, in government and non-governmental organisations, and in the public at large). In the more recent past, a new element has been injected into the discussion around the naming of the ‘Middle Eastern Studies’ Area Studies discipline. The use of ‘religion’ as a defining element of Area Studies has become increasingly prevalent. Departments (and departmental units, even if they are no longer given the name ‘department’) have begun to selfidentify as being focused on ‘Islamic Studies’ or the study of the ‘Islamic’, or ‘Muslim’ World. In the following sections, I aim to make some personal observations on the intellectual ramifications of the use of Islamic or Muslim in the titles of units in the field, and what this might imply for the future of the subject area formerly known as ‘Oriental Studies’. I will do this through addressing two pressing questions: 1. To what extent is the use of ‘Islam’ (and its derivatives) the result of international events? 2. To what extent is its use the result of increased interdisciplinarity in academia generally, and in particular, the transformation of (Christian) ‘Theology’ departments into ‘Religious Studies’ departments? In what follows I will refer to the sub-element of Area Studies which forms my focus as Middle Eastern Studies (MES). I do this purely for convenience, since one must refer to it in some way. I recognize, at the same time, that the very name of the area under examination, what is included and what is excluded, and how to describe it is in a state of flux.

AREA STUDIES AND THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA The Case of the Middle East and Islamic World Few subject areas are as sensitive to developments in international affairs as the general field of ‘Area Studies’. This is hardly surprising. In European and North American academic settings, the study of areas rather than disciplines found its genesis in the imperial and colonial projects of European powers. Part of this may have been administrative efficiency: in order to understand a foreign ‘people’, one requires first a technical skill of language acquisition, and then a knowledge of a range of elements of the ‘people’s’ society. In an expanding empire, it was natural that an individual who was well-versed in the language, culture, religion, history, politics, society and economy of the ‘colonized’ people would make for an excellent

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agent in the field, and be able to establish the structures of domination with greater efficiency than a team of individual experts. Hence the polymathic requirements of imperial operatives was reflected in the structure of the subject area during the establishment of Oriental Studies in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America. Out of this initial impulse emerged the Area Studies academic ethos which survives in contemporary academia, though not without threats and criticisms from more disciplinary approaches (Tessler et al. 1999; Clowes et al. 2015). Given this history, it is not so surprising that the health of any particular Area Studies field continues to be dependent on the vagaries of international events. The famous disinvestment from Eastern European Studies following the end of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe is perhaps one salient recent example. Of focus here is the manner in which international political events have impacted on the formation of the MES discipline in the recent past. For MES, the 1960s and 1970s can be generally characterized as being dominated by the concerns of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the emergence of oil-rich Gulf states. The frustration with the ‘Oriental Studies’ approach, with its long historical purview and its eschewing of contemporary discussions, was viewed with deep frustration by many, students and academics alike, who wished to engage with the politics and society of the region. The rise of Middle East Studies can be seen as a reflection of that frustration. In a similar way, the increased prominence given to ‘Islam’ in the MES Area Studies disciplines reflects international events in which ‘Islam’ has become a distinct and precise focus of concern. The 1979 revolution in Iran was the first spur through which the study of ‘Islam’ emerged (as distinct from the politics or society of Muslim majority countries). I think it is fair to say that few, perhaps none, in the field of MES predicted the Iranian Revolution. (Gause 2014) It was the first major success by a political movement inspired by an overtly Islamic agenda in the modern period; at the time, most MES academics were caught up in the popular mood of secularism which dominated in academia and in society more generally: as societies developed and modernized, religion would wither away as a significant social force. Of course this argument was fallacious from the start. The rise in Islamic content in the MES field is in part due to the growth of the influence of the Iranian Revolution. Other factors also brought Islam to the fore, such as the murder of Anwar Sadat in 1981 by Islamic Jihad, the organization which two decades later would merge with al-Qaida under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden. World events such as these required explanation, and the natural place for governments and other agencies to turn was academic departments specializing in Middle Eastern Studies. These events also led to a growth in student numbers, as interest in the region increased beyond the standard Arab-Israeli conflict. Looking at the UK case, with which I am most familiar, many MES academics in the UK in the 1980s were able to take advantage of the opportunities offered by these events. The international arena secured for MES a certain level of protection. Long before the now ubiquitous notion of ‘impact’ and research-user engagement, academics

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were working with external partners, not all of them entirely neutral in the region, and MES departments were seen as potential pools of new recruits to government agencies (from diplomatic services and security departments, to the aid and development agencies) to enable British interests in the region to be protected. This, together with the marriage of oil reserves in the Arabian Peninsula and a particular conservative form of Sunni Islam (Wahhabism), created a need for greater expertise which was, in part, fulfilled by the growth of MES in the UK. Aside from the MES departments, there was also growth in the principal learned society devoted to MES, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES). Founded in 1973, BRISMES’s focus was always interdisciplinary, covering both premodern and modern studies of the Middle East. The pressing need to understand contemporary events has led to an increased focus on the contemporary period and modern political developments in the region. Since the Middle East was the historical birthplace of the religion of Islam, naturally the study of the religion played an important role in the Society’s development. This was intensified following the events of 1979 (including the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent religiously inspired resistance movement of the Mujahidin) and the 1980s. The importance of ‘Islamic Studies’ as part of MES was reflected not only in BRISMES’s annual conference and journal (with papers on Islamic thought and history), but also in the pressure it brought to bear on the make-up of MES departments. For most of these departments, where Arabic language acquisition was central to any undergraduate programme, the requirement to read religious texts (including the Qur’an) was considered an essential element of any proper Arabic language program. This created the need for staff to teach these subjects, and hence employment for Islamicists in UK Higher Education. While the 1970s may have seen a neglect of Islam (and Religious Studies generally) as a defining element of MES, the 1980s witnessed a rise in the importance of Islam and Islamic Studies in MES. This trend was to continue into the 1990s following the First Gulf War of 1991, and the growth of Jihadi movements which followed in its wake. This period was coeval with the establishment and growth of the Muslim community in the UK. In the 1990s, the UK Muslim community, mostly of South Asian origin, began to produce British Muslim students wishing to focus on their religious tradition. These developments radically altered the make-up of Islamic Studies in UK Higher Education, most prominently signalled by the inclusion of Islamic Studies within the standard ‘Theology and Religious Studies’ department curricula. In this sense, the UK higher education environment was mimicking the developments already evident in the US academy (HEFCE 2008).

ISLAMIC STUDIES AS RELIGIOUS STUDIES Including the study of Islam within the broader Religious Studies curriculum was pioneered in North America. The prominence of an Islamic Studies scholar such as

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Marshall Hodgson (d. 1968) based in a Divinity School at the University of Chicago would have been almost unthinkable in the UK. Hodgson, whose three-volume Venture of Islam work was developed out of his teaching curriculum in Chicago, and was published posthumously (Hodgson 1974). It became a standard textbook for many years afterwards in Religion departments in the US and elsewhere. His approach was to take Islam out of an exclusively MES context, and instead situate it within a broader ‘world history’ approach. For Hodgson, there was nothing in the history of Islam which might prevent the tools of historical analysis being employed in its study. In some ways, the establishment of this approach was a rebellion against the old orientalist tradition of MES in Area Studies departments. In some versions of the Area Studies approach, current in the 1960s and 1970s, each region was considered bafflingly complex to an outsider, and understanding it required many years of training and study. The natural result of holding these views was to focus on the internal dynamics of the region, and to insist that those from other disciplines (such as history, religion or politics) would only ever have a partial comprehension of the area under examination. The tension between Islamic Studies in, on the one hand, a ‘Religious Studies context’, on the other and, within an Area Studies context was evident in the late 1980s and 1990s in the UK. In part this was the result of influence from North America (Muslim World 2016), but also it was inspired by a movement around Religious Studies famously associated with Ninian Smart at Lancaster (King 2016). From 1967 to 1976 Smart developed the British discipline of Religious Studies. Smart wished to shift the focus away from philological skills developed in Area Studies departments, and emphasise the conceptual understanding of religious concepts. For this, one needs, he argued, a neutral position on the truth claims of religions (hence it was quite separate from the traditional discipline of Theology); and also one needs to think comparatively between religious traditions in order to gain a clearer understanding of how religions work as human phenomena. It was in this context that Islamic Studies as one element of a respectable Religious Studies curriculum emerged in the 1990s. There was some institutional resistance from the MES academics within the UK to the introduction of Islamic Studies into Religious Studies, but there was also much cross-fertilization, as jobs in British MES departments for Islamicists were not so numerous, and Religious Studies was a growing field. There was also a willingness on the part of UK Religious Studies departments to hire scholars studying Islam from Historical, Anthropological and Sociological perspectives. These scholars came from outside of the MES field, and were trained in disciplines where familiarity with Arabic and the textual tradition of Islamic scholarship was not a priority as it was in MES.

9/11, 7/7 AND AREA STUDIES From Middle East to Muslim World Studies For the MES discipline, it is difficult to underestimate the effect of al-Qaeda’s attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Understanding the context for the attacks

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became a major desideratum for security agents, government departments and media commentators alike. This represented, if anything, an even greater focus on the academic study of both the religion of Islam and the Middle East region than that following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The threat of violence from Jihadi groups was not unknown in the 1990s, but 9/11 created an extended debate about whether the phenomenon which gave rise to the attacks is best understood as a regional phenomenon (from an Area Studies/MES perspective) or as the manifestation of a transnational religious trend (making Islam, the religion, the focus of study), within the emerging field of Terrorism Studies (Dalacoura 2009). In the UK, the debate was extended yet further by the attacks of July 7, 2005; here those responsible were British Muslims, in some cases born and brought up in the UK. The need to understand the British Muslim community and the trends and tendencies within it (particularly its youth) became paramount. For the academic study of Islam, these events affected on the one hand the specialisms departments sought when hiring new academics; and on the other, what were considered cutting edge topics. The result was two distinct emphases: first, an emphasis on the use of social science methodologies to understand ‘Islamic’ phenomena (be they amongst Muslims in the UK or globally); second, an emphasis on Islam in pseudo-ideological terms (that is, as an intellectual system of ideas which can be separated from the historical context in which it might be realized). In UK academia, the monopoly on the study of Islam which had been held by MES departments (formerly Oriental Studies) was eroded to minority status by 2007. Factors which had led to a general rejection of the MES model included the demanding nature of the training in MES; the association with outmoded methodological models (Orientalism and its link with Colonialism was seen as the most egregious example); the privileging of the literary tradition of Islamic scholarship over ‘lived’ Islam. When the UK government designated ‘Islamic Studies’ a ‘strategic’ subject in 2007, the report they commissioned to accompany the designation portrayed current Islamic Studies provision as out-of-date and ‘irrelevant’, focusing on Arab and Middle Eastern matters rather than the pluralistic British context of Islam, and too linked to language acquisition rather than understanding religious concepts. Recommending growth in non-traditional (i.e. non-MES based) areas of study, the report recognized a broader platform for Islamic Studies than simply MES units in the more established universities. This new notion included not only Religious Studies departments, but also disciplinary units of Politics, Anthropology, Sociology and even Art History and Music as sites where ‘Islamic Studies’ should now take place. The announcement of Islamic Studies as a ‘strategic subject’ was not, it should be noted, accompanied by any significant additional funding; but it was to be viewed as a worthwhile area of investment for universities in the future (Siddiqui 2006). There was a call in one report for a renaming of the subject area to ‘the Study of Islam and Muslims’, but it has yet to gain any serious traction. (El Awaisi et al. 2006). Of the small amount of funding which was made available, the establishing of a working group to review Islamic Studies in the UK led in time to the

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successful establishment of a new learned society, the British Society for Islamic Studies (BRAIS). The success of BRAIS, with its well-attended international annual conference, reflects a more general focus on Islam and Muslim communities.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS In this context, where might the future of Middle Eastern Studies lie, given the unavoidable focus on Islam as a current research priority? The area of the Middle East traditionally stretched as far as Iran; after that Central and South Asia began. There is certainly an intellectual trend to view the Muslim world as linked through historical connections, thereby establishing the notion of ‘Muslim World Studies’ which stretches well beyond the artificial borders of ‘the Middle East’. Islam and a shared tradition of Muslim identity characterize a global transnational community, and a focus on the Arab world, or on the Arabic language, as the defining discipline of Islamic Studies is no longer tenable in British Academia. This decentering of Islamic Studies was also generated by the growth in Diaspora Studies – and in the UK this means incorporating Muslim traditions from the South Asian area (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh) into the academic study of Islam. The ability of Jihadi narratives to appeal to Muslims across the world has forced Islamic Studies academics to think of how the global Muslim community creates a viable unit of study. The rejection of the Jihadi narrative by Muslims across the world has often been couched in how the history of connectedness is based on recognition of religious pluralism (rather than the single-minded notion of religious identity proposed by Jihadi rhetoric). Identifying religious heritage as the base for the object of study unavoidably creates a quite different scholarly dynamic compared with the more traditional focus on a geographic area. Nonetheless, some of the problems inherent in the Area Studies approach remain. First, the definition of the Muslim world is not as straightforward as it might seem. Do we refer to Muslim majority areas? Areas where the rulers are Muslim? Or, more broadly, the global Muslim community? Second, there is the intellectual problem that by creating the notion of a ‘Muslim world’, academics are positing a ‘non-Muslim’ world, and thereby playing into the problematic ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative. Third, the inherently hybrid notion of Islam, its interrelationships with other traditions, is potentially glossed over by emphasizing the single religious identity of over 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. The identification of religion as the basis for a category of analysis reflects, though, the influence of outside pressures on the development of an academic discipline. The emphasis on the supposed ‘danger’ posed by Islam (and the resultant notions and phenomenon of Islamophobia) has, in a sense, created the move toward a global Muslim Studies. What is in danger of being lost is the detailed, almost parochial knowledge produced by an Area Studies approach, in which religion is seen as one factor amongst many others active in any coherent explanation of events. The focus on Islam has come about by a combination of world events (two Gulf Wars, the emergence of Jihadism

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and 9/11) and the emergence in Europe and North America of an active diaspora Muslim community. These developments undoubtedly have enlivened the field, providing not only exciting new areas of research, but more practically jobs and research funding as governments react to the need for new, applied knowledge of both the MES region and the Islamic religion. The challenge is to use this current attention to secure a solid basis for future scholarship if (or more likely, when) international and national attention is drawn elsewhere.

NOTES 1. The Muslim World (currently published by T & F Francis) has been operating since 1911, and is subtitled ‘a journal devoted to the study of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations in past and present.’ Published by Hartford Seminary, it indicates the prominence given to the term ‘Muslim World’ in academic circles. One also has the German journal Die Welt des Islams (The World of Islam) which has been publishing since 1951, with a specific emphasis on ‘modern Islam’ (i.e., since 1800). The centres and institutes include the recently established ‘Center for Muslim World Studies’ (Florida International University) and the older ‘International Institute of Arab and Muslim World Studies’ (Paris). Modules in ‘Muslim World Studies’ have appeared on numerous University programs. 2. That Area Studies is somehow a derivative, secondary field, whilst disciplines hold the initial primary focus in the hierarchy of knowledge is challenged by articles in the collection (Clowes et al. 2015). For a specific, critical focus on Middle Eastern Studies see (Jung 2014). 3. Including, for example, the American Oriental Society, and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. 4. For example, we have the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) but the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES).

REFERENCES Aydin, Cemal. 2017. The Idea of the Muslim World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clowes, E. W., et al. 2015. eds. Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Dalacoura, Katerina. 2009. ‘Middle East Area Studies and Terrorism Studies: Establishing Links via a Critical Approach’. In Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, edited by Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth and Jeroen Gunning (pp. 124–37). London and New York: Routledge. El-Awaisi, Abd al-Fattah, and Malory Nye. 2006. Time for Change: Report on the Future of the Study of Islam and Muslims in Universities and Colleges in Multicultural Britain. Dundee: Al-Maktoum Press. Gause, Gregory F. III. 2014. ‘Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability’, Foreign Affairs 90 (4): 81–90.

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HEFCE. 2008. ‘Islamic Studies: Trends and Profiles’. http:​//web​archi​ve.na​tiona​larch​ives.​gov. u​k/201​00303​15414​6/htt​p://w​ww.he​fce.a​c.uk/​pubs/​hefce​/2008​/08_0​9/ (accessed August 7, 2017). Hodgson, M. J. 2014. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Irwin, R. 2006. For the Lust of Knowing: Orientialists and their Critics. London: Penguin. Jung, Dietrich. 2014. ‘The ‘Ottoman-German Jihad’: Lessons for the Contemporary ‘Area Studies’ Controversy’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41 (3): 247–65. King, Ursula. 2016. ed. Turning Points in Religious Studies. London: Bloombury, 2016 Morgenstein Fuerst, Ilyse R., and Zahra M. S. Ayubi. 2016. ‘Shifting Boundaries: The Study of Islam in the Humanities’, Muslim World 106 (4): https://doi.org/10.1111/muwo.12163. Siddiqui, Ataullah. 2006. ‘Islam at Universities in England: Meeting the Needs and Investing in the Future’. www.d​era.i​oe.ac​.uk/6​500/1​/Upda​ted%2​0Dr%2​0Sidd​iqui%​20Rep​ort.p​df (accessed August 7, 2017). Tessler, Mark, et al. 1999. eds., Area Studies and Social Sciences—Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

8 Blurring the Boundaries of History and Fiction Re-imagining the Past and Re-defining the Present through the Lens of Saudi Women Novelists Zahia Smail Salhi and Ibrahim A. I. Alfraih Subscribing to New Area Studies (NAS), this chapter strives to look beneath the plethora of stereotypes in circulation about the less known, practically impenetrable, country of Saudi Arabia (SA). It argues that contrary to the Orientalist cliché about the Middle East/Orient as being static and unmovable (Said 1978) SA is gruellingly changing. However, against the media reports which claim that the present-day cycle of change and social transformation were heralded by the late King Abdullah and sustained by King Salman, this chapter suggests that a wave of change along with a feminist awakening which took root in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War (Salhi 2017) is starting to bear fruit in all areas of SA society. We contend that in order to gain a palpable impression of the place where this change is happening and of the people who are its main actors, one needs to delve into their literature as the medium which, in less democratic countries, allows people to voice their aspirations freely under the guise of fiction. We theorise for the blurring of the boundaries between literature and history as the former complements the latter by adding a human side to official accounts of any story. Using various literary features, such as dialogue, monologue and flashbacks, novelists re-enact historical events and bring back to life people’s actions, the very words they say and the places where they occur (Salhi 2017). Through the dramatization of historical events, novelists skilfully humanize them and bring them closer to our imagination. They go under the skin of the formal discourse to allow us as readers an insight into the real story as lived by the real people. We argue that the methodologies of Area Studies allow us to gain deep and adequate understanding of people and sometimes their difficult to access places as is the case with SA. A close reading of a literary work which straddles the categories of history and fiction grants us a closer view and a better understanding of an otherwise testing issue. This act takes an additional dimension when it is performed by a female author, especially in the context of the 99

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Middle East and more specifically in the case of SA, where for centuries women’s voices have been obfuscated. Through the act of novel writing SA women craft their own version of their national history and appropriate it as their version of her-story as opposed to his-story, emphasising the view that history is made up of multiple stories (Cooke 1996, 4). Furthermore, following Lambert’s argument on AS’s focus on narrower geographic and thematic specialisation (1990, 712) this chapter centres on one specific region within SA and scrutinises one particular event, the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, through the lens of the female novelist, Aisha Al-Hashr (2009) who through her untranslated Arabic novel al-Tashaẓẓī1 (Fragmentation) demonstrates how this event constitutes a milestone in the modern history of Saudi women. This chapter begins by investigating the significance of history for women. It then explores the seizure of the Grand Mosque not only because the novel under examination is set in this period and offers a new interpretation of this event, but also because it is frequently seen as a watershed in the modern history of SA women. These two steps serve as a backdrop to the in-depth discussion of the novel Fragmentation. This chapter is therefore principally concerned with how Al-Hashr has engaged with history and the ways in which through literature she represents women and their approach to and negotiation of religion and gender relations. Although Fragmentation predominantly addresses the diverse themes of love, modernity, the crucial role of religion and extremism with a focus on social transformation in SA, the seizure of the Grand Mosque features as a momentous event which marks the end of one era and the beginning of another. Furthermore, while the theme of love seems central to the novel, it is merely used as a strategy to facilitate the discussion of more critical topics, most noticeably religion, gender relations, and the problems faced by Saudi women.

BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES OF HISTORY, FICTION AND THE TRUTH In her collection of essays on the novel and history, Byatt (2000, 11) suggests that ‘we cannot understand the present if we do not understand the past that preceded and produced it.’ This notion seems particularly relevant to the discussion of Saudi women novelists’ appropriation of their national history, highlighting social transformations and their consequences for women while at the same time discussing current issues within the framework of the past. History seems to provide an arena in which dominant discourses are negotiated and challenged. While it is of course not the task of the novel to accurately reflect reality and provide a precise historical account, it often works in conjunction with the lines of the historical events it dramatizes (Salhi 2017). The relationship between history and fiction is a vast, vexed and a highly complex subject. While our objective here is not to discuss it at length or to trace the various

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theoretical approaches and debates, we are more concerned with investigating the writings of women about history, their rereading of history and their setting of novels in the past. Taking into account the experience and specificity of Saudi women novelists, we wish to highlight the reasons for women writers, in particular, to set their novels in the past and what this strategy might allow them to gain. Fictionalising historical events and the endeavour to imagine the past and reconstruct history from the perspective of women are noteworthy issues often discussed in women’s texts in relation to feminism and history. Some feminist approaches have perceived women writers of historical fiction as revisionists of history engaged in ‘writing back’ (De Groot 2010, 70). Additionally, writing about the past is a strategy to reclaim history, to give voice to the marginalised and the silenced, as well as to involve them in dialogue on pressing issues in the present. Zimmerman (2014, 9) points out that the woman’s historical novel has received scant attention, although it has appeared in the writings of women novelists in diverse places in the world. In the Middle Eastern context, many women writers have recognized the significance of the ‘re-reading of history’ and ‘the retrieval of memory’ in order to ‘reclaim history and specificity’ (Fayad 1995, 149–50). This trend of engaging with history is gradually emerging in contemporary Saudi women’s writings. A number of recent novels have been set in the past and have mixed fact with fiction in order to approach critical issues and reconstruct history from a female standpoint. For instance, the novels al-Baḥriyāt (‘Women from the Sea’) and al-Wārifa (‘The Leafy Tree’) by Umayma al-Khamis embody aspects of the history of the Najd region, and Riyadh in particular, from a woman’s viewpoint. While they restore the women’s severed voices, these works also represent the unrecorded history of Saudi women and society. Feminist critics argue that history has left women on the margins, excluding them from the historical record which has been male dominated. This reading sees history as a patriarchal and hegemonic account of the past, a male-centric ‘his-story’. In this context, the act of writing women back into history and restoring their voices is an attempt to reconstruct the historical account from a feminist perspective and to move women from the margins into the centre (Salhi 2012). Heilmann and Llewellyn (2004, 144) state that ‘historical fiction offers them and their female characters a means of reclamation, a narrative empowerment to write women back into the historical record.’ The process of remembering, re-writing and re-imagining the past has in itself a political advantage for marginalised subjects such as women, as it allows them to develop a consciousness of their identity. Moreover, it may involve shifts in gender power relations which may be viewed as a challenge for the reader. According to Mohanty (2003, 78), feminist analysis has always recognized the centrality of rewriting and remembering history. This is a process which is significant not merely as a corrective to the gaps, erasures, and misunderstandings of hegemonic masculinist history, but because the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity. Writing often becomes the context through which new political identities are forged.

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The strategy of looking at the past and re-writing history provides female writers with an important instrument not only to critique this past and to give voice to the marginalised, but also to show some of its implications for women in the present day. It could be argued, though, that it is not solely about the past; more importantly, it is about the present and the future. The strategy of referring to history is one of the techniques that Saudi women novelists have employed in order to negotiate and discuss current issues. It thus offers a crucial advantage for women in this context, which is the freedom to discuss a variety of subjects, including taboos. The use of a historical setting then becomes, in many cases, a political tool. Wallace (2005, 2) posits, historical setting has frequently been used by women writers (as by male writers) as a way of writing about subjects which would otherwise be taboo, or of offering a critique of the present through their treatment of the past. Perhaps even more important for women writers has been the way that the historical novel has allowed them to invent or ‘re-imagine’. . . the unrecorded lives of marginalised and subordinate people, especially women, but also the working class, Black people, slaves and colonised people, and to shape narratives which are more appropriate to their experience than those of conventional history. Moreover, the resort to history occupies a prominent  position in discussing, negotiating and subverting traditional gender roles and gender relations. It reveals that gender identity and gender roles are socially and culturally constructed and historically contingent. Therefore, challenging the perception of gender roles and gender identity as innate and essential has been considered one of the key motives for women to write historical novels; ‘If gender roles are subject to change over time then they are clearly socially and culturally constructed and open to the possibility of further change’ (Wallace 2005, 8). Writing about history is also a way of conversing, a dialogue between the writer, the reader and history. It offers the opportunity to attribute meanings to events and to challenge certain views and beliefs. Connor illustrates the ‘dialogic nature’ of the historical novel. He contends that the historical narrative is not concerned with ‘representing the truth of history’, but rather with ‘constructing the terms of a conversation or structure of address between the past and the present’ (1996, 164). Engaging with history, therefore, allows perceptions to be altered and aspects of the past to be viewed differently. In other words, the preoccupation here is not with truthfully depicting the past, but rather with offering alternative and diverse interpretations of it, influencing it and shaping its impact on the present. Thus, by engaging with history, novels, particularly those written by women, create an arena for exploration and negotiation of both past and present. Most importantly, they offer a way of becoming involved with and challenging the dominant powers, namely the patriarchal and imperialist discourses, a process worthy of exploration and examination. In this sense, Mehrez (1994, 7) argues that fiction which engages with history and questions dominant discourses is political and ideological by nature, as it produces its own discourse, and more importantly, in our view, it speaks truth to power.

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THE SEIZURE OF MECCA A Turning Point For Women? One of the most crucial events in the modern history of SA is the seizure of Mecca on November 20, 1979, which coincided with the first day of the fifteenth century of the Islamic calendar, when Juhayman al-Utaybi and his followers took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, recognised as the most sacred site of Islam. The insurgents believed that the advent of the new century indicated the coming of the Mahdi, the redeemer of Islam who will bring justice to the universe. Consequently, they sought to swear allegiance to Muhammad al-Qahtani, the expected Mahdi and thus the legitimate political leader. The ensuing siege lasted for about two weeks, during which hundreds of people, including the supposed Mahdi, were killed. Juhayman was captured, tried and executed along with thirty-six of his followers in January 1980. Although this event was significant, there has been some ambiguity regarding Juhayman, his group and their ideology. Recent scholarship has contributed greatly to elucidating this momentous event, most importantly the account of Nasir al-Huzaymi, one of Juhayman’s early followers who, unconvinced of the supposed coming of the Mahdi, left the group a few months before the uprising. The seizure of the Grand Mosque was interpreted in many different ways and various explanations have been offered, some of which might be considered rather simplistic. Although it is of outstanding importance in Saudi history, its significance lies not in the fact of its occurrence, nor in the ideology of Juhayman’s group, but in its subsequent impact on social transformation in SA which, prior to the uprising, had been embracing modernization and openness, but took a path of closure and conservatism in subsequent decades. In other words, although Juhayman and his group were defeated their ideology has survived, with major consequences for the country’s future. Al-Fassi (2014, 126), a prominent Saudi academic and activist, considers the implications of this event for SA in general and for Saudi women in particular: The two leaders and sixty fellows were executed in January 1980, but the ideology expressed in Jheiman’s famous sermon, part of which addressed the status of women, called for more conservatism and for imposing restrictions on the media, and was gradually adopted by the government. In an interview with the satellite television al-Arabiya on July 14, 2004, Prince Khaled al-Faisal said: ‘it was a mistake to destroy the group that committed Jheiman al-ʿOtaibi’s crimes and ignore the ideology that stood behind it as if it never existed, allowing it thus to propagate throughout the country; it was a big mistake’. Al-Fassi notes the great importance of this event and accepts that while the adoption of the ideology might have been unintended, the result was that it became reality, and more restrictions were imposed on the media and women. Likewise, Saudi women rights activist Manal al-Sharif (2012) identified Juhayman’s rebellion as a turning point in modern Saudi history. She argues that in order to preclude the occurrence of any similar rebellions Saudi authorities conceded to the demands of the conservatives and imposed more restrictions on women, including banning

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pictures of women in printed media and narrowing the employment of women to education and healthcare, as well as banning music, closing cinemas and strictly enforcing gender segregation. These recent invocations of Juhayman particularly focus on the ideological influence of the group on social life and the status of women. For example, it has been argued that members of the group believed in a literal and extreme reading of the Quran and Prophetic traditions, which led them to take a strict position regarding social affairs and reject modernity as western penetration. However, it is important to highlight the political dimension of this group’s ideology that legitimised itself by using religious rhetoric and by the same token questioned the ideological legitimacy of the state and challenged its religious image. According to Ménoret (2008, 122), what seems to be rejecting some aspects of modernity might be ‘related to the group’s refusal of everything connected with the Saudi government.’ Moreover, the group’s social influence seems limited in comparison with its doctrinal and political concerns regarding the state, not only because the group was small and its members had a marginal status in society, but also because Juhayman paid scant attention to the media and women in his letters. In other words, the increasing politicisation of the group was the primary motivation of the seizure of the Grand Mosque. In his most important letter, The State, Allegiance and Obedience, Juhayman highlighted his political views, asserting that the Saudi state was illegitimate and listing three conditions for a legitimate Islamic ruler, one being that he must come from the prophet’s tribe. Largely isolated from other Islamist movements in its ideological and political orientation, Juhayman ultimately adopted a self-defeating ideology and his movement was widely condemned. It had little or no popular support, both because the insurgents failed in their objectives and the supposed Mahdi was killed during the siege, which contradicted religious traditions and vitiated their claim. However, the association of Juhayman’s movement with the imposition of restrictions on women and the media, and the change towards greater conservatism represented a counter-discourse to the fundamental Islamist discourse in the country. These views tend to link Juhayman’s infamous group with other more significant Islamic movements in SA, particularly the ‘Islamic Awakening’, which is immensely influential and has predominantly focused on social issues, most importantly the position of women, without openly questioning the state’s legitimacy or the official religious establishment. In short, although some writers may consider the seizure of the Grand Mosque and the ensuing siege to constitute a momentous episode with the greatest ideological effect on the social life of SA, it seems that wider contemporary circumstances have together created a complex situation with a considerable impact on its domestic and foreign policy, among other countries in the region, pushing it towards deeper conservatism. In the following section we will examine the ways in which women novelists have approached these events and attempted to engage with and re-appropriate history in order to give voice to the subaltern, in particular women and the villagers from Asir, south of SA.

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NEGOTIATING HISTORY, GENDER AND RELIGION IN FRAGMENTATION Al-Hashr is a Saudi author who emerged in 2007 with her seminal book Khalf Aswār al-Ḥaramlak (‘Behind Harem Walls’, 2007), comprising a number of essays concerning Saudi women. This was followed by her two novels Saqar (Hell) in 2008, and Fragmentation in 2009. Focusing on history and the social transformation of recent decades, her works challenge and subvert some of the long-held assumptions about religion, women, and gender. In Fragmentation, al-Hashr approaches the seizure of the Grand Mosque from a feminist viewpoint, and discusses the ideological and social transformation in Saudi society and how women, in particular, have been influenced by these changes. While the importance of this novel lies in its engagement with the themes of social transformation, gender relations, and the role of religion in these developments, it is also the only novel by any author that tackles the controversial theme of the social and ideological transformation in the Saudi region of Asir through its engagement with history. The novel’s importance also relates to al-Hashr as a feminist author who is clearly concerned with women’s issues and has engaged in a process of writing back and speaking truth to the dominant powers. The message is that the seizure of Mecca by conservative powers interrupted the government’s modernisation process and in order to maintain itself in power it sacrificed the rights of Saudi women. As it explores this new theme, by the same token it adds crucial dimensions to the Saudi women’s novel. The narrative draws the reader’s attention to critical aspects of Saudi history and identity and to a different representation of Saudi women. In drawing on history, al-Hashr attempts not only to give voice to the marginalised, but also to negotiate and interrogate history and its implications for women, and to illuminate some of its less well-lit areas. For women writers, the rewriting of history offers a means to discuss and interpret certain events and their implications. The novel’s use of an omniscient narrator, besides embodying the position of an authoritative voice, allows the author to have control over the characters and their inner feelings and to interpret particular actions, as well as encouraging the reader to perceive others in certain ways. The downside of this technique, which appears plainly throughout the novel, is that the voice of the author seems exceedingly dominant. Indeed, the reader may often have the impression of reading an essay or polemic, rather than a novel, a criticism which has often been made of Saudi women’s novels in recent years. This observation, however, underpins our argument that a large number of Saudi women novelists have used the genre as a weapon and a vehicle for their thoughts, making them therefore more concerned with content than with form. The events of Fragmentation mostly take place in a small village in Asir, suggesting a microcosm through which the author seeks to document wider social transformation. She engages intimately with the past not only by setting the narrative in a

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particular period but also by presenting the dialogue in local dialect. In addition, she frequently quotes Juhayman’s letters as primary sources and sets certain historical events as the backdrop to the narrative. Al-Hashr juxtaposes the political with the personal, the public with the private, which allows the novel to engage with various issues. Although Juhayman makes several brief appearances in the novel, the author develops her characters to give voice to the marginalised, attempting to tell the story of those who are less privileged and less heard. The reader is initially introduced to a very young girl, Amina, who marries Saleh, a follower of Juhayman, then moves with him to Riyadh. The story of Amina is intertwined with many others, but the narrative mainly revolves around the theme of social transformations and how they are reflected in the village, particularly in the lives of women and in gender relations. The village gradually becomes conservative, resulting in the decline of the women’s status. In representing these social and ideological transformations, the author gives significant attention to changes in gender relations and the role of religion, themes which are analysed in the following two sections.

GENDER ROLES AND FEMALE IDENTITY Formation and Reformation In Fragmentation, the seizure of the Grand Mosque is epitomised as the result of the religious extremism that had spread in SA and invaded Amina’s village, imposing new social and political values, which are totally alien to the villagers’ understanding of Islam. As she highlights these social and ideological transformations and their implications for women, al-Hashr’s treatment of her female characters passes through two distinct phases. In the first, she represents women in the village as asserting their agency and enjoying rights, autonomy and roles similar to those of their male counterparts, whereas in the second phase, in Riyadh and subsequently in the village, after the arrival of a new imam, their condition undergoes a considerable change: women are now portrayed as subordinate and confined. In shaping gender relations in the first phase, the narrator depicts men and women as working together in the fields, enjoying natural and spontaneous relationships. Women’s freedom of movement is not restricted and they did not need to obtain their husbands’ permission to leave the house. For instance, ‘when a woman noticed that she was about to run out of firewood, she would take her axe and rope and go to the forest’ (22). However, when Amina moves to Riyadh with her husband, she finds that ‘women here cannot go anywhere as was the case in her village, but only to particular places that have been specified beforehand and with the permission of men’(75). Furthermore, while village women may well receive male guests, sit and converse with them without restraint, the situation is very different in Riyadh, where gender segregation is widely observed with houses having separate quarters for men and women. It is noticeable that this account describes Riyadh before the seizure of the Grand Mosque; therefore it underscores the different cultures of Najd and Asir.

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Although at the outset the condition of the village women is contrasted with that of their counterparts in Riyadh, a transformation occurs gradually until the situation in the village begins to resemble that of the city. The novel clearly presents these changes as resulting from various factors, focusing on the role of Rashid, who is appointed as the village imam. A follower of Juhayman, Rashid takes advantage of the villagers’ superficial knowledge of religion and calls for restrictions on women by resorting to extreme religious discourse (110). It is important to note here that in the portrayal of female identity as subject to change in accordance with social, cultural and situational factors, gender identity is not represented as fixed or rigid. On the contrary, its formation is significantly influenced by certain experiences. In other words, the implicit message of the novel is that femininity is not natural or innate. In Behind Harem Walls, al-Hashr expresses her view more explicitly, contending that differences in gender roles and gender relations resulted from diverse cultural and social factors, while the environment also played a role in their formation. She also argues that agriculture, being the chief activity of the inhabitants of Asir, had a major impact on the shaping of gender relations and roles in the past, when women worked outside the home and mixed with men (2007, 138 and 157–58). This view of gender identity informs the author’s construction of the relationship between her male and female characters through the course of the novel, which she achieves by employing history as a site for negotiation and contest. Amina’s agency and mobility are influenced by different gender roles and expectations within specific historical and sociocultural contexts in the same country. Thus, in stressing the considerable transformation in the gender identity and gender roles of her female characters, the author underlines the role of cultural and social contexts in constructing women’s identity and roles. This view corresponds to the widely cited statement by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. De Beauvoir continues: ‘No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine’ (1997, 295). The construction of female identity is one of the focal issues within feminist theory. It is argued that while sex is biologically determined, gender is socially and culturally constructed. In other words, males and females are assigned distinct attributes in accordance with social and cultural contexts. This argument offers an extremely important space for negotiating social hierarchies and gender roles, as represented in Fragmentation. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler illuminates her insightful analysis of gender identity with the following extension of de Beauvoir’s argument: If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice,

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it is open to intervention and resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the ‘congealing’ is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means. It is, for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if there were a telos that governs the process of acculturation and construction. (1999, 43)

Thus, gender is a continuing process that is significantly produced, influenced and sustained by social and cultural forces. As to al-Hashr, her account of this process highlights the role of culture and society in constituting gender identity, as well as the changing nature of gender. By shedding light on the process of social transformation and its effects on the role and status of women, al-Hashr is foregrounding the role of society in determining the position of women and insisting on its unusual nature. Nonetheless, the transformation of gender roles is depicted as a complex process that was influenced both by some kinds of religious discourse and by other critical factors which highlight how individuals are influenced by diverse manifestations of power. In the process of transformation, the narrator criticises some governmental institutions that contribute to the marginalisation of women and to placing them in an inferior position, focusing on education and its role in changing and constructing different gender roles and allocating dissimilar attributes to males and females. Butler (1999, 43–44) contends that gender is performative and is ‘the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’. This is extremely important and relevant to Fragmentation, where gender becomes a sort of doing that constitutes being, which is assumed over time to be natural. Gender being performative does not imply that subjects are free to choose their gender identity and roles. Rather, this process is regulated and enforced by society and diverse powerful institutions, which construct gender identity. The strategy of emphasizing the changing nature of gender also allows for the challenging of patriarchy and particularly of notions that some members of society might hold to, in relation to the position of women and their assumed roles. As argued earlier, while the narrative of Fragmentation is set in the past, this is a strategy to negotiate gender roles and relations and to engage with issues in the present. In the case of women’s employment, for example, whilst some might argue that the private sphere is women’s natural environment, the author challenges this notion by showing the changing nature of gender roles historically within the same social context. The frequent stress in the course of the novel on women’s former freedom in the public sphere is definitely meant to challenge this perception. The representation of women as having similar status to that of men and participating in the public sphere also challenges a certain monolithic view of Arab women as passive and oppressed. The change in their roles is portrayed as a consequence of ‘discursive practices’ that constitute what are to be perceived as normative attitudes. Moreover, although it may be argued that custom and tradition are against the notion that women should be free to work, this objection is challenged from within by resorting to history and depicting women as once having had active roles in

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this area. It is important to note that drawing on history allows traditional gender norms, in this context, to be appropriated as a means of empowerment for women. It is true that the approach of some Saudi women writers to social norms may seem ambivalent and equivocal, as is the case in Fragmentation, whose author takes them as a source of empowerment and then rejects others by using the discourse of ‘women’s rights in Islam’. Nevertheless, this should be understood within the context of negotiating gender and power relations. The following section elaborates on the issue of advocating women’s rights within the framework of Islam as a discourse against social norms.

RE-APPROPRIATING RELIGION Tolerance versus Intolerance One of the principal issues that arises when addressing the highly complex intersection of gender, religion and patriarchy is the confusion between customs and religious practice. This confusion is one of the remarkable features of feminist discourse in the Middle East. Moreover, it is an essential attribute of Saudi women’s writings when dealing with the position of religion vis-à-vis women’s rights. This is especially evident following the rise of the woman question in recent years. The discourse of ‘women’s rights in Islam’ as opposing patriarchal customs and traditions has been employed by many Saudi women with different ideological and intellectual orientations (see Le Renard 2014, 12). Having to resort to this discourse confers two substantial gains: since it emanates from religion, it embraces Islamic discourse, which is empowering in this context; and by the same token, it is perceived as an indigenous as opposed to a Western discourse. It could thus be understood as a strategy that Saudi women writers employ, albeit with different goals, to advance their objectives, raise awareness, demand rights for women and negotiate gender relations. This discourse could be viewed as engaging with Islamic feminism. Cooke makes the following observation: Some Arab women are inventing new ways of responding to age-old silencing strategies and are constructing from the margins a discourse of power. To act as an ‘Islamic feminist’ is, therefore, not to perform a fixed identity but to create a new, contingent subject position. From this location, these women declare their double commitment: to the religious community and to themselves as strong women active on behalf of and with other women without the debilitating fear that pro-women action or writing will run the risk of labelling them traitors to their culture who have sold out to the West. (2000, 152)

In Fragmentation, the author frequently addresses this confusion and its implications for the characters, particularly females, in her engagement with history and social transformation. Indeed, it forms one of the major threads running through the novel. For instance, she describes Rashid, the new Imam who is clearly not from the region, as being shocked and intensely annoyed at the sight of the village

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women uncovering their faces, and going out and mixing with men in fields, valleys, wells and homes (113). His exasperation, as the narrator reveals, is not grounded in religious texts, but in his own inner belief that women should be secluded and not mix with men. The narrator, conveying Rashid’s interior thoughts, states that ‘if they were grouped in a corner together, it would be less significant. What annoyed him was seeing them [men and women] sitting next to each other, mixed without any order’ (114). By using the example of the Imam, al-Hashr clearly illuminates that his understanding of Islam is greatly influenced  by patriarchy rather than the religion he preaches. In other words, it is social norms, expressed through the language of religion rather than religion per se, that has determined the status of women in society. Hence, the fact remains that it is an important stance, as it encourages the reader to question some of the longstanding and widely held conceptions concerning women and to ask whether they are grounded in religion or in patriarchy. This strategy is not exclusively about a comparison between two regions, as it may appear at first, but rather about deploying the notion of the need to distinguish what is religious from what is patriarchal in order to allow further space for the pursuit of improved rights for women. Al-Hashr identifies the strong influence of various personal experiences as being the underlying cause of the extreme views held by Rashid and other male characters, in particular their misogyny. Thus, Mohsen, a young villager who subsequently joins Juhayman’s group, has been rejected by the village girls not so much for his modest social status, but for his aggressive and disgraceful conduct. This rejection leads him to despise all women, and he becomes drawn to Rashid’s ideology inasmuch as it allows him to avenge himself on women. In other words, he interprets this ideology as legitimating his misogyny (123–25). The portrayal of these characters is with no doubt a strategy to clarify that misogyny and extremism are not directly linked to Islam. By the same token, the narrative challenges the notion that women’s subordinate position is the result of authentic religious teachings; instead, the real cause is presented as patriarchal social customs infused with religious practice and personal experience in the guise of religion. Furthermore, by juxtaposing the narrative of Juhayman with the history of social and ideological transformation, and in particular by focusing closely on women’s issues, al-Hashr foregrounds the significance of the two issues. She indicates that misogyny is no less extreme than religious extremism. Thus, by its use of a historical backdrop, the novel links the criminal seizure of the Grand Mosque with restrictions imposed on women, even if those imposing them claim religious legitimacy. In other words, the narrative encourages the reader to rethink some restrictions imposed on women in the name of Islam, which may be just as extreme and fallacious as the 1979 insurrection. This interrelation between extremism and the control of women, which is represented in Fragmentation at various levels, suggests a preoccupation with these issues on the part of the author and her desire to emphasise their connection. For instance,

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following her marriage and move to Riyadh, Amina becomes alone, confined and married to a man who pays her no respect or attention. Saleh, an active member of Juhayman’s group, is portrayed as the epitome of extremism as well as being fierce and ruthless, in particular in his relationship with Amina (173), whom he does not allow to communicate with other women or visit her neighbours. Secluded and isolated Amina ironically meets a young neighbour who first sees her while adjusting his TV aerial, gradually converses with her and begins meeting her regularly (184). Their secret relationship develops into a love affair, making Amina the opposite of what Saleh had intended. The author portrays this as a reaction to his extremism and therefore contrasts two alternative situations: one where women are granted respect and freedom and remain loyal and chaste; and the other where Saleh isolates his wife away from men despite which she finds the opportunity to meet and have an affair with another man. The novel thus foregrounds significant variances between religious adherence and extremism while also stressing the failure of the latter, particularly in gender relations. It is through this distinction that the relationship between religion and gender relations is negotiated, while patriarchal notions are challenged and subverted. Fragmentation seems to articulate the view that the subordinate position of women is a result of an extreme understanding of Islam that is greatly influenced by social norms and personal experience, thus challenging both patriarchy and the monolithic depiction of Saudi women as passive victims of their religion.

CONCLUSION The seizure of the Grand Mosque is often considered a historical turning point in SA, and in particular where women’s status is concerned. Regardless of the validity of this analysis, some Saudi women authors have employed this historical event as a device to negotiate and challenge the status quo. This chapter has highlighted the ways in which, by blurring the boundaries between history and the novel, Al-Hashr has re-read the social transformation of her society from a woman’s perspective and has utilised the seizure of the Grand Mosque to negotiate gender and religion. The adoption of a historical lens seems to provide her with a crucial arena in which to discuss religion and gender relations and thus to subvert patriarchal, reductionist and stereotypical views of Saudi women. This approach has allowed us as readers a deeper immersion into the workings of a society which is otherwise impermeable to non-insiders. While appreciating the reading of the novel we also gain an understanding of the history of SA through a feminist reading which subverts the intricacies of formal history to reinstate the lost voices of the subaltern categories comprising women and the villagers of Asir. In this, drawing on history appears to be an empowering strategy for this negotiation. It is noteworthy that in Fragmentation the events surrounding the uprising in Mecca are connected with misogyny and extremism in dealing with women’s issues. For al-Hashr, this

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strategy seems to have proved successful in denouncing patriarchal practices and connecting them with an event that is linked in the collective memory with religious fundamentalism. The association of misogyny with the extremists who seized the Grand Mosque opens up a space for negotiating and challenging both patriarchy and what is deemed to be the use of religion to ostracise women and condemn them to an inferior status. Thus, adherence to religion could be perceived as part of women’s struggle for equality within the discourse of women’s rights in Islam. Through the blending of literature and history, al-Hashr negotiates, subverts and challenges patriarchy by adhering to religion as opposed to social mores, which challenges the perception of Islam as oppressing women. Moreover, in contrast to the large number of novels written by Saudi women that have tended to depict, sometimes in radical ways, what is deemed to be an oppressive reality in order to draw the attention of readers to this oppression and to protest against it, Fragmentation portrays some of its female protagonists as strong and capable of being independent. Hence, al-Hashr also sheds light on the complexity of Saudi women by highlighting their diversity of character, experience, history and culture. Furthermore, she challenges the perception of traditional gender roles by showing their changing nature. Therefore, while Fragmentation bears witness to the transformations undergone by Saudi society, and in particular by its women, by shedding light on a period that has received relatively little attention, it simultaneously challenges dominant discourses about women in SA, both patriarchal and Western, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the human condition in a generally little studied society. The deconstruction of Fragmentation has allowed us to not only delve into the depths of this society and its politics but more importantly to gain a first-hand understanding of it, subscribing thus to Hodgett’s view of Area Studies as continuing ‘to be crucial to deep and satisfactory understanding of place and people in addressing difficult, modern and persistent problems’. Seeing how blurring the boundaries of history and literature in Fragmentation is deployed as an effective strategy to negotiate, subvert and challenge patriarchy and reinstate the severed voices of women, leads us to the conclusion that a new genre-blurring epoch is definitely upon us!

NOTE 1. All translations from the original are ours.

REFERENCES Al-Hashr, Aisha. 2007. Khalf Aswār al-Ḥaramlak. Beirut: Al-Dār al-ʿArabiyya li-l-ʿulūm. ———. 2009. Al-Tashaẓẓī. Beirut: al-Dār al-ʿArabiyya li-l-ʿulūm. Al-Huzaymi, Nasir. 2011. Ayām maʿ Juhaymān. Beirut: al-Shabaka al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Abḥāth wa-l-Nashr.

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Al-Sharīf, Manal. 2012. ‘The Drive for Freedom’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 0PXXNK-3zQ4 (accessed 17 November 2017). Al-Fassi, Hatoon Ajwad. 2014. ‘Does Saudi Feminism Exist?’ In Arab Feminisms: Gender – and Equality in the Middle East, edited by Jean Makdisi and Rafif Rida Sidawi (157–70). London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Byatt, A. S. 2000. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Chatto & Windus Connor, Steven. 1996. The English Novel in History 1950 to 1995. London: Routledge. Cooke, Miriam. 1996. Women and the War Story. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. ‘Women, Religion, and the Postcolonial Arab World’, Cultural Critique 45 (45): 150–84. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1997. The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Vintage. De Groot, Jerome. 2010. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge. Fayad, Mona. 1995. ‘Reinscribing Identity: Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Writing’, College Literature 22 (1): 147–60. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2004. ‘Hystorical Fictions: Women (Re)writing and (Re)reading History’, Women: A Cultural Review 15 (2): 137–52. Lambert, R. 1990. ‘Blurring the Disciplinary Boundaries: Area Studies in the United States’, American Behavioral Scientist 33 (6): 712–32. Le Renard, Amélie. 2014. A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mehrez, Samia. 1994. Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction. Cairo: AUC Press. Ménoret, Pascal. 2008. ‘Fighting for the Holy Mosque: The 1979 Mecca Insurgency’. In Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations in Sacred Spaces, edited by Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly (pp. 117–39). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Ornamentalism. New York: Pantheon. Salhi, Zahia Smail. 2012. ‘Between ‘Porte-Parole’ and Porte-Memoire’: Assia Djebar’s Cinematic Voice in the Maghreb’, International Journal of Feminist Studies 15 (1): 53–77. ———. 2017. ‘Withstanding the Winds of Change? Literary Representations of the Gulf War and Its Impacts on Saudi Society’, Arab Studies Quarterly 39 (4): 973–95. Wallace, Diana. 2005. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers 1900–2000. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Zimmerman, T. 2014. Writing Back Through Our Mothers: A Transnational Feminist Study on the Woman’s Historical Novel. Münster: LIT Verlag.

III CANADA IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

9 TransArea Studies Gendered Mobility in North American Literature Caroline Rosenthal

COMPARATIVE AREA STUDIES Although contested and denigrated in the last decades, Area Studies have proven to be ‘a resilient corner of academia’ (MacKay 2007). Many universities reframe Area Studies programs in transdisciplinary, international ways that focus on global issues such as economic and political crises, climate change, and other environmental problems such as dwindling resources and sustainability. In my corner of the world, Eastern Germany, the territory of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), Area Studies are undergoing an amazing renaissance after a distinct paradigm shift. The University of Halle, for instance, is offering a Master of Science in International Area Studies.1 The two-year program is highly interdisciplinary, consisting of three main areas: economic and social sciences, natural sciences and regional sciences. It promises to qualify people for consulting, research, academic management, and spatial planning. At Potsdam University, a transcontinental, translocal, and transnational research network has recently been established (Potsdam International Network for TransArea Studies – POINTS), which focuses on ‘mobile conceptions of spaces and places’ and ‘emphasize[s] vectorial dynamisms and processes’ in Trans­ Area Studies (Mission Statement POINTS 2016).2 With respect to Canadian Studies, scholars in Germany over the last decades have developed an approach which has recently been termed Comparative North American Studies (Nischik 2016). This approach partially developed out of institutional necessity, because of the way academic departments are structured in Germany. Very few universities have Canadian Studies Departments but rather Departments for English and American Studies so that Canadianists in Germany are either experts in British and Canadian or, more often, American and Canadian Literature. This institutional structure eventually turned into a blessing because it led to productive ways 117

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of comparing genres, periods, ethnic groups, and gendered narratives in Canadian and American literature (Nischik 2014). Unlike Hemispheric Studies or Transnational Studies that have rightly been blamed for maintaining US-American culture at center and thus not being truly transnational, Comparative North American Studies has put Canadian literature and culture on equal footing and offers truly new perspectives on North American culture. A comparative approach questions the naturalness of spaces and myths and thus provides a reflective perspective which renders the underlying parameters and traditions by seeing the self through the other and vice versa. Various paradigm shifts have furthermore increased transdisciplinarity, especially between the social sciences, geography, and literary studies. With the cultural turn, literature has come to be understood as a symbolic practice which not only reflects but produces social reality. The distinction between text and context becomes increasingly blurred as texts are seen as archives for bygone contexts as well as hypothetical ethical arenas which allow us to envision future scenarios and the possible outcome of our actions. Another vital turn, from the 1990s onward, has been the spatial turn which made us aware that space never simply exists but is always constructed through representation – may that be cartography or literature or visual representation – and that representation can never be neutral but is always invested with power. The seminal works of Henri Lefèbvre (1991), Michel Foucault (1986, 1995) and Edward Soja (1989) have emphasized that rather than a given, space is the product of social practices, of power formations, and of ideologies (Rosenthal 2011, 50). Spaces reflect the symbolic orders of a society and become part of a nation’s cultural imaginary. Every culture has a specific semiotics of space. Nations, cultures, and regions are imagined communities (Anderson 1991), which are not only constituted by history, politics and geographical factors but by artistic representations. These entities define themselves, among other things, through symbolic spaces, spaces that are semantically invested and that, way beyond their geographical specificity, become important for the self-understanding/conceptualization of that particular nation (Rosenthal 2011, 11–48). While the US, for instance, has claimed the West as a space defining its national character, the Canadian imagination has always turned North. Both nations, of course, have a West and a North but they distinctly differ in which spaces they have claimed as important for defining a national character and in how they represented and produced such a social imaginary through cultural artifacts and literary texts (Rosenthal 2005). Spaces and spatial practices, as such a comparative perspective shows, are always embedded in a distinct cultural and historical context and mobility occurs within such horizons. Spatial narratives of a nation, however, repress what and whoever might disturb the imagination of a homogenous national self so that the story of a nation is always a story haunted by what it repressed (Sugars 2004; Gunew 2004). Literary canons produce subtexts, excesses, surpluses that often become powerful spaces of signification from which new seminal impulses and cultural productions arise.

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In the second part of this chapter I want to apply a comparative North American Studies approach to two contemporary novels which both use female figures of mobility to subvert national semiotics through spatial practices. Aritha van Herk’s No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1989) traces the journey of a woman who leaves behind the normative gender roles of the Canadian West for the open space of the Canadian North, while Erica Lopez’ graphic novel Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing (1997) recounts the motorcycle trip of a young Latina from the East to the West Coast of the United States in a satirical fashion. In each novel, the unruly female protagonist subverts social norms and expectations by violating spatial rules and changes normative gender expectations as much as geographical space and underlying national imaginaries. Both authors transcend space, genre and gender in their texts in ways that nonetheless reflect the tacit spatial traditions of each nation shaped by race and sex as much as colonialism and hegemony.

THE DIFFERENCE SPACE MAKES Gendered Mobility and New Area Studies Movement as a vital ingredient of cultures has been an important aspect of literary and cultural theories since the late 1980s. As Janet Wolff claims in ‘Metaphors of Travel’ (1990), metaphors of mobility have had an effect on Postcolonial Studies where they destabilized fixed categories of traditional anthropology by de-essentializing the relationship of researcher and researched subject. Postmodern theory also used patterns of movement to point out that knowledge is always contingent, provisional and partial. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) with their theory of the rhizome3 and their concept of nomadism4 as well as Mary Louise Pratt’s influential terms ‘contact zone’ and ‘transculturation’ (1991) are examples as well as James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997). The book has had a tremendous impact on the study of so-called ethnic literature because rather than looking at origins, roots, as a fixed location, Clifford emphasizes that we have to look at routes, at the transmigration of people and at how they create spaces and areas. In the new millennium, Mobility Studies added to this spatial turn in Cultural Studies the idea that space is dynamically produced by interrelated mobilities. The exchange of people, objects, and ideas, in other words, creates urban, rural, or national spaces. As human geographer Tim Cresswell puts it: ‘The new mobilities paradigm seeks to understand mobility as a lived reality and, more radically, as a source of knowledge and meaning production’ (2013, 16). Mobility is never neutral but always invested with power. Also, as an embodied practice, it is never universal but bound to specific bodies marked by factors of race, sex, age, or class (Urry 2007, 43). Who is allowed to move in certain spaces at certain times is regulated by underlying cultural hierarchies and hegemonies so that social difference and geographical space always mutually depend on each other (Soja and Hooper 1993;

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Massey 1994). Mobility includes as well as excludes and comes at the expense of immobilized others (Razack 2000). Women or visible minorities are not allowed to move freely in certain spaces so that spatiality reflects the symbolic orders of society. In addition, there is potential conflict between individual mobility and state control, as Stephen Greenblatt pointed out in his seminal Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (2010). Especially in Europe we are witnessing how people are stopped at borders, are being denied access to countries and become immobilized. The paradigm of Mobility Studies is vital for a new approach to NAS because it allows us to see an area as a malleable construct, shaped primarily by the flux of people and multiple, often contesting mobilities. Mobility establishes and maintains hegemony and power but also has the potential to subvert them. The female road novel, as investigated below, for instance, challenges the masculine white journey west, involving the subjugation of the land and its people and hence rewrites colonial and gendered mastery (Ganser 2009, 33). If we understand gender as a performance that comes into being in repeated enactments, then female road novels not only challenge our understanding of space but also of gender and genre. The road for a long time has been regarded as a masculine space built on the false dichotomy that home is a safe place for women while public space is full of potential threats, especially after dark and if alone. As Liz Bondi and Joyce Davidson put it so succinctly: ‘Situating or locating gender (and any other potentially or purportedly universal concept) requires both a cultural and a geographical imagination: it requires that we attend to particular contexts, and it problematizes conceptualizations of space as well as gender’ (Bondi and Davidson 2003, 325). A normative spatiality helps to maintain normative gender behavior and the restriction of mobility keeps men and women in their ‘natural’ spaces (Ganser 2009, 76–77). Women are, for example, warned of roaming solitary public places after dark or of travelling alone. A normative spatial behavior thus teaches them to stay in the private sphere which in turn enhances certain gendered behavior. Literature as a hypothetical arena for shaping and testing new behavior and performances is an important counter discourse for imagining space and gender differently. The two texts I am going to investigate address the subversive spatial practices of two unruly women.

UNRULY WOMEN Trangressing the Norms of Space, Gender, and Genre in North America Literature Protagonist and first-person narrator of Erica Lopez’s novel Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing is Jolene Gertrude Rodriguez, nicknamed Tomato. She is in her mid-twenties, the child of a Puerto Rican father and a white American mother. Her philandering father has left the family while the mother is in various unhappy lesbian relationships. Tomato forms a two-woman gang with her newly found Puerto Rican friend Magdalena which she calls The Flaming Iguanas,

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‘in honor of our flamboyant little South American iguana brothers and sisters who are penned in like tiny lizard cows, but want to run free. All because the locals think they taste like chicken and take up less space.  .  .  . Since they can’t [run], we will run for them’ (Lopez 1997, 20). After a couple of days on the road the two women separate after a big fight so that Tomato now is a one-woman gang. This absurdity, which undermines heroic male descriptions of motorcycle gangs, is carried further when Tomato tries to embroider the name of her gang on the back of her motorcycle jacket, but, unskilled in needlework, only gets to ‘FLAM’ (Lopez 1997, 47). Her ensuing road trip takes her from New Jersey to San Francisco where she wants to visit her father who runs a sex toy business and is dying of brain cancer. The novel intentionally works with contradictory themes – bawdy sexuality and philosophical questions of death – and modes – realism juxtaposed with hyperbolic satire – which are enhanced by the rubber stamp art featured in the novel. Rather than illustrating the text, the images achieve their own level of signification and often deliberately jar with the text. In defiance of the story Tomato writes and the trip she takes, Lopez’s rubber art plays with stereotypical representations of Latina women in popular culture as either religious virgin or over-sexualized vamp. In contrast to this iconography, Tomato is neither feminine nor masculine, neither heterosexual nor homosexual. Lopez ‘queers’ her text at every possible level. She subverts genre conventions, makes the illustrations contradict the story, and demolishes stereotypical notions of both homo- and heterosexuals to make her protagonist escape ‘any possible gender role expectation’ (Cooper 2007). Tomato is not supposed to fit any role offered to women; instead her sexual and gender identity remains deliberately ambiguous. In accordance with Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody in postmodern literature ‘as a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking differences rather than similarity’ (2000, xii), Lopez parodies male road novels and satirizes constructions of masculinity and femininity within them. Tomato admits that she could never finish the classic road novels of Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson and Henry Miller: ‘Maybe . . . I just couldn’t identify with the fact that they were guys who had women around to make the coffee and wash the skid marks out of their shorts while they complained, called themselves angry young men, and screwed each other with their existential penises’ (Lopez 1997, 27). In prototypical road novels like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road women have been associated with home and stasis, men in contrast with the open road and movement. At best, women in such novels ‘ function as diversion, scenery and romantic support for the hero’ s larger quest’ (Paes de Barros 2004, 4), are often forced to slip into the roles of ‘whores, sex objects or defenseless victims’ (Ireland 2003, 481) and are supposed to underline the heroes’ manliness (Ganser 2009, 46). The protagonist of Lopez’s novel initially does not know how to ride a bike and falls down time and again. Lopez uses this ineptness to mock the heroic attitude of men on the road. She pointedly lists the vexations and actual physical risks involved in riding a motorcycle. Her protagonist is annoyed when her hair gets ‘all sticky with

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bug guts’ (Lopez 1997, 79) while riding on the highway and asks herself: ‘What happened to the cool, laid-back part of riding? My heart stopped every time I had to come to a complete stop or turn a corner’ (80). Tomato is constantly scared of dying; she ‘had to ride screaming on the yellow line in the middle of the two trucks so [she] wouldn’t get squashed’ (185). In Lopez’s road novel, it is not all about pristine landscapes, there is pollution and heavy traffic, and it is not all about liberty and individualism because the structured routes of mobility make it difficult to move freely. While Tomato resists emulating male heroic postures, she does slip into the role of the male rogue. Tomato reenacts Bakhtin’s definition of the road as a dialogic contact zone, a heterogeneous space of exchange and clashing mobilities (Bakhtin 1983, 243). In a picaresque fashion5 – but as a female picaro – she has manifold sexual encounters, becomes more and more self-determined and deconstructs the masculinist space of the road. Tomato eventually not only learns how to ride a bike and cope on the road but to master both: ‘I felt alive and alone in the best way. No one could intimidate me or give me shit because I had bug guts all over me and could keep a bike upright and pass a truck in the crosswinds with a war cry’ (Lopez 1997, 185). And yet, Lopez always resists the temptation to simply reverse gender expectations and create a female road hero; quite to the contrary, she undercuts any heroic habitus as Tomato continues: ‘I’d just been through traffic hell and now I was actually a biker who’d earned the right to spit on any road, even though I never did because I never practiced, because I knew it’d just drool down my chin inside the helmet’ (Lopez 1997, 185). Nonetheless, through her unruly spatial and sexual behavior, Tomato counteracts the ‘geography of fear’ produced by the gendered private/public divide and by the belief that women outside the private sphere have to pay for violating normative gender expectations in the form of ‘ sexual vulnerability and the threat of sexual assault’ (Ganser 2009, 156–57). As Tomato says in addressing her readers: ‘There is this myth that if you’re a woman traveling alone people will instantly want to kill you. This is an example of where you shouldn’t listen to anybody. So much of the way we live and the decisions we make in this world are based on fear’ (Lopez 1997, 111). In this passage, it becomes especially clear how fictional texts become arenas for testing out other behavior and provide role models for alternative identities. Yet, not only gender stereotypes but national myths are undercut and rewritten in Lopez’s text. The road is an important space in US-America’s self-conceptualization. Spatial mobility, especially towards the West, and social mobility, as captured in the ragsto-riches myth of the American dream are essential to the nation’ s self-fashioning and both are evoked by the space of the allegedly open road. Lopez in her novel therefore not only deconstructs space, gender, and genre but re-imagines the area of the American West and the understanding of mobility. Aritha van Herk also tells the story of a modern-day picara. Arachne Mantea is a successful sales representative for ladies’ underwear who traverses Alberta in her 1959 vintage Mercedes. Like a typical male picaro, she has lots of casual sexual encounters

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along the road with men whom she treats like objects: ‘They’re just bodies, you could put a paper bag over their head’ (van Herk 1989, 24). Van Herk parodies the road narrative and the narrative of the typical male traveling salesman at the same time. Arachne’s name stems from Greek mythology and is given to her by the only person who cares for her during her childhood in Vancouver in a dysfunctional family. Her mother Lanie has a tea-cup-leaves reading business and one of her customers, aptly named Gabriel, becomes Archne’s name giver and guardian angel. One day, when Gabriel visits the pregnant Lanie, he sees a spider at the window and says ‘arachnid’ (van Herk 1989, 64), and ‘Good thing it [the spider] caught something. Spiders are rogues’ (64). When Gabriel dies, Arachne inherits his vintage Mercedes, her only possession, and becomes a rogue, or picara, who roams the Canadian North. The very name of van Herk’s protagonist, Arachne, evokes the meandering, weblike structure of her travels: It calls upon a competition between the goddess Athena and the mortal Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Arachne is so famous for her weaving of tapestries that she provokes the envy and wrath of the goddess Athena. She challenges Arachne to a weaving contest, which Arachne wins, so that the enraged Athena turns her into a spider doomed to weave forever. Van Herk writes a counter-narrative in which Arachne has a best female friend, named Thena, and is not the victim but the perpetrator who treats men like flies and lures them into her web (Kirkwood 1987, 86). In its non-linear, rhizomatic structure, the web also functions as a counter representational strategy to cartography and maps. While maps are per definition static and impose a certain order on the world, a rhizome is dynamic and meanders (see note 3). Van Herk’s story itself is told in an a-chronological way that switches frames as well as modes of narrative representation and narrative voices. Arachne’s narrative is framed by four pieces entitled Notebook(s) on a Missing Person, told by an extradiegetic narrator (the narrator of the frame story) who addresses the reader and includes him/her in the search for Arachne. Embedded in this is Arachne’s story, told in 64 episodes in a non-linear fashion by a heterodiegetic (third person) narrator focalizing on Archne. In a magic realist fashion the novel fuses a realistic mode of narration with magical incidents, which are not, however, fantastic, but in the fictional world seem plausible. In the second part of the story, the protagonist thus ‘drives her inherited black 1959 Mercedes right out of the realistic world’ (Moss 1987, 360) into the un-storied North. The novel’s second part consists of a row of weird and haunting episodes in which Arachne escapes further and further into the hinterland of the allegedly unexplored6 Canadian Northwest. Increasingly, the landscape becomes a character of its own, so that van Herk, just like Lopez, parallels the subjugation of women and that of the land and an escape from spatial norms with that from traditional gender expectations. No Fixed Address is a road novel just like Flaming Iguanas but instead of going West the protagonist, in a Canadian fashion, goes North. Van Herk draws on a central element of Canadian mythmaking because unlike the US, Canada has always looked North for its self-definition (Rosenthal 2009). Especially postmodern

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Canadian literature has used the North as a space for playful investigations of identity, language, representation, and gender but also for questioning concepts such as historiography, truth, or authenticity. Sherrill Grace in Canada and the Idea of North (2001) has called these texts ‘counter-texts’ because they challenge and rerepresent earlier representations of North such as exploration accounts or maps. Rewritings of northern exploration narratives, such as for instance Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers (1995) or Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air (2007) regard cartography and mapping as instruments of appropriation and domination as maps inscribe power by claiming land in somebody’s name. In No Fixed Address, Arachne’s partner is a geographer, Thomas Telfer, who is the stable center of her existence and welcomes her home when she returns from her trips despite her many affairs. Initially, the maps Thomas keeps everywhere fascinate Arachne as they seem to harbor stories of adventure and exploration. In the end, however, Arachne realizes that these maps are too narrow for her desire for unexplored space. In her work, Aritha van Herk frequently deconstructs maps and mapping as a representational practice invested with power. In her 1992 essay ‘Mapping as Metaphor’, van Herk already draws a parallel between mapping and the writing of fiction: ‘Clearly mapping, like language, is creation more than representation, and so it is not illogical to think of fiction as cartography. The only way a country can be truly mapped is with its stories’ (van Herk 1992, 58). In likening maps to stories, van Herk does not want to authenticate literature via cartography but on the contrary uses the impact of stories to question the authority of maps. After all, maps only tell one possible story and interpret a landscape in one of many possible ways. Countries – areas – she claims can only be comprehended if they are storied areas, spaces that become real through the narratives being told about them. This is the central claim in No Fixed Address because, as Howells has rightly put it, ‘[m]apping is the main structural metaphor in this novel’ (1996, 7). Increasingly, though, Thomas’ ‘maps are too restrictive, for Arachne is obsessed with space and movement, desiring a map of endless promise and a way of escape, a map that would record her restless craving for new knowledge and ­experience’ (10). Just like Tomato does not want to emulate the heroic attitude of male road novels by perfectly mastering a bike, Arachne does not want to master space. Her spidering activity is organized in a rhizomatic fashion which is contrasted with the ordering impetus and authority of official maps. At the end of the novel, Arachne escapes all social restrictions and crosses ‘the ultimate frontier, a place where the civilized melts away and the meaning of mutiny is unknown, where manners never existed and family backgrounds are erased. It is exactly the kind of place for Arachne’ (316). Arachne vanishes into the, from her perspective, uncivilized, unexplored Canadian North. Van Herk’s text refuses representation itself, as Arachne becomes a missing person in a ‘roadless world’ (310). Van Herk’s protagonist defies spatial rules and orders as well as claims to realism and in a magical realistic way drives off the representational radar altogether.

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TRANSAREA STUDIES Both analyzed novels show that gender resides, among other things, in spatiality. We spatially perform what it means to be a man or a woman in a certain culture, place and time. In the novels, the road as a gendered space is deconstructed by subversive gender behavior that challenges both space and stereotypical expectations of gendered behavior. Both protagonists arrive at an understanding of self by confronting the masculine other inscribed in the space of the West and the North. While both spaces traditionally signify male exploration, endurance, dominance and heroism, the two female protagonists appropriate the spaces in a process of liberation. In this process they also re-semioticize the respective area for the cultural imaginary of the respective nation because they point to gaps in national narratives and symbolic landscapes and include female vistas in the story. In the sense of New Area Studies, we as readers become aware of the power structures and the constructed nature of any area. Areas or regions come into being in spatial practices, in people of different ethnicities, sexes, races, ages, or classes using them in specific, often overlapping ways.7 An area is always diversified because different ways of using, perceiving, or being in that area are layered on top of each other. At the same time, we need to compare areas and regions across national borders. The gain of a comparative North American approach for New Area Studies is to make us realize that regions are never universal, stable, or unified entities but are always embedded in specific historical, cultural and symbolic contexts. An area-intense knowledge is needed to understand the role the West and the North play in the cultural imaginary of each nation in order to understand how the two authors subvert the placemaking and storytelling of each nation. On the other hand, looking at the area of the American West and the Canadian North not in isolation but comparison allows us to identify common patriarchal and colonial structures in making the respective region. We need Area Studies more than ever, albeit with an awareness for the interestedness, malleability, and constructed nature of subjectivity and space. Literary Studies as Cultural Studies have important contributions to make to this field. In a world of growing complexity, we need narrative ways of comprehending and describing areas within global networks. We need narratives that negotiate the particular and the universal in a distinct area, that mark characteristics of an area and at the same time stress that there is never just one but many stories to a place. This is a promising direction for New Area Studies to follow.

NOTES 1. Martin Luther University, July 25, 2018, International Area Studies see http://ias.geo. uni-halle.de/. 2. Potsdam International Network for Transnational Area Studies, July 25, 2018, see https://www.uni-potsdam.de/tapoints/.

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3. Based on the botanical term rhizome, a root with multiple rootstalks, in philosophy rhizome refers to multiple, non-hierarchical structures that branch out in representing and interpreting entities. 4. As a philosophical concept, nomadism relates to the deterritorialization of ideas. It is a concept that wants to transgress the boundaries of conventional thought and bring fluidity into static notions. Applied to notions of subjectivity, it understands the subject as being temporary and heterogeneous rather than static, rooted and unified. Feminism has made use of the concept of nomadism to construct a female subjectivity outside patriarchal orders. See Rosi Braidotti’s work (1994), for instance. 5. The picaresque novel originated in sixteenth-century Spain. It has an episodic structure, satirizes society and features as main protagonist, and often narrator, a picaro. He is promiscuous, lives by his wits, often is an orphan and outsider to society as well as a social riser. These features still characterize the genre in its North American form today. Prominent present-day examples are Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964). Lopez and van Herk use and subvert the genre by portraying female picaras who transgress the conventions of genre and gender. 6. I am saying allegedly because regarding the North as uninhabited, unrepresented, or unstoried – as is frequently done in Canadian literature – is a Western perspective that ignores indigenous presences, knowledges, and practices in the area. 7. See, for example, Bose (2015) and Powell (2010); and on regionalism and postcolonialism, see Calder (2010).

REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London; New York: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1983. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel. Notes Toward a Historical Poetics’. In The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 184–259. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bondi, Liz, and Joyce Davidson. 2003. ‘Troubling the Place of Gender’. In Handbook of Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson et  al. (pp. 325–43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Cooper, Sara E. 2007. ‘Burning Down the Canon: Queer Family and Queer Text in Flaming Iguanas’. Ciberletras: Revista de Crítica Literaria y de Cultura 16: 7–13. Cresswell, Tim. 1993. ‘Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac’s On the Road’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18 (2): 24–262. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. ‘ Questions on Geography’. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited and translated by Colin Gordon, 63–77. Brighton: Harvester.

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Foucault, Michel. 1995. ‘The Language of Space’. In Geography, History, and Social Science, edited by George B. Benko and Ulf Strohmeyer (pp. 51–55). Dortrecht: Kluwer. Ganser, Alexandra. 2009. Roads of Her Own. Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives 1970–2000. New York: Rodopi. Grace, Sherrill. 2001. Canada and the Idea of North. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010. ‘A Mobility Studies Manifesto’. In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, edited by Greenblatt et al. (pp. 250–53). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunew, Sneja. 2004. Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalism. New York: Routledge. Hay, Elizabeth. 2007. Late Nights on Air. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Howells, Coral Ann. 1996. ‘Aritha van Herk’s No Fixed Address: An Exploration of Prairie Space as Fictional Space’. The London Journal of Canadian Studies 12: 6–19. Hutcheon, Linda. 2000. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ireland, Brian. 2003. ‘American Highways: Recurring Images and Themes of the Road Genre’, The Journal of American Culture 26 (4): 474–84. Kirkwood, Hilda. 1987. ‘Kiss of a Spider Lady. An Interview with Aritha van Herk’, Canadian Women Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme 8 (3): 85–89. Lefèbvre, Henry. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lopez, Erika. 1997. Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing. New York: Simon & Schuster. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. London: Polity. Moss, John. 1987. A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel. Second edition. Toronto: The Canadian Publishers. M.Sc. International Area Studies. 2016. ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches and Global Issues’. Martin Luther University Halle- Wittenberg. http://ias.geo.uni-halle.de/ (last modified October 15, 2016. MacKay, Ruth. 2007. ‘The New World of Area Studies’. Stanford University Interaction 6 (Spring): 6–7. http://news.stanford.edu/news/multi/interaction/ (accessed December 8, 2016). Nischik, Reingard M., ed. 2014. The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nischik, Reingard M., ed. 2016. Comparative North American Studies. Transnational Approaches to American and Canadian Literature and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Paes de Barros, Deborah. 2004. Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road Stories. New York: Lang. POINTS. n.d. ‘Potsdam International Network for TransArea Studies’. http://www.unipotsdam.de/tapoints/ (accessed on December 5, 2016). Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, MLA 13 (9): 33–40. Razack, Sherene H., ed. 2000. Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines. Rosenthal, Caroline. 2011. New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban. Rochester: Camden House. ———. 2011b. ‘Imagining National Space: Symbolic Landscapes and National Canons’. In Rosenthal 2011, 11–48. ———. 2014. ‘North American Urban Fiction’. In Nischik 2014, 237–54. ———. 2009. ‘Locations of North in Canadian Literature and Culture’, Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 29 (2): 25–38.

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Rosenthal, Caroline. 2005. ‘Comparing Mythologies: The Canadian North versus the ­American West’. In Regionalism in the Age of Globalism. Vol 2. Forms of Regionalism, edited by Lothar Hönnighausen, et  al. (pp. 283–91). University of Wisconsin: Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures. Soja, Edward. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London; New York: Verso. Soja, Edward, and Barbara Hooper. 1993. ‘The Spaces That Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics’. In Place and the Politics of Identity, edited by Michael Keith (pp. 183-205). London: Routledge. Sugars, Cynthia, ed. 2004. Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Van Herk, Aritha. 1989. No Fixed Address. London: Virago Press. Van Herk, Aritha. 1982. ‘Mapping as Metaphor’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Kanada ­Studien 2: 75–87. Wiebe, Rudy. 1995. A Discovery of Strangers. New York: Quality Paperback Club. Wolff, Janet. 1993. ‘On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism’, Cultural Studies 7 (2): 224–39.

10 Area and Circus Studies The Case of and for a Boundary-Crossing Quebec Charles R. Batson

With their cirques, Québécois art and artists have found a global presence. As such, they point to new questions we must ask ourselves as we seek heightened awareness of areas and peoples. This chapter’s explorations of Québec’s circuses alongside a close look at the field of Québec Studies offer ways of understanding relationships between the distinctly local and the avowedly global, providing potentially fruitful insights that take into account the multiplicities that make and mark peoples, performances and places. As I write these lines, Cirque du Soleil (founded 1984 in Baie-Saint-Paul, Québec)1 has eighteen shows actively touring on five continents or staged in permanent fixtures from Las Vegas to Florida’s Lake Buena Vista and Mexico’s Riviera Maya. Cirque Eloize (founded 1993 by seven circus artists all from the Magdalen Islands, Québec)2 has three major shows touring from Amsterdam and London to Rio de Janeiro, and has just announced a five-year contract for a theatre in Paris. Les 7 doigts de la main, or The 7 Fingers as they are known in English (founded 2002, with their first show in Montréal, Québec),3 lay claim to at least four shows touring from the Netherlands to China, with multiple active projects from Moscow to New York. Cavalia, the first show by the equestrian and acrobatic circus troupe of the same name,4 premièred in Shawinigan, Québec, in 2001 and has been seen by more than four million spectators from Brisbane to Abu Dhabi. More than 95 percent of the graduates of Montréal’s National Circus School (founded 1981)5 find jobs within a few months in companies from the Americas to Oceania. As we approach a study of this artform and its distinctly Québécois origins, we may find ourselves answering the call of this collection’s editors to show that New Area Studies (NAS) are far from being parochial, narrow and lacking vision beyond limited and limiting boundaries. Indeed, in our questions, we may come to see the global in Québec’s cultural expressions and studies on Québec as revelatory 129

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of impulses, tensions and movements not rangebound by the borders of older, more traditional paradigms, including those of the national state and colonial hierarchies. This chapter begins with a close examination of Québec Studies and their expanding contributions to an awareness of the importance of exploded binarisms and of what cannot be conceived of in monolithic terms. Moving on to an analysis of Québec’s circuses as a way of seeing cultural productions as constitutive of boundary-crossing identities and images, this chapter closes with a proposal that Québec, with its Studies and its cirques, offers a rich site of understanding forms of the new in what we may call New Area Studies.

THE CASE OF AND FOR QUÉBEC STUDIES As this collection’s editors note, Traditional Area Studies (TAS) may seem to partake of an outworn model of scholarship. In their introduction to the 2010 aptly named Remaking Area Studies, Wesley-Smith and Goss write that, since the global changes that arose at the end of Cold War, Area Studies face a ‘fiscal and epistemological crisis’ (ix). At stake is nothing less than ‘the perceived relevance of Area Studies knowledge in a new, more intense phase of globalization characterized by diffuse challenges to the dominance of American economic and political power and the apparent erosion of the conceptual and spatial boundaries with which Area Studies constructed its subjects and defended its institutional identity’ (ix). Along with other scholars including Ludden and Khosrowjah, Goss and WesleySmith remind us that our Area Studies disciplines and institutions emerged in a post–World War II era marked principally by ‘the international interests of the United States .  .  . in response to the perceived need for useful knowledge about the non-Western places and people Americans increasingly encountered as military analysts, policy makers, business leaders, and private citizens’ (x–xi). Ludden further calls us to remember that it was the sovereign state, the ‘national state’ (2000, 1), that provided ‘the primary institutional base for Area Studies’ (1) in the construction and perception of such knowledge. As Khosrowjah (2011) puts it, such foundations at the heart of Traditional Area Studies have led to the use of language related to ‘“us” and “our” as in “our [national] interests”’ (131), thus setting up, in such a logic, a series of others, a ‘they’ and ‘them’, not unrelated to the ‘heritage of colonialism’ (133) that reminds us of the ‘dominantly white, male, Eurocentric origins’ (136) of what Area Studies have done and whose interests they have been called upon to serve. In this context, it is striking to note that Québec Studies as a discipline emerged in years prior to the end of the Cold War and prior to the rapid fin-de-millénaire intensification of forces of economic and cultural globalism that mark the current crisis in what area work should and can do beyond reiterate old power relations. In perhaps a watershed moment of the creation of internationalized Québec Studies, the organization that ultimately took the name American Council for Québec Studies (ACQS) was founded in 1980, its first conference was held at Yale University in

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1981, and its journal Québec Studies published its first issue in 1983.6 It is instructive for the pages that follow to note an important reason behind the founding of this organization: according to long-time Québec Studies editor Jane Moss, it was because a group of scholars ‘felt French Canada and literary studies were marginalized by ACSUS [Association for Canadian Studies in the United States], which was dominated at the time by [A]nglophone social scientists’ (Moss 2).7 As Lacombe (2014) reminds us, Canadian Studies itself as a discipline was largely an Anglophone enterprise, even primarily an ‘English Canadian project’ (quoting Angus 2012) from its origins in the 1960s and 1970s. Québec Studies, then, from their own origin, speak to something new in Area Studies: they have emerged to create and disseminate knowledge and understanding of one of the ‘others’ from beyond hegemonic structures, traditionally understood nation-state borders, and attendant cultural and linguistic concepts. Indeed, it may be difficult to overstate the importance of the fact that Québec is not a sovereign national state and that a large majority of its peoples speak a language that is not the dominant language of Canada or of North America. Furthermore, if we look to Khorowjah’s notion of the ‘heritage of colonialism’ in which, for example, there would be fairly clear distinctions between who or what can be called the colonized and the colonizers, or who can lay claim to a universal language and value system, we find ourselves, in the case of Québec, adrift. As Richards (2009) tells us in his ‘Putting Québec Studies on the Map’, ‘In Québec, such binarism falls apart’ (82). The French, of course, colonized Nouvelle France, but Québec itself became ‘postcolonial from France in 1763’ (82) under English dominance, and, henceforth, ‘the Québécois idiom becomes the opposite of a universal’ (82): it is the expression of a literal minority both in a North America dominated by English and in the larger Francophone world dominated by a European French that has traditionally seen Québécois as ‘archaic, Americanized, and in need of correction’ (83). In a further interesting twist on this lack of clear lines of demarcation when it comes to studies of Québec, the title of a 2003 article by Katherine Roberts tells us much about how Québec is conceived in the larger academy: ‘Francophone . . . but not like the others’ (153). A site where concepts of settler, colonial, and post-colonial ideologies are in constant play and juxtaposition, Québec finds itself an ‘other’, a not easily classified, even in fields exploring questions of ‘otherness’. Roberts speaks, however, to the rich rewards that can be gained by attending to how classifications fall apart in the case of Québec. By even asking the question, ‘Which postcolonial?’ (153), as we look at Québec, we find ourselves having to realize that ‘Postcolonialism is clearly not a homogenous category but a complex and dynamic configuration or multiplicity of powers and histories, constantly reinterpreted and reorganized by both First and Third world critics and scholars’ (155). Lacombe also reminds us, from her own experience of teaching Quebec Studies in a Canadian Studies university department, that other terms show shifting meaning as they move from the Canadian Studies (Anglophone) context to a Quebec Studies (Francophone) one. In one important example, the ‘America’ in ‘Americanization’, for the former, most often stands in (frequently

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negatively) for ‘the United States’. In a Québec that claims identity as ‘resolutely francophone and North American’ (130, emphasis in original), however, an embraced ‘americanité’ may well reach back imaginatively ‘to the New France, and emphasiz[e] how French culture was altered by the process of exploration and settlement’, thus referring and pointing ‘to modern Quebec’s literary and cultural appropriation of new world perspectives’ (130). It is thus vital that we attend to these differing meanings if we are more fully to understand cultures and peoples. Nimijean and Trépanier’s (2014) introduction to a collection of papers arising from a 2012 conference on ‘Where is Québec in Canadian Studies?’ further offers a lament that ‘many scholars in English Canada are unaware of academic literatures in Québec’ (6), thus missing an understanding of the cultural messages revealed in such shifting meanings. In language referring back to Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel whose title is now shorthand for lack of communication between English and French Canada, Nimijean and Trépanier note that, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, ‘it is not new that people in the two solitudes know less and less of each other’ (6). Malla (2015), in a review for The New Yorker, also refers to the MacLennan work and goes so far to write that, even in 2015, ‘[d]ialogue between Quebec and the rest of North America, to which English Canada might provide a conduit, is practically nonexistent’. Malla cites the Québec City–based translator Peter McCambridge for a potential reason as to why ‘French-Canadian literature rarely crosses over to Englishlanguage readers’, even in translation. For McCambridge, ‘Quebec finds itself too exotic to be easily digested by the Canadian and U.S. market .  .  . but not exotic enough to compete with the appeal of something new from Indonesia or Iceland. To North American readers, especially, I think it’s at once too different and too familiar’. Not only do we find ourselves back with Richards in noting that, with Québec, binarisms governing not only cultural production but also how it is received fall apart. We also, with Malla, Nimijean, and Trépanier, find a resolute reminder of the ‘otherness’ of Québec, in even its perceived difference from that which is already different. Offering language and concepts frequently escaping binarisms or pointing to their failure, Québec Studies may offer a model of new ways to study area. Furthermore, Québec Studies itself as a field is being expanded, examining the exploding limits of national or provincial boundaries, perhaps precisely because of its foundational awareness of the rich rewards of examining the previously unexamined. Long embracing the study of minority French-speaking cultures and people in Canadian provinces beyond the borders of Québec, Québec Studies has, in recent years, enjoined explorations of other cultures in the Americas related by history, migration, or appropriation to France’s former North American colonies. With contributions on, for example, the impact of the Franco-American newspaper Le Messager or on the complex identities taken by the Franco-American millennial, the 2016 ACQS conference in Portland, Maine showcased scholarship on Franco-American communities of the Northeast United States, some of which are at a remove of several generations from even speaking French but which actively continue to claim a North American French heritage. Québec Studies have also made important contributions

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to the growing scholarship on the French Atlantic, offering further anchoring points in our understanding of connections among the Americas, Africa, and Europe.8 For Khosrowjah (2011), ‘the role of immigrant / exilic / [e]mmigrant academics becomes increasingly more prominent as a way of understanding and legitimizing the new area studies discourse’ (136). Québec Studies scholars participate in this movement in two more fields of inquiry. Immigrant literatures written in French take a certain pride of place in new scholarship about this area where award-winning authors such as Haitian-born Dany Laferrière and Vietnamese-born Kim Thúy find complex senses of belonging. And importantly, new work from scholars such as Michèle Lacombe and Pamela Sing has emerged on indigenous literature, cinema, art, and cultural expression as it inflects, informs, and stands in relation to the nonindigenous cultures of and in Québec. Hurley’s (2016) work on English-language theatre in Québec (see, for example, ‘Townships’) may further point to how Québec Studies can speak to the explosion of delimiting boundaries, in her explorations of what happens when the performances of a minority happen in a major language in a province whose dominant language carries minority status. A recent issue of Québec Studies (volume 60, 2015) dared propose that, through such multiple complications of received binarisms, Québec, as broadly understood, may well be queer, in a sense borrowed and adapted from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993), where queer would stand as ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when . . . constituent elements [of identity] . . . aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (8–9). There is certainly, as I have written elsewhere, ‘A venerable lineage of . . . scholarship in Québec [that] would . . . connect the staged figure of the queer with a certain Québec, particularly one for which there are questions of survivance and of protection of its differences’ (Batson and Provencher 2015, 10). As Khosrowjah points out, when New Area Studies leave behind older notions of the primacy of the nation-state and attendant so-called national geopolitical interests, new foci such as human rights and women’s and gender issues come to the fore: again, Québec Studies, through this scholarship on the complexities of a queer(ed) Québec, may serve as an exemplar of these new questions. Indeed, Québec Studies may stand as the site of productive explorations of what cannot be conceived of, or even constituted, in monolithic terms. Drawing on the rewards gained by examinations of significations and significance which, to borrow that language from Sedgwick (1993), find form in a play of ‘gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances’, these studies further point to the very risk of depending on binarisms to give us meaning as this scholarship helps us all garner richly layered understandings of peoples and places.

THE CASE OF AND FOR QUÉBEC CIRCUS STUDIES It is here that I turn to certain performance cultures emanating from Québec, in particular its circuses which emerged from a very specific Québec context to become

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highly influential globe-straddling enterprises.9 In his keynote address at a September 2012 conference on the State of Circus Research in Québec held in Montréal, reprised for publication in the 2016 Cirque Global, the circus historian Pascal Jacob offered an overview of what he called the ‘Planète Cirque’. This prominent French circus historian declared that, as of the early 2000s, Québécois circus has written a new page in ‘circus history worldwide’ (32). In his historical analysis, after periods of influence on circus aesthetics and practices that were, since the late eighteenth century, led in turns by the English, French, Germans, Americans, and Soviets, ‘Quebec [is] the new world of the circus’ (30). Pascal points to the ‘planetary earthquake’ (28) that was the 1984 founding of Cirque du Soleil but goes on to note the important maturation and expansion of the Québécois circus scene beyond any one, albeit iconic, company. For Pascal, it was this diversity of expression, supported by a world-class educational institution, Montréal’s École nationale de cirque, that, some twenty years after the Soleil’s creation, gave to the Québécois circus arts their position of world-wide influence that continues to this day. It is important to remember that Cirque du Soleil does not merely have its headquarters in Québec, even after its recent sale to a multinational group of investors: it has particular Québécois origins. Histories of the troupe remind us of the stilt-walkers, jugglers, and buskers who came together in the early 1980s for performances that moved from the streets of the province to create multidisciplinary spectacles for a public for which home-grown circus was not a norm, unlike in the United States and in Europe (see Babinski 2004). For the artists who formed the nouveau cirque in Québec, their particular nouveauté was thus less marked by specific rebellion against traditional circus and more inflected with a generalized sense of the newness of the Québec society taking shape in the second half of the twentiethcentury. With a sympathetic population and a post-1960s government that funded artistic festivals for the express purpose of providing venues for Québécois artists, performance spaces became loci not only for forms of protest that had nourished earlier artists’ calls for a Refus global: they also became places of burgeoning publicly supported creation. By the 1980s, groundbreaking and physically intense aesthetics, dramaturgies, and movement forms were being created in the streets, theaters, and nightclubs by such companies as the dance troupe Lalala Human Steps and the physical theater ensemble Carbone 14.10 Drawing on what has been termed the resultant nouveau bouger montréalais (Tembeck 1994), the creators of the Cirque du Soleil profited from a cauldron of creativity nourished not only by each other’s artistic fervour but also by the cultural-political scene in that fruitfully friction-filled post-referendum decade.11 This foundational story of Québec’s nouveau cirque has similarities, after all, with what Erin Hurley, in her cogent introduction to a series of essays in Globe (2008) on the performing arts in Québec, reminds us is the ‘Grand Récit’, that narrative of the Exodus of Québec and its peoples out from the ‘Grande noirceur’ (‘Grand’ 14) of a so-called backwards conservative, Catholic-dominated society into a secular and progressive land of the Quiet Revolution and of funded autonomy flavored with

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vibrant creativity. The very title of another article by Jacob (2003) on the contemporary Québécois circus scene speaks eloquently to the mutually informing resonances among these narratives: ‘Québec, un souffle de liberté;’ Québec, that breath of freedom, inspired and exhaled. Even beyond these fraught terms of such a foundational narrative, however, Québec circus artists themselves have spoken of a particularly Québécois, and particularly libre, creativity that feeds their work. Gilles Ste-Croix, one of the artists early associated with the Cirque du Soleil, locates Cirque’s ‘Québécois spirit’ in ‘its audacity and ability to change, to call into question’ (Harvie and Hurley 1999, 310). The silks performer and co-founder of Les 7 doigts de la main, Isabelle Chassé, has spoken of Québec’s cultural and linguistic minority status in North America as giving it ‘not just a rich multiculturalism but also a drive to prove itself to the rest of the world’ (Fleming 2002). For Chassé, this difference, this drive, seems integral to what Jacob senses as that ‘souffle de liberté’. In a 2002 interview with the St. Petersburg Times conducted soon after the founding of the new troupe, Chassé explains some of the élan driving her fellow artists’ work: ‘I think because we’re different than our surroundings, it gives us more freedom to be different in our dreams, in our goals, in our aspirations’, Chassé said. ‘Maybe we have a step ahead because of that’ ­(Fleming 2002). The program notes for Les 7 doigts’ 2012 creation, Séquence 8, include a s­pecific comment on the role of the city in which their work has taken principal form: ‘merci à Montréal cette ville chaleureuse et cosmopolite pour nous avoir influencés, nous le collectif’. For Les 7 doigts, and other circassiens before them, this particular creativity has a specific anchor, a specific locus, the city of Montréal, the province of Québec. Importantly, however, Québec’s nouveau cirque has been fêted as particularly Québécois and global; it is not one without being the other. The influential sovereigntist leader René Lévesque, for example, offered early praise for Cirque du Soleil as a signal example of the fruits of the ‘superhuman effort Quebec put itself to in the middle of the 1960s, when it became aware of how dangerously underdeveloped its human capital was’ (Babinski 2004, 84), referring to the troupe as a ‘United Nations in miniature performing for the young of all ages’ (84). Even now, the provincial government’s webpages devoted to the arts note Québec’s nouveau cirque in particular in a pamphlet called ‘Québec: a vibrant presence on the world stage’ (2017): ‘If there is one field in which Québec has made an unparalleled mark, it is undoubtedly the circus arts. The major innovator, Cirque du Soleil, has quite simply reinvented the genre’. On its webpages, the Ministry of Culture and Communication has also posted a glossy document called ‘Culture Québec: Une Culture qui Voyage’ (2017) that features a reference to Cirque du Soleil in its first pages. With such language, we can see the government not only expressing pride for its world-traveling artists. It also stakes a claim to seeing the culture itself carried by voyaging denizens; where its artists go, there Québec goes. Such pride-filled expressions for those artistic agents that carry and transmit Québécois culture beyond the province’s borders are not limited

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to government communiqués: in 2011, the world-straddling Cirque du Soleil was selected in a Les Affaires poll as the enterprise most admired by Québécois (Turenne 2011). Examining the tenets of this admiration may bring us rich rewards as we look to what New Area Studies may tell us. In one of the first pieces of scholarship devoted to Québécois Circus Studies, ‘States of Play: Locating Québec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina and the Cirque du Soleil’, Harvie and Hurley point out that Cirque du Soleil expressly claims allegiance not to a terroir or nation of Québec, but, rather, to the ‘imagi-nation’ that the Cirque creates for itself and for its audiences each time it produces and tours a new show’ (1999, 309). One may therefore be seeing a Québec-ness in what are ultimately free-floating signifiers in such productions where land-based origins are purposefully effaced. Spectators discover names and nationalities of Cirque artists only if they buy the souvenir programs and look deep into the fine print; sources of any recognizable language, including the province’s dominant French, slip away into the heteroglossia of the shows’ musical vocalizations. Having reminded us of these effacements of an original Québec, Hurley, in National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion (2011) suggests that the very interrogation of how to be national with or without making ‘recourse to the dubious category of ethnicity’ (18) or other origins is precisely a Québécois question. She goes on to argue that ‘[l]ike other nations without a state, Quebec relies on cultural production to vouch for its national status’ (21). Without a nation de jure, it is in performance that a nation de facto can take form. And she writes, ‘Viewed from this angle, the vital role of cultural production in the national project in Quebec is clear: cultural production depicts the nation’s attributes onstage.  .  .  . Granting the nation referent status through performance effectively establishes the off-stage “nation” as fact’ (22). Interestingly, the contours of this de facto ‘nation’ may be particularly well suited for the circus. Les 7 doigts’ Chassé has reminded us of the cultural and linguistic marginality of her fellow Québécois. As people who are thus called to be translators, people who do the transfers and crossings of trans-latio,12 as a necessity for a certain survivance, Québécois artists in their nation without a state may be particularly drawn to participate in the displacement and replacement, the voyage and the trip, that circus has long constructed – prior to, but importantly including, Cirque du Soleil. Indeed, Québec, that ‘Culture qui Voyage’, may find particular presence in the travel itself, as the language of that government document, whose English translation carries the title ‘Culture Québec: A Culture that Travels the World’, suggests a conception of itself as peopled with voyagers: we Québécois are ourselves when we travel, when we cross boundaries, when we enter the world beyond. In a provocative essay looking at policies and practices enacted by Québec’s Ministry of Tourism, Aronczyk (2009) offers an instructive twist on Billig’s (1995) notion of ‘banal nationalism’, a term that would refer to ‘the various habitual and collective acts that index the nation, such as singing the national anthem, which effectively

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reinforce a sense of national belonging through their daily and unexceptional repetition’ (41). In pursuing a highly Québec-centric series of images to entice foreign visitors to come to know, the Ministry may well be, for Aronczyk, engaging in a ‘banal globalism, in which the global projection of national imagery serves a recursive function of national legitimacy’ (41). In such language, we may well see Québec, in its global moves, become not only what Hurley would call a de facto nation; it may be what I might call a nation de imāgine, constituted and legitimated through its images. It is perhaps revelatory in this context that we recall not only that the province of Québec has a ministry focused on foreign affairs (the Ministère des Relations Internationales et de la Francophonie), thus actively pursuing and creating an image of and for itself outside its borders. This ministry has also, in striking contrast to recent federal decisions to cut funding to internationally focused programs such as ‘Understanding Canada’, maintained significant funding to artistic, educational, and research initiatives through partners such as the Association Internationale des Etudes Québécoises, which itself has partners across the globe from Russia and Morocco to Brazil and China. ‘A Culture that Travels the World’ indeed; one that invests in, and literally imagines itself in, the voyage.13

CIRQUE More Than Circus Québec’s circuses, then, end up telling us much more than a simple narrative of, for example, some entrepreneurial spirit that, with a few dollars and a bit of luck, made a local company go global. In these pages, we have seen that they are decidedly more than mere primary examples of the force of free-flowing financial capital and of a rapidly moving economic and cultural globalism which has contributed to the very crisis about the raison d’être of Area Studies. Far from being an uncentered, free-floating enterprise without link to time, place, and area, they find themselves participating in an international presence of a very specific culture which sees itself as – which creates its very image as – local, Québécois, and global. In a piece called ‘Why Area Studies?’ posted at the turn of the millennium, Ludden (1999) offers various axioms underlying the need to ask the question of his title. One intriguing example reads: ‘Knowledge of effective education and scholarship today is not being produced within a single epistemology . . . nor within a single, global paradigm’. As we have seen, Québec Studies in general have pointed us towards this very understanding, as we are called to attend to when binarisms fall and meanings shift. A look at Québec’s cirques further underscores how we might understand more fully the forms of the global when we examine the particulars of the local and when we see the local and the global one within the other. This collection’s editors have proposed that we scholars may be optimistic that fields of New Area Studies pursuing such examinations are taking shape as a resurgent intellectual movement. They further launch a call for comprehensive, deep

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understandings in the face of our world’s rapid changes. It is with them, then, that we can perhaps now close on Ludden’s (1999) final axiom underlying the question of why we need Area Studies: ‘knowledge in the world is now global and interactive but also emphatically local and multiple’. In its disruptions of ‘either/ or’ paradigms, the case of Québec – its studies, its circuses – may respond to and underscore these calls for new insights nourished by new questions. It certainly already shows us the richness in explorations of the multiplicities of people, performance and place.

NOTES 1. Cirque du Soleil, ‘Discover our Shows’, July 26, 2018, https://www.cirquedusoleil.com. 2. Cirque Eloize, Calender, July 26, 2018, http://www.cirque-eloize.com/en/. 3. The 7 Fingers, Creative Collection, July 26, 2018, http://7doigts.com. 4. Cavalia Odysseo, July 26, 2018, https://cavalia.com/cavalia/. 5. National Circus School Montreal, July 26, 2018, http://ecolenationaledecirque.ca/en. 6. American Council for Quebec Studies, July 26, 2018, http://www.acqs.org. 7. I am grateful for Moss’s significant insight on the direction of recent trends in­ Québec Studies which informs some of these pages, including her 2015 unpublished conference paper. 8. Moss (‘Teaching’ 2015) gives a lengthy list of some of these contributions. I cite that passage in its entirety: ‘There is, for example: John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (2005); David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream (2008), a brilliant study of the man called the Father of New France; Jay Gitlin’s The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (2010); Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2015), which explores how the conflict played out in the Spanish and French communities of the Gulf Coast; Janet Polasky’s Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (2015)’. 9. Over the course of the next several pages, I draw on analyses laid out in my article ‘Pink, Cirque, and the Québécisation de l’industrie’ (2014) previous published in Quebec Studies 58: 25–44. I thank the journal for permission to use this work. 10. Founded in Montréal in 1980, Lalala Human Steps was long directed by Edouard Lock and was widely known for its theatricality and high-speed physical stylings and contacts. Also founded in Montréal in 1980, Carbone 14 was founded by Gilles Maheu with the expressed intention of creation and research in new meldings of text, dance, music, and film. 11. For more discussion of the 1980s context, see Hurley (2011), in particular chapter 6 and its explorations of Carbone 14. 12. See Simon (2006) for an exploration of the Québécois-specific crossings and transfers in the province’s cultural capital. 13. In this context of the celebration of Québec abroad, it is perhaps interesting to note that a number of highly respected researchers published a call in April 2013 for ‘chaires (particulières) de recherche sur le Québec’ (Devoir) to be created and funded in Québec, in order to bring yet more Québec Studies to a domestic population.

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REFERENCES Angus, Ian. 2012. ‘Here and Now: A New Rationale for Canadian Studies’. In Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis, edited by Christl Verduyn and Jane Koustas (pp. 161–78). Halifax: Fernwood. Aronczyk, Melissa. 2009. ‘Providing emotions since 1534: the politics of visibility in Quebec’s tourism brand’, Québec Studies 48 (Fall): 35–52. Babinski, Tony. 2004. Cirque du Soleil: 20 Years under the Sun. New York: Abrams. Batson, Charles R. 2014. ‘Pink, Cirque, and the Québecisation de l’industrie’, Québec Studies 58: 25–44. Batson, Charles R., and Denis M. Provencher. 2015. ‘Feeling, Doing, Acting, Seeing, Being Queer in Quebec’, Quebec Studies. 60: 3–22. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: SAGE Publications. Coates, Colin, and Geoffrey Ewen. 2012. ‘Canadian Studies en français’. In Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis, edited by Christl Verduyn and Jane Koustas (pp. 244–56). Halifax: Fernwood. ‘Culture Québec: Une Culture qui voyage’. n.d. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. https​://ww​w.mcc​.gouv​.qc.c​a/pub​licat​ions/​mcu_f​ranca​is.pd​f (accessed 27 June 27, 2017). Fleming, John. 2002. ‘Cirque du Surreal’. St. Petersburg Times, November 3, 2002. Harvie, Jennifer, and Erin Hurley. 1999. ‘States of Play: Locating Québec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil’, Theatre Journal 51 (3): 299–315. Hurley, Erin. 2008. ‘Le Grand récit des arts de la scène au Québec’, Globe 11 (2): 11–22. ———. 2011. National Performance. Toronto: University Toronto Press. ———. 2016. ‘Townships Theatres: Identities and Circuits 1935–1982’, Journal of Eastern Townships Studies/ Revue d’études des Cantons-de-l’Est 46 (Fall). ‘Il faut des chaires de recherche sur le Québec’. Le Devoir, 5 avril 2013. Jacob, Pascal. 2003. ‘Québec, un souffle de liberté’, Arts de la piste 28 (mai): 20–21. ———. 2016. ‘The Québécois Circus in the Concert of Nations: Exchange and Transversality’. In Cirque Global, edited by Louis Patrick Leroux and Charles R. Batson (pp. 25–35). Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Khosrowjah, Hossein. 2011. ‘A Brief History of Area Studies and International Studies’, Arab Studies Quarterly 33 (3-4): 131–42. Lacombe, Michèle. 2014. ‘The Teaching of Quebec in Canadian Studies: Crisis or Opportunity?’ IJCS/RIEC 50: 121–36. Leroux, Louis Patrick, and Charles R. Batson, eds. 2016. Cirque Gobal: Quebec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ludden, David. 2000. ‘Area Studies in the Age of Globalization’, FRONTIERS: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad (Winter): 1–22. ———. 1999. ‘Why Area Studies?’ http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/whyarea.htm (accessed June 27, 2017). MacLennan, Hugh. 1945. Two Solitudes. Toronto: Macmillan. Malla, Pasha. 2015. ‘Too Different and Too Familiar: The Challenge of French-Canadian Literature’. The New Yorker, May 26, 2015. Moss, Jane. 2015. Untitled and unpublished conference paper, Trent University (May). ———. 2015. ‘Teaching the Legacy of France’s North American Empire’. Unpublished conference paper, Baltimore (September).

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Nimijean, Richard, and Anne Trépanier. 2014. ‘Introduction’. IJCS/RIEC 50: 5–13. ‘Québec: A Vibrant Presence on the World Stage’. n.d. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. https​://ww​w.mcc​.gouv​.qc.c​a/fil​eadmi​n/doc​ument​s/pub​licat​ions/​quebe​c-sce ​ nes-a​nglai​s.pdf​(accessed June 27, 2017). Richards, Marvin. 2009. ‘Putting Québec Studies on the Map’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13 (1): 81–89. Roberts, Katherine. 2003. ‘Francophone … But Not Like the Others: Notes on Quebec Studies in the United States’, Québec Studies 35 (Spring-Summer): 153–62. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Séquence 8. 2012. Les 7 doigts de la main. Dir. Shana Carroll and Sébastian Soldevila. Print program. Simon, Sherry. 2006. Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Tembeck, Iro. 1994. ‘Dancing in Montreal: Seeds of a Choreographic History’, Studies in Dance History 5 (2). Turenne, Martine. 2011. ‘Le Top 10 des 150 Sociétés les Plus Admirées’. Les Affaires, February 18. Wesley-Smith, Terence, and Jon D. Goss, eds. 2010. Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

11 Image, Figurations of the Border Claude Denis, with Abdelkarim Amengay

A line. A line in the sand perhaps if we are talking about the Sonoran desert which straddles the Mexico-US border. In the popular imagination, the border is this line. Which, it seems, would be the antithesis of an area: the line that surrounds a space making it into an area, a place. I draw a line in the sand. See it; look at it. Do not cross it.

The woman from Ghana must have thought that, now, it would be safe to cross. In previous months, people had lost fingers and toes to frostbite as they walked through snowbound fields and bush from Minnesota or North Dakota into Manitoba (Grabish 2017a). Some were rescued on remote country roads by police, truck drivers or farmers within hours of freezing to death. But this was the end of May, late into the spring, and surely the weather could not be lethal? So, she started across the land to escape the United States in the era of Donald Trump. But she was mistaken: overnight temperatures dropped to unusually low levels, and she died of hypothermia. Her body was found in a ditch the next day, still in Minnesota, less than a kilometer from Canada (Malone and Taylor 2017). The death of Mavis Otuteye, that fifty-seven-year-old Ghanaian woman fleeing Trump’s America, is remarkable and made the national news in Canada because it is so unusual: the fields, bushes and forests that Canada and the United States share hardly ever kill asylum seekers. The Sonoran desert is another story: hundreds of men, women and children – from Mexico, Central and South America and beyond – die each year, trying to reach the United States through its unforgiving expanses. In what way does it make sense, here, to say that the border is a line? It seems, rather, a zone: a zone, a key characteristic of which is its physical geography, of a depth measured in kilometers (or miles) and of a width conditioned by the 141

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distance between border posts. And it is not only its physical space that matters: time is also key – the amount of time needed to trek through that space, and the time of day and of year when this is attempted. When all these coordinates align in the wrong way, injury and death can ensue. This is the border as death zone: it may or may not kill you, but you are at (perhaps vastly) increased risk. It is anything but a metaphor. The popular imagination can be a poor guide. Regarding borders, this is evidently the case as, since the 1990s ‘[t]he study of borders has undergone a renaissance’ (Newman 2006, 171) that has involved thinking of borders ‘in terms of a series of practices’ (Parker et  al. 2009, 586) and increasingly as processes, delocalized/­ deterritorialized. Therefore, ‘[a] considerable [amount of] literature on the location, nature, and meaning of borders has shown that territorial borders are not the straightforward lines defining players in international relations that ritual, Weberian [and westphalian] evocations made them sound’ (Parker 2009, 18). Thus, the critical study of borders does not see borders just ‘as phenomena located at the “edges” of territories but rather “all over” territories, in innumerable societal practices and discourses’ (Paasi 2009, 215). In other words, ‘the border is everywhere’ (David Lyon, quoted by Rygiel 2010, 53).

FIGURATIONS OF THE BORDER If the border is everywhere and is many things – practice, process, relation, institution – it could be easy to run into conceptual trouble: how does one distinguish between the border and the not-border? There are ways to sidestep this difficulty and offer rich accounts of sharply different border encounters. In this chapter, we want to formulate two such ways drawing on the work of Elias and Benjamin, at the same time as we outline several revealing encounters. A first step calls for recognizing the methodological and theoretical legitimacy of seeing the border as an inherently multiple concept. Rather than deciding whether the border is either a process or a practice, for instance, or even a line in the sand, the challenge is to allow for the conceptualized border to be any and all such things in varying circumstances. Providing a substantive definition of the border, then, may not be what we need to do – pace Parker et al. (2009), who claim that finding a suitable definition is one of the major challenges for the critical Border Studies research agenda both ontologically and epistemologically. Would it be too much to suggest that this desire for a suitable definition belongs to another time? Since the end of World War II and into the 1980s, borders and, indeed, ‘areas’ seemed pretty settled, static - if not quite natural. Even decolonization in Africa and Asia affirmed colonial spatial patterns. Post-war international borders were sanctified by the United Nations Charter and state sovereignty was unquestioned. For much of ‘Area Studies’, then, object construction was pre-given and, with that, a significant driver of theoretical reflection went missing.

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Globalization began to change all that, and 9/11 destabilized things further. Indeed, a key feature of our times, culminating (so far) with the Trump presidency and Brexit, would seem to be a general disorientation. What an ‘area’ is, then, can no longer be taken for granted. More than this, ‘area’ is explicitly a construct – a construct that frames and is framed by the speed and strange complexity of the times. In this world, it has become possible to think of borders as areas. The concept of figuration, formulated by Elias in The Civilizing Process (2000 [1994]), may provide the appropriate combination of flexibility and boundedness, short of an actual definition of ‘the border’. Elias called the figuration ‘a structure of mutually orientated and dependent people’. Thus, ‘the concept of the figuration . . . expresses what we call ‘society’ . . . [as] the network of interdependencies formed by individuals’. He offered social dances as an example of figurations: ‘the image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on the dance floor’ (Elias 2000, 482). Seeing dance as a collection of figurations makes visible the fact that there are different kinds of dances, from the mazurka to the waltz (not to mention twerking, the Nae Nae and the dab); it also shows that any one dance (and all of them together), while not requiring any particular dancers, is utterly in need of some dancers. Thinking of the border as figurations, then, at once conjures multiplicity and the specificity of patterns. The border that killed Mavis Otuteye is emphatically different from the European ones crossed by hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in 2015 making their way to Germany and Sweden. And these seem a world away from the border people deal with seeking a new Canadian passport. This means that, in our liquid times, grappling with a situation and getting a sense of what it is, demands that we also think what it is not. But this is not only negation: it is an invitation to compare.

THE BORDER AS BUREAUCRATIC RUN-AROUND As we finished writing this chapter, I was also helping my eighty-two-year-old mother apply for a passport from the Canadian government. Having been born in Quebec City, in Canada, she needed to provide a birth certificate as proof of citizenship. But, she did not have a birth certificate. This is because, back in the 1930s (and up to the mid-1990s), the Quebec government delegated to religious institutions the task of registering births – for Catholics, through a baptism certificate from her parish. But these are no longer valid for the purpose of obtaining a passport. As a result, before applying for a passport, my mother had to ask for a birth certificate, from a different level of government. For this she needed to provide proof of her identity – in this case, her driver’s license; but she moved recently, and the address on the driver’s license is not up to date. So, we needed to update my mother’s driver’s license to get the birth certificate, to get the passport: all forms of interaction with Canada’s border. The experience, in other words, may be stretched enormously in time and space: the action of applying for a passport (from one’s ‘own’ state) and, perhaps,

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for a visa (from the state to be visited) is part of the border-crossing experience, as future travelers begin the process of providing state agents the documentation that will eventually allow them to enter another country’s jurisdiction. We also need to consider, in Canada for instance, the thousands of stores and post offices where people go to obtain an appropriate photo and a passport form, and the government offices across the country where the filled form, photo and other documents may be brought (unless they are sent by mail). Thus, future travelers construct themselves for the border encounter in many places and for a long time before they actually travel. For international travelers, the border-crossing experience is always intensive, in the sense that it involves a lot of social and documentary interaction; long-lasting and of variable time; sited in space; and commercially mediated, as shops charge fees for the photos. And still, while the border’s space may be reduced to the immediate surroundings of the micro-interaction between a traveler and her environment, including perhaps a border official (as we will see below), it can also be expanded to considerable parts of the territory of a particular society, engulfing people who are not seeking to interact with the border. Indeed, people who happen to be close to that jurisdictional line but not seeking to engage with it (by intending to cross or, by working in a border-related occupation) can get caught up in its political field. For instance, U.S. trains that travel near and parallel to the Canadian border have been boarded by immigration agents who check the identities of travelers – the suspicion being that some may be ‘undocumented’ and on their illegal and circuitous way to Canada (Bernstein 2010; Nixon 2018).

THE BORDER AS DIALECTICAL IMAGE If we are to think of Hélène Denis’s mundane and privileged run-around to obtain her passport together with the tragedy that befell Mavis Otuteye, and the 2015 asylum march across Europe, it may be helpful to think of the border as figuration – or rather as a set of figurations. We need to allow, then, for a ‘fragmentation of the field of vision’, Sayer’s phrase for Benjamin’s approach to researching and writing history in his Arcades Project (2013, 7). In Benjamin’s massive unfinished work, such fragmentation took a form similar to that of collage, the surrealist and cubist technique of juxtaposing fragments of various materials to create a larger picture. Here, I am juxtaposing a variety of encounters with phenomena that people call ‘border’, understood as a figuration. How these figurations hang together is the next question that needs to be addressed and, emulating Sayer (2013, 2017), Benjamin will be our guide. Benjamin gave us one of the twentieth century’s tragically iconic border stories: having escaped just across the Spanish border as German armies were occupying France in 1940, he killed himself in the Catalonian town of Port Bou after learning that Spanish authorities were about to send him back to France into the Nazis’

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hands. With The Arcades Project, he also gave us one of the century’s great attempts at understanding the all-encompassing and bewildering social transformation of nineteenth-century modernity. In the midst of the transformations shaking our world, from the collapse of the Soviet block to 9/11, nearly two decades of Western wars in the Middle East, the Arab Spring and its multiform backlash, the migratory waves across the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas, the Trump presidency and Brexit, and so on, it is hard to be properly aware of what is going on – of how it all hangs together, the ways in which it makes sense or does not. To the extent that becoming aware is akin to awakening – we may profit from Benjamin’s formulation of his Arcades Project: ‘[A]wakening is the great exemplar of memory: the occasion on which it is given us to remember what is closest, tritest, most obvious’. Arcades is what Benjamin calls an ur-history of the nineteenth c­ entury, a new, dialectical way of doing history: it is ‘the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. . . . Therefore: remembering and awakening are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance’ (Benjamin 1999, 389). Later in Arcades, Benjamin continues on the relation between past and present: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression, but image, suddenly emergent. (Benjamin 1999, 462; emphasis added)

This, then, is the dialectical image, a key concept of Benjamin’s: it is the constellation emerging from the encounter between the now and the what-has-been. Here, Benjamin’s writing is powerful but it may also be fuzzy. His point is important, however, and Eiland’s ‘Translators’ Foreword’ to The Arcades Project helps us understand it. The dialectical image, Eiland (translator, quoted in Benjamin 1999, xii) writes, is the central term in Arcades for the historical object of interpretation: that which, under the divinatory gaze of the collector, is taken up into the collector’s own particular time and place, thereby throwing a pointed light on what has been. Welcomed into a present moment that seems to be waiting just for it . . . the moment from the past comes alive as never before. . . . The historical object is reborn as such into a present day capable of receiving it, of suddenly ‘recognizing’ it. This is the famous ‘now of recognizability’ (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit) . . . the character of a lightning flash.

In mobilizing the metaphor of waking / dreaming as a heuristic, Benjamin is drawing explicitly on – and expanding from – Marx, whom he quotes at the beginning of this section of Arcades: ‘The reform of consciousness consists solely in . . . the awakening of the world from its dream about itself’. This formulation is from

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an 1843 letter and is typical of Marx’s writing at the time. Benjamin deployed the waking / dreaming motif to articulate past and present – as he studied the nineteenth century from the vantage point of the twentieth. But Marx used it broadly, to shed illusions about religion and bourgeois politics, and to wake up to what true human emancipation would mean. As we are trying to understand the contemporary border through several of its figurations, it makes sense to follow Marx’s inspiration and broaden our focus beyond Benjamin’s historical conceptualization. We can then tweak Benjamin’s notion of constellation to make it the ensemble of our figurations, this ensemble is also the definition of the dialectical image.

BORDERS ARE FICTION, UNTIL THEY ARE NOT For a while after the mass asylum-seeking migration began its march from Greece toward northwestern Europe in 2015, borders were being crossed as if there was nothing there. From non-Schengen country to non-Schengen country, and then into the Schengen space, officially tight border controls were blissfully ignored. These were, materially, open borders. The Canada-U.S. border has long been described as the world’s longest undefended border. It is this openness that drew Mavis Otuteye to her death. It is the cold, and the distance between her last US shelter and an eventual first Canadian one that killed her. There are other places where Canada and the United States meet that are more forgiving, like near the Lacolle border post between Quebec and New York State. There, not far from Plattsburgh on the US side, you can take a taxi to a country road and get off at a spot where you only need to cross a ditch to step into Canada and walk a few meters to reach a residential street. At the ditch, there is a metal sign explaining that crossing into Canada here is not permitted. Until recently, it seems that the occasional undocumented border crossing happened. Then, in 2017, Donald Trump became President of the United States and threatened to deport increasing numbers of residents with fragile status in the US. African asylum seekers started showing up by the hundreds along roads in Manitoba (Grabish 2017b) and at that ditch near Lacolle (CBC News 2016). And for a while there was nothing to stop them: Canadian residents looking out their windows saw lines of people walking with their suitcases, headed to Montreal. Months later, Haitians by the thousands, residing in the United States, made the trek to the Lacolle ditch (Blanchfield 2017). By then, Canadian authorities had posted police officers on the Canadian side, set up tents to process the new arrivals, and called up buses to bring them to the border post and Montreal. Because of a Safe Third Country Agreement (Government of Canada 2016) between Canada and the United States, people who come to a border post and make an asylum claim are automatically sent back – before they have set foot in Canada. But claimants who manage to actually enter Canada – somewhere other than at a sanctioned

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crossing, which would stop them short of Canadian territory – have a constitutionally protected right to have their claim heard and evaluated (even as they are charged with entering the country illegally). Hence the popularity of the Lacolle ditch and Manitoba fields, as the United States appears less safe in the opinion of some people. And while asylum seekers coming to border posts are being turned back, those who take advantage of the unprotected border are being channeled into the Canadian refugee adjudication system. The border, then, is open everywhere other than at the border posts, which exist ostensibly to channel people from one country to the other: the notion that borders actually stop people from crossing is often a fiction. And then governments start building walls or fences like Hungary in 2015, seeking to stop asylum seekers from using it as a transit point to Austria, into Schengen. Along territory that people are not supposed to cross, governments built a fence to keep them from doing what they are not permitted to do in the first place. When considering the border’s material and symbolic articulation of closure and openness, the contradictions go deep. For instance, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 was a defining moment of the Cold War. As seen from the West (at least among politicians and other ideologues), it not only changed geopolitical relations materially, it served as a powerful symbol of the struggle between the freedoms of democratic capitalism and the oppression of communism. And yet, there is good reason to think that President Kennedy, among others in the east and west, saw the wall as perhaps the only way to avoid nuclear war in the circumstances of the time (see Kempe 2011). Kennedy’s rhetorical commitment to the free mobility of people was only the public face of quiet relief that the Soviets and East Germans were stabilizing a dangerous situation by building that border wall. In the international order as we know it, mass population movements are not supposed to happen – especially not at the geopolitical center of that order, which is to say Western Europe and the United States. So long as the masses stay in place, the fictions can be broadly maintained, that borders are crossed only at border posts and that governments control who and how many get in (and out). When enough people start to cross elsewhere, visibly, governments’ temptation to build fences grows. And then borders become more difficult to cross; death zones appear or deepen – the Mediterranean between Libya and Italy – the Aegean between Turkey and Greece.

THE EVERYWHERE BORDER Renaissance of Border Studies The renaissance in Border Studies ‘can be seen as partly a reaction to naïve, post– Cold War “borderless” world discourses’ (Johnson 2016, 61) and as a critique of the notion that globalization simply makes borders irrelevant (Parker and Adler-Nissen 2012, 774), especially in the post-9/11 context (Vaughan-Williams 2009). Thus, as arbitrary as they may be (Elden 2006), the importance of borders persists due to ‘their constitutive role for the many dimensions of a social particular’ (Parker

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and Adler-Nissen 2012, 773). Even more, the ‘bordering process is one of the most important roles for community, delineating between inside and outside, us and them, safe and dangerous, known and unknown’ (Amoore et al. 2008, 96). In particular, the post 9/11 context, combined with those movements of population (at the US southern border, across Europe in 2015) that rattle governments, provide a rich environment for discussions of a ‘permanent’ ‘state of exception’ (Salter 2006). Here, security claims have been seen to overwhelm concerns for rights and freedoms (Basaran 2008), especially when considerations of race and gender come into play (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2013). However, ‘[w]hile border studies have become more diverse during the last ten years or so, there is still not a catchall theory’ (Johnson 2016, 62). This absence of a general theory of borders is well reflected by the variety of theoretical approaches mobilized by scholars in studying them, generally borrowed from philosophers who had theorized power relationships – such as Foucault (Walters 2006 and Amoore 2006), Agamben (Salter 2006), Deleuze (Parker 2009) and Schmitt (Minca and Vaughan-Williams 2012). This multitude of attempts to understand the ‘real’ nature of borders speaks to their omnipresence in our sociopolitical lives. From the million asylum seekers walking through Europe to Donald Trump promising to build a Mexican-funded border wall and keep Muslims out of the United States (Johnson 2016), media and everyday politics are full of border-related issues. The arts are hardly immune: in Winter 2018, the National Gallery of Canada is featuring an exhibition of photographs called Frontera: Views of the U.S.-Mexico Border, and the National Arts Centre Orchestra is launching a recording called New Worlds with liner notes from its musical director, Alexander Shelley, saying that ‘[t]hemes of migration and crossing borders are as hot topics today as they ever were’. This omnipresence of border-related issues in the public space speaks to the fact that state authorities find it increasingly difficult to control people’s mobility at the territorial border to their own satisfaction.

THE INSTITUTIONALLY DEEP BORDER: A DISPOSITIF Not that mobility used to be better controlled. Rather, as long-standing US tolerance for informal Mexican immigration shows, authorities have often found it unnecessary or impractical to seek a tighter seal (on this issue, see Coleman 2007). The game changed, however, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Governments have been attempting to better secure their borders, fastening onto the idea of the deep border: pre-clearance and biometrics, for instance, allowing surveillance, identification and risk assessment – thought of collectively as a dispositif – to proceed at a physical distance from the border itself; with a time buffer before the actual moment of encounter between the traveler and border guard. The difficult, risky border encounter is thus defused in time and space. While Sassen (2006) has shown that space-time is compressed in the context of globalizing

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neo-liberal economics, the space-time dynamic here is reversed: the border’s spacetime coordinates are dilated, stretched, spread out such that, as Lyon wrote, the border ends up being everywhere. But there is also, clearly, a way in which, empirically, borders proliferate in space: the Canada-US border, for instance, exists not only along a line that runs through such pairs of places as Niagara Falls (Ontario) – Niagara Falls (New York), or Windsor-Detroit, but it also exists inside several of Canada’s international airports (Salter 2007). To the extent that the governing strategy of dilating the border into a deep dispositif works comprehensively, the difficult, risky encounter at the geographic border would disappear: ultimately, people and goods would cross as though there were no territorial border. The maximum border, then, is the invisible, seamless border. But, as Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose argue, [g]overnment is a congenitally failing operation: . . . We do not live in a governed world so much as a world traversed by the ‘will to govern’, fueled by the constant registration of ‘failure’, the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the constant injunction to do better next time. (2008, 71)

WHEN THE DISPOSITIF FAILS, IT TRIES AGAIN Four men, stowaways on a ship that landed at Halifax harbor (Nova Scotia, Canada), slipped out of the harbor zone and tried to board a train to Montreal by overpaying, in European currency. The suspicious ticket agent would not sell them tickets, contacting instead the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) who were not immediately helpful. One problem was that the ticket agent, who had been ‘trained to be vigilant’ (Alphonso 2008), initially called the wrong RCMP number; he later did get through to the appropriate number (Alphonso and Séguin 2008). The four men, unable to get on the train, hired a taxi for a 100-km ride, and were eventually arrested by the RCMP after agents finally were informed of the situation and went looking for them.

NEW WAYS TO SEE THE BORDER The border is where and when the Customs and Immigration officers are. If the international border is (among other things) the place where a person or object crosses or leaves a country and enters another, it can be said for instance that there is such a thing as a Canada-Mexico border: it also exists in airports (and, eventually, at seaports), but only at such times when a traveler coming directly from either country encounters the other country’s Customs and Immigration officers. The border, then, exists in space but also in time (as does the Canada-US border in airports, as the Canadian or US government could decide at any time to end the practice

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of pre-clearance – although a new agreement between the two countries is in fact expanding it). This is another indication that paying attention to the time, and not just the space, of the border experience is necessary for a proper understanding of the border. Which is to say that a border can exist at only a fleeting moment, and then recede in a kind of virtual or reserve existence (to be called up again, as needed, at the moment of the next relevant interaction). So, here is a border that at certain times is nowhere; that at other times exists in specifically defined areas of ports of entry – whether airports or seaports. This fleeting border is made visible by signs, desks and, most of all, government officials who will inspect your passport and visa and who will decide what happens to you next. From the everywhere border that stretches to every corner of a territory, we have reached the nowhere border that exists only as a function of air and sea travel. When the dispositif fails (2): the border as a kill box. Robert Djiekanski, a wouldbe Polish immigrant, was coming to Canada to join his mother. He was a big man, speaking neither English nor French, who became disoriented at Vancouver International Airport between the Customs and Immigration zones, and was killed by police (Hume and Dhillon 2007). This traveler was inside the de-territorialized and intensely secured border; when the dispositif failed at length to respond to his increasing disorientation, he became agitated, and police officers tazered him. The inordinate length of time that he spent inside a border space through which people generally move in a matter of minutes is directly related to how his life ended. When the dispositif fails (3): what goes on behind closed doors. Four Canadian women, in three separate incidents, are suing the US Customs and Border Protection Agency for ‘sexual molestation’ following body searches at the Ambassador Bridge crossing point at Windsor-Detroit. These allegations raise the question of whether the (female) officers involved were following protocol or violating it (See CBC News 2012a, 2012b). When the dispositif fails (4): it tries again, again. The late, notorious Toronto Mayor Rob Ford answering an associate’s question of how he managed to enter the United States in early March 2014 (to appear as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel’s latenight TV show), when he was all over the US media as the year’s most notorious crack consumer noted that ‘the customs guy who came on the (private) plane, … recognized me!’ Ford was allowed to enter the US (Donovan 2014) but was turned back weeks later when heading to a rehabilitation clinic. It seems that the officer who was denying him entry allowed him to withdraw his application and turn back (Alcoba 2014). So, Ford’s notoriety first helped him cross the border and second, it kept him out. There is a polarized border. Failing figurations are not hard to come by and, while many are relatively harmless, it is all too easy for such a failure to have dire consequences. Danger and failure attend the border encounter, and some of the figurations outlined here allow us to look at ways in which things can go badly at border posts or between border posts. The border polarizes the social field in the sense that movement (socially, and in geographical space) is difficult in various degrees depending

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on direction (or vector). Given the polarity of borders, two pairs of contingencies present themselves for analysis: the docility / resistance of border crossers, and the success / failure of authorities’ dispositifs. When theses pairs intersect, three outcomes meet the authorities’ objectives (docility-success, docility-failure, resistance-success), as the risky encounter is channeled in ways consistent with state control; the fourth (resistance-failure) creates a crisis.

CONCLUSION The Border as a Making The search for a theory of the border is premised upon the notion that success would be measured by making the conceptualized border one thing. But the several figurations of the border outlined here – and the many more that are not – suggest that reduction to one may not be appropriate. Rather we must conceptualize it as constellation or image. Or Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image was ‘the awakening of the reified phenomenon’ (Tackels 2009, 803). And as the Paris arcades were Benjamin’s dialectical image of the nineteenth century, we may consider the border as the dialectical image of our time. The everyday notion of the border as a line separating two territories is nothing if not highly reified. But the situation is not as simple as just saying ‘it’s a mistake to think of the border as a line:’ There is a way in which the border is also a line in geographical, political, legal, military space. From the Berlin Wall to Trump’s wall, Israel’s separation wall and Hungary’s fence; from the death zones of the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Sonoran desert, Minnesota’s (and Canada’s) snowy fields or Vancouver airport; so many experiences make the border. In this sense, we may also say that the border is a making (Thompson 1963). ‘[T]he awakening of the reified phenomenon’ – Benjamin’s phrase – applies just as well to the New Area Studies broadly. The revitalization of ‘area’ is anything but a return to the same old areas: what has been happening is a thinking through a reified object, deconstructing it and forming new, explicitly conceptualized ones that shine with the troubled life of our times. In this spirit, this chapter has sketched some constellations making up the modern border. In so doing, it has sought both to trouble everyday and academic senses of these words; and to suggest a way of seeing the border as a ‘lightning flash’, and as our own dialectical image.

REFERENCES Alcoba, Natalie. 2014. ‘Was Rob Ford denied entry to the US and if so, why? ‘He can’t just turn around and say “I’ve changed my mind” (sic)’, The National Post, May 6. http:​//new​ s.nat​ional​post.​com/2​014/0​5/06/​to050​7-wtf​/ (accessed on May 24, 2014). Alphonso, Caroline. 2008. Lax security blamed for stowaways’ brief run, The Globe and Mail. 20 March​.http​://ww​w.the​globe​andma​il.co​m/new​s/nat​ional​/stow​aways​-brie​f-run​-blam​ ed-on​-lax-​secur​ity/a​rticl​e6692​06/ (accessed on March 20, 2008).

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Alphonso, Caroline, and Rhéal Séguin. 2008. ‘Ticket agent called wrong number about stowaways, in Halifax, RCMP says’, The Globe and Mail. http:​//www​.theg​lobea​ndmai​l.com​ /news​/nati​onal/​ticke​t-age​nt-ca​lled-​wrong​-numb​er-ab​out-s​towaw​ays-i​n-hal​ifax-​rcmp-​says/​ artic​le560​918/ (accessed on March 20, 2008). Amoore, Louise. 2006. ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography 25 (3): 336–51. Amoore, Louise, Marmura Stephen and Salter Mark. B. 2008. ‘Editorial: smart borders and mobilities : spaces, zones, enclosures’, Surveillance & Society 5 (2): 96–101. Basham, Victoria M., and Nick Vaughan-Williams. 2013. ‘Gender, Race and Border Security Practices: A Profane Reading of “Muscular Liberalism”’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations: 509–27. Basaran, Tugba. 2008. ‘Security, Law, Borders: Spaces of Exclusion’, International Political Sociology 2 (4): 339–54. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bernstein, Nina. 2010. ‘Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.’, New York Times. August 29. http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​10/08​/30/n​yregi​on/30​borde​r.htm​l?pag​ewant​ed=​ all​(accessed on May 15, 2016). Blanchfield, Mike. 2017. ‘Haitian Asylum Seekers Flee to Canada after Trump Proposes End to Protected Status’, Global News from the Canadian Press, https​://gl​obaln​ews.c​a/new​s/369​ 9160/​haiti​an-as​ylum-​seeke​rs-ca​nada-​trump​-end-​prote​cted-​statu​s/.Co​nsult​ed (accessed February 1, 2018). CBC News. 2016. ‘Number of Asylum-Seekers Crossing Illegally into Quebec from U.S. Spikes’, CBC News, http:​//www​.cbc.​ca/ne​ws/ca​nada/​montr​eal/n​umber​-of-a​sylum​-seek​ ers-c​rossi​ng-il​legal​ly-in​to-qu​ebec-​from-​u-s-s​pikes​-1.38​97213​ (accessed February 1, 2018). CBC News. 2012a. ‘3 Canadians accuse U.S. border guards of “molestation”’, CBC News – Windsor. March 13. http:​//www​.cbc.​ca/ne​ws/ca​nada/​winds​or/st​ory/2​012/0​3/13/​wdr-b​ order​-assa​ult-l​awsui​ts.ht​ml (accessed on March 15, 2012). CBC News. 2012b. ‘Immigration lawyer says border-crossing complaints common’, CBC News – Windsor. March 15. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/ story/2012/03/14/ wdr-border-crossing.html (accessed March 15, 2012). Coleman, Mathew. 2007. ‘A Geopolitics of Engagement: Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, and the Reconfiguration of US Immigration Enforcement’, Geopolitics 12 (4): 607–34. Cooper, Anthony, and Chris Rumford. 2013. ‘Monumentalising the Border: Bordering Through Connectivity’, Mobilities 8 (1): 107–24. Corey, Johnson et  al. 2011. ‘Interventions on Rethinking ‘the Border’ in Border Studies’, Political Geography 30 (2): 61–69. Donovan, Kevin. 2014. ‘One wild night in March’, The Toronto Star, May 9. http:​//rea​d.the​ star.​com/?​origr​ef=ht​tps%3​A%2F%​2Fwww​.goog​le.ca​%2F#!​/arti​cle/5​36d74​79ec0​6916f​ 08000​43d-r​ob-fo​rd-on​e-wil​d-nig​ht-in​-marc​h (accessed May 24, 2014). Elden, Stuart. 2006. ‘Contingent Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity, and the Sanctity of Borders’, SAIS Review of International Affairs 26 (1): 11–24. Elias, Norbert (2000) [1994]. The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Malden, MA; Oxford ; Victoria (Australia): Blackwell. Government of Canada. 2016. ‘Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement’, Government of Canada, https​://ww​w.can​ada.c​a/en/​immig​ratio​n-ref​ugees​-citi​zensh​ip/co​rpora​te/ma​ndate​

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/poli​cies-​opera​tiona​l-ins​truct​ions-​agree​ments​/agre​ement​s/saf​e-thi​rd-co​untry​-agre​ement​ .html​(accessed February 1, 2018). Grabish, Austin. 2017a. ‘“They Almost Froze to Death”: Refugees Frostbitten after Walking to Manitoba Border’, CBC News, http:​//www​.cbc.​ca/ne​ws/ca​nada/​manit​oba/r​efuge​es-fr​ ostbi​te-hi​ghway​-75-w​innip​eg-1.​39234​30 (accessed January 12, 2018). Grabish, Austin. 2017b. ‘Hundreds of Asylum Seekers Entering Manitoba near Emerson Border’, CBC News, http:​//www​.cbc.​ca/ne​ws/ca​nada/​manit​oba/r​efuge​es-em​erson​-bord​ er-ma​nitob​a-1.3​92374​7 (accessed February 1, 2018). Hume, Mark, and Sunny Dhillon. 2007. ‘Questions hang over taser death’, The Globe and Mail. October 26. http:​//www​.theg​lobea​ndmai​l.com​/news​/nati​onal/​artic​le790​894.e​ce (accessed on March 16, 2011). Johnson, Jenna. 2016. ‘Here are 76 of Donald Trump’s many campaign promises’. The Washington Post. January 22. https​://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/news​/post​-poli​tics/​wp/20​16/01​ /22/h​ere-a​re-76​-of-d​onald​-trum​ps-ma​ny-ca​mpaig​n-pro​mises​/ (accessed on May 14, 2016). Kempe, Frederick. 2011. Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth. New York: Berkley Books. Malone, Kelly and Jillian Taylor. 2017. ‘Body of Woman, 57, Found near Manitoba Border Believed to Be Asylum Seeker, U.S. Police Say’, CBC News, http:​//www​.cbc.​ca/ne​ws/ ca​nada/​manit​oba/b​ody-f​ound-​near-​manit​oba-b​order​-asyl​um-se​eker-​1.413​8866 (accessed January 12, 2018). Miller Peter and Nikolas Rose. 2008. Governing the Present. Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Minca, Claudio and Nick Vaughan-Williams. 2012. ‘Carl Schmitt and the Concept of the Border’, Geopolitics 17 (4): 756–72. Newman, David. 2006. ‘Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue’, European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 171–86. Nixon, Ron. 2018. ‘Under Trump, Border Patrol Steps Up Searches Far From the Border’, New York Times, February 21. https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​018/0​2/21/​us/po​litic​s/tru​ mp-bo​rder-​patro​l-sea​rches​.html​ (accessed on March 15, 2018). Paasi, Anssi. 2009. ‘Bounded Spaces in a ‘borderless World’: Border Studies, Power and the Anatomy of Territory’, Journal of Power 2 (2): 213–34. Parker, Noel. 2009. ‘From Borders to Margins: A Deleuzian Ontology for Identities in the Postinternational Environment’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 34 (1): 17–39. Parker, Noel, and Rebecca Adler-Nissen. 2012. ‘Picking and Choosing the ‘Sovereign’ Border: A Theory of Changing State Bordering Practices’, Geopolitics 17 (4): 773–96. Parker, Noel et al. 2009). ‘Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies’, Geopolitics 14 (3): 582–87. Rygiel, Kim. 2010. Globalizing Citizenship. Vancouver: UBC Press. Salter, Mark B. 2007. ‘Governmentalities of an Airport: Heterotopia and Confession’, International Political Sociology 1: 49–66. Salter, Mark B. 2006. ‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31 (2): 167–89. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Updated edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sayer, Derek 2017. Making Trouble: Surrealism and the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

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———. 2013. Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tackels, Bruno. 2009. Walter Benjamin: Une vie dans les textes. Paris: Actes. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 2016. Refugees Migrants Emergency Response – Mediterranean, Regional Overview. http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/ regional.php (accessed on May 15, 2016). Vaughan-Williams. 2009. ‘The Generalised Bio-Political Border? Re-Conceptualising the Limits of Sovereign Power’, Review of International Studies 35 (4): 729. Vaughan-Williams, Nick. 2008. ‘Borders, Territory, Law1’. International Political Sociology 2 (4): 322–38. Walters, William. 2006. ‘Border/Control’, European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 187–203.

12 The State Against Canadian Studies Colin M. Coates

This chapter is about prepositions. A typical title for an overview journal article on disciplines, subdisciplines and multidisciplines (like Canadian Studies) begins with the words, ‘The State of . . . (Medieval Art History) or (Australian Literary Studies)’. These are generally appropriate, though sometimes quixotic, attempts to determine trends amongst a variety of individualistic scholarly approaches in a particular area. ‘Area Studies’ have long been disposed to such discussions. Their multidisciplinary nature has led scholars to attempt to find communality in the variety of approaches, and identify common themes. In a recent addition to this type of discussion about the state of Canadian Studies in Canada, historian Bryan Palmer concluded, ‘neither Canadian Studies nor the broader appreciation of the need to know ourselves more thoroughly and more differently can be said to be healthy at the current moment’ (Palmer 2017, 29). Part of the problem Palmer points to reflects the fact that in recent years Canadian Studies has faced a different sort of problem, which can be summed up by the use of a different preposition: the State against Canadian Studies. Within Canada and outside, Canadian government support for the multidisciplinary approach has been severely curtailed. There are various reasons for this. Canadian Studies has been associated with what the editors of this volume term Traditional Area Studies (TAS). Tied to their Cold War origins and their links to dominant state perspectives, traditional approaches tended to Orientalize their subjects. For reasons explained below, Canadian Studies was a relatively late addition to the plethora of Area Studies. While the similarities between Anglophone Canada and the United States may have served to lessen the exoticization of the country in comparison to other parts of the globe, critics have often assumed that the Canadian Studies project fixates on the search for over-arching national identities at the expense of rigorous analysis. 155

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From its inception, Canadian Studies has faced a backlash within Canadian academia. In an extended critique of developments in the Canadian university sector in the 1980s, historians David Bercuson, Robert Bothwell and J. L. Granatstein dedicated a chapter to the topic of ‘Canadian and Other Useless Studies’. (Bercuson, Bothwell and Granatstein 1984, 130–46). ‘Canadian Studies’ was intellectually shallow, institutionally weak (though, oddly, over-funded), they claimed. In a later, widely read book covering similar themes, Granatstein decried the amorphous nature of the approach. Critiquing the multidisciplinary approach of this specific ‘Area Studies’, for Granatstein, it lacked the rigour of disciplines. Canadian Studies was not a single discipline with a methodological basis; instead, it was whatever those who taught something, anything, about Canada wanted it to be – an amalgam of literature, art, current events, politics and public issues, and the environment. There was very little room here for a systematic study of the past, let alone the Canadian past (Granatstein 1998, 24). Such criticisms capture some realities of Canadian Studies as an area study, but they presuppose that the discipline of more traditional academic disciplines is ipso facto a positive and incontrovertible feature. However, disciplines are not necessarily as sacrosanct as some scholars may assume. Canadian academic undergraduate programs typically insist that students take courses outside of their main disciplines, sometimes including science courses, or simply breadth requirements in different disciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches. The critique of multidisciplinarity also assumes a higher degree of intellectual consensus within the disciplines than is really the case, as scholarly polemics have illustrated time and again. Indeed, despite Granatstein’s assertion, Canadian Studies was never intended to provide ‘a systematic study of the past’, though  – in terms of the argument –  all Canadian Studies programs that I am aware of integrate Canadian history courses into their range of offerings. I would contend that students who would never find their way into a Canadian history course (or political science course) could still explore important aspects of the country’s make-up through ‘Canadian Studies’. Canadian Studies was never a choice of one or the other: EITHER Canadian history (or political science) OR Canadian Studies. Moreover, the critique of Canadian Studies mirrors the debates about ‘Area Studies’ approaches in general. Scholars with specializations in a variety of geographical areas deal with the argument that their multidisciplinary approach may lack the rigour of ‘harder’ social science methodologies (for instance, Graham and Kantor 2007; Jung 2014).

ORIGINS OF CANADIAN STUDIES WITHIN CANADA Two of the conditions for the establishment of Canadian Studies programs in Canada may explain some of the recent tribulations. In the first place, Canadian Studies emerged as a means of placing Canadian issues on the agenda within Canadian

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institutions. This is a worthwhile commentary in itself, in that most other countries around the world did not fail to the same extent to make the study of their own polity a priority. But Canada’s colonial origins and its on-going sense of inferiority compared to the United Kingdom and United States have hampered the desire to place Canadian issues at the forefront of the country’s academic studies. (It is important to note that this issue is much more indicative of Anglophone Canada than Francophone Canada. Since the nineteenth century, Francophone Canadians’ belief in the inherent uniqueness of their culture has animated sustained scholarly study.) Although one might assume that the optimism of the 1960s helped to carve a space for Canadian approaches, the early proponents of this new multidisciplinary approach actually pointed to a high level of political malaise. In the first editorial of the newly founded, bilingual Journal of Canadian Studies in 1966, political scientist Denis Smith opened his comments by stating, ‘It is ironic that the months preceding the celebrations of Canada’s centennial have been the most degrading in the nation’s history’. Pointing to the deep political divisions between Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson and Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker, Smith hoped for ‘the regeneration of political life’. He expressed the wish that the new journal could contribute to ‘greater self-understanding and a more tolerable national consensus’ (Smith 1966, 1–2). Therefore, one basic justification of the Canadian Studies enterprise was the wish to acknowledge, understand and improve the polity in which the scholars and their students lived. At the same time, Canadian Studies developed as well out of an oppositional urge, driven by the unrest in the United States. For some of the most vocal proponents of Canadian Studies, the establishment of new programs was a means for a broader transformation of Canadian academia, one that would lead to the Canadianisation of the academy. For literary specialist Robin Mathews, ‘Canadianization was a spark that could have moved Canadians and Canada to a significantly more independent role in the world . . . and in the operation of our own society and economy’ (Mathews 2014, 137). In the context of the Vietnam War, Canadian Studies was a counterpoint to American hegemony, and indeed Ian Angus has written about the core importance of the United States in defining English-Canadian identity (Angus 1997). While anti-Americanism may have encouraged support for Canadian Studies within the country – and indeed some of the interest abroad – as political winds shift it may not have been a strong basis upon which to build an academic pursuit. A fairly mild form of anti-Americanism still pertains in Canada. But it does appear that at least one of the battles of Canadian Studies has been won: Canadian issues are now fully on the agenda within disciplines taught in the country. Nonetheless, very few History departments in Anglophone Canada require that their students take even a single course on Canadian history – and the same is true in English and Political Science departments – a sizable proportion of the professoriate comprises scholars with Canadian interests. While the tendency to decry almost any Canadian topic as being parochial still exists in some quarters among academics in Canada, it seems unlikely that the conditions which applied in the early 1960s will return.

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CRITIQUES OF CANADIAN STUDIES One might assume from some of the arguments that a large amount of resources had been re-directed to Canadian Studies within Canada. This was not indeed the case, as typically Canadian Studies was established as a fairly cost-effective way of providing a different degree, largely based on pre-existing courses located within disciplines, enhanced by a limited number of required multidisciplinary scaffolding courses that introduced the Area Studies component within the scholarly program. In most cases across Anglophone Canada, those multidisciplinary courses have tended to be fairly popular, while the numbers of students majoring in the programs remained small. As a result, Canadian Studies programs have been closed in a number of universities across the country, reflecting the internal political debates on the campus and the willingness and ability of individual professors to defend their programs. The costsavings have tended to be fairly small, but at least administrators could point to some success in closing small programs. By the same measure, other Area Studies have also tended to be constrained by their relative lack of majors. Various waves of closing Canadian Studies programs have swept through English Canadian universities over the last three decades, offset to some extent by actions in some of the newer institutions creating their own programs. In the 2010s, a number of Ontario universities underwent an extensive internal review process, partly under the urging of the provincial (Liberal) government. Based on a model of evaluation imported from the United States and associated with Robert Dickeson (Heron 2013), these reviews, even when modified through local discussions, tended to reflect the suppositions of the initial template that decried the proliferation of programs, singling out ‘Area Studies’: ‘Recently minted programs in ethnic or gender studies or interdisciplinary programs that seek to integrate studies in area or geographic or thematic ways are often victims of too tight a definition of essentiality’ (Dickeson 2010, 85). Multidisciplinary programs like Area Studies and Gender Studies were ranked among the lowest priorities. Here again, local politics came into play, and where local academic champions of the program could assert some influence, the programs have tended to survive. But in 2017, ironically the one-hundredth anniversary of Confederation, the country’s third largest post-secondary institution, York University, announced the closure of the Canadian Studies program in its largest faculty. (A different Canadian Studies program still exists on the university’s smaller, bilingual Glendon campus.) The provincial state did not affect the closure of this program itself, but it did encourage it through the review process.

CELEBRATORY MALAISE Indeed, it is worth noting the intellectual malaise that permeated much of the public discussion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Confederation. The pessimism of Denis Smith aside, the 1967 Centennial generated a great deal of public

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enthusiasm. Popular historian Pierre Berton dedicated a book to the Centennial year with the subtitle: ‘The Last Good Year’ (Berton 1997). But the contrast of 2017 with the 1967 celebrations may be drawn more starkly than is warranted: although the forward-looking Expo celebrations in Montréal may have highlighted some of the optimism of the time, other voices showed discord and disagreement. In 1967, René Lévesque was about to split with the provincial Liberal party and become the leader of the separatist – or sovereigntist – coalition, established formally as the Parti Québécois in 1968. Indigenous speakers also made efforts to counter the celebratory messages of the Centennial year. Chief Dan George of the Tseil-Waututh Nation near Vancouver famously stated before a large crowd at Empire Stadium: ‘today, when you celebrate your hundred years, Oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land’ (George 1967). And the ‘Indian Pavilion’ at the Expo site also provided a counter-narrative, demonstrating that Indigenous peoples did not have the same urge to celebrate the founding of the Canadian state under the terms of the 1867 constitution (Griffith 2015). In 2017, the counter-narratives had even more purchase. While Québécois sovereigntist perspectives received much less attention in Anglophone Canada in 2017, Indigenous voices were even stronger. Pointing to the years of officially sanctioned cultural genocide, as shown conclusively in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, Indigenous critics claimed, rightly, that they found little reason to celebrate Canada during that year. What is perhaps more surprising was how subdued the federal government’s own views were on the sesquicentennial. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed in his July 1 statement, ‘As we mark Canada 150, we also recognize that for many, today is not an occasion for celebration’ (Trudeau 2017). Lacking the grassroots enthusiasm of 1967, the celebrations were decidedly muted, one of the most striking markers of the year being a huge yellow rubber duck that visited a number of harbours in Ontario (Harper 2017). The Canadian Studies project does not – and should not – require a celebratory impulse, but the lack of popular enthusiasm is not a deep encouragement to citizens to engage in the history and culture of their country. Unlike the enthusiasm that existed in the late 1960s, in the late 2010s Canadian Studies was not likely to be buoyed up by popular demand.

CANADIAN STUDIES AT THE INTERNATIONAL LEVEL Early Individuals In Canada and internationally, the Canadian Studies projects share some links, but they also have major differences. It has helped the profile of Canadianist interests within Canada to point to interest from international scholars. Indeed, international research ensures that Canadian Studies does not become simply a dialogue among Canadians. But the contexts are very different. Scholars located in other countries

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translate for their local audiences the themes related to Canada that resonate for them, and these may differ from country to country. At a time when the university sector was much different and smaller, the study of Canada depended on its place within the British Empire and Commonwealth. At Harvard University, a historian of early French Canada, W. B. Munro, taught from 1904 to 1929, although he shifted his interests to American political institutions. Typically, a British empire specialist could have an interest in Canada, and some American historians could develop interests in cross-border issues. Representing a later generation of scholars, at Yale University, Robin Winks, author of The Blacks in Canada, brought Canadian interests to his university and beyond. In the United Kingdom, scholars of imperial history like E. E. Rich at Cambridge University and Gerald Graham at the King’s College London played important roles in encouraging research on the history of Canada. Institutional Development But such interests remained the work of fairly isolated individuals. In the postwar period, the concept of multidisciplinary Area Studies developed, linked to a Cold War ethos of understanding other parts of the globe as a way of ensuring US cultural influence. American government and institutional funding encouraged much of this work. As Ban Wang writes, ‘During the Cold War, area studies targeted specific geographical areas of strategic relevance to the United States and was very much a power-driven project’ (Wang 2002, 55). For obvious reasons, Canada was not part of this Area Studies focus until fairly late. Canada, so closely related in cultural terms and its use of the English language, did not require much of the translation effort that was representative of other efforts. Nonetheless, the logic of Area Studies eventually encouraged increasing focus on Canada. Some institutions in close geographical proximity to Canada (SUNY- Plattsburgh, University of Maine at Orono, Western Washington) provided some focus on Canadian topics. Others with long-standing links like Harvard or Duke University (J.B. Duke had important interests in hydroelectricity in the Lac Saint-Jean region of Québec in the early twentieth century) made similar choices. The United States formed the first national association of Canadian Studies scholars in 1971, preceding Canada itself by two years. Other countries with longstanding political, economic, and usually immigration links to Canada followed suit. This scholarly interest provided an opportunity for the Canadian government to make investments in such scholarly endeavours. If it was sometimes difficult to convince Canadians of the importance of studying Canada, it was even less likely that international scholars would see the point. Nonetheless, in some cases the structure of undergraduate programs could integrate an interest in Canada. Building on the strong historical ties between Scotland and Canada, at the University of Edinburgh, a popular suite of Canadian Studies courses was established at the university in the 1970s, led by prominent geographer Wreford Watson and historian Sam Shepperson.

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Canadian Government Support During the late 1970s and into the 2000s, successive Canadian governments, both Liberal and Progressive Conservative, fostered this attention in Canadian Studies, by providing funding for local scholarly activities and travel to Canada for the purposes of research and teaching development. The bigger associations in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany benefited from the ability to hire dedicated administrators. In some universities, centres or programs were established. In the United Kingdom, Canadian funding helped to turn existing American Studies programs into Canadian and American Studies (Birmingham and Nottingham). Did such funds make a difference? To take the United Kingdom as an example, without external funding, not a single academic in the United Kingdom would be hired to teach about Canada. Of course, many UK-based scholars may choose to teach and research about Canada – but not a single post throughout the entire sector would be attributed solely to the study of Canada. And it should not be hard to make a case, given immigration, cultural and economic links, for at least some British universities to hire a Canadian specialist. But the importance of Canada pales in comparison to the reasonable desire in the UK to focus on other parts of the world. It is easy to take Canada for granted. External funding helped to encourage a few universities (Edinburgh, Birmingham and Nottingham) to hire full-time tenuretrack faculty members to posts with Canada in the job description. Of course, a university may easily hire someone with a specialization in Québec literature into a French department or someone with an interest in Canadian multiculturalism into a sociology department. But it makes a difference to continuity and dedication if Canada remains the focus of the academic post. This funding tended to be virtually as hands-off as it is with granting agencies in Canada. However, as it was channelled through embassies and high commissions, it could on occasion fall prey to political instincts. Over-reaching government appointees could, on rare occasions, try to influence the titles that scholars might give to their academic papers at conferences, for instance, but they did not try to suppress the scholarship. Overall, the government encouragement of Canadian Studies abroad has been a success. Since the 1970s, successive federal governments had provided financial assistance to individual scholars and international associations of Canadian Studies, expanding the network of specialists to include some 70 countries and some 7,000 scholars. Canadian Studies did not rely exclusively on Canadian government encouragement, but the strategic investment of limited government funds has helped Canada take a much greater profile in a variety of countries than it would have otherwise. After the election of the Conservative government in Ottawa in 2006, the previously benign governmental approaches would shift in emphasis. Operating in a minority government situation from 2006 to 2011, the Conservatives tinkered with international funding, trying to encourage research on a series of topics that they considered the most useful: Canada-US relations, Canada’s military past,

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multiculturalism and so on. The Canadian state continued to support many forms of Canadianist scholarship. Attack on Canadian Studies Cancellation of Understanding Canada Program, 2012 But in 2012, the proposition shifted: with the Conservative Party in a majority government, no longer was the Canadian state for Canadian Studies; it suddenly operated against Canadian Studies internationally. Here the domestic critique attached itself to the international endeavour. If it was inappropriate to encourage the multidisciplinary Canadian Studies project within Canada, surely it was logically irrelevant to support it internationally. In 2012, the Canadian federal government cancelled its programs supporting international scholars who conduct research and who teach on Canada. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, under the leadership of Minister John Baird, entirely cancelled the ‘Understanding Canada’ program that cost $5 million a year. With the sudden decision to end support, the larger associations had to let go long-serving administrators, reduce scholarly activity (conferences and journal publications), and, crucially, curtail financial assistance for young scholars to travel to Canada for research. It was almost as if the Conservative government was attempting to answer a question that Bercuson, Bothwell and Granatstein had posed in 1984: ‘Does anyone anywhere believe for one milli-second that if a new government summoned the courage to cut off the funding of the Canadian Studies blossom abroad that the whole extra-Canadian empire would not wither and die?’ (143–44.) Despite the withdrawal of funding, most of the international associations have continued their work. Sometimes local embassies and high commissions have tried to help out, but the Harper government slashed their budgets as well. Many of the newer associations, particularly those in Latin America, entered into a period of great difficulty. Does that matter to Canada? Yes, Argentinian colleagues tell us, when the main understanding of Canada in their country comes from the activities of Canadabased mining corporations. One of the effects of previous government funding had been to create a cadre of Canadianist specialists in many countries who were able to provide independent and informed commentary on significant cultural and political issues. The Harper government’s actions translate into a wrong-headed and ultimately self-defeating attempt to control such independent views. In effectively closing one of the older Canadian Studies centres in the United States, a Duke University official was reported to have exclaimed, ‘If Stephen Harper doesn’t support Canadian Studies, why should we?’ (Moss 2015). Canadian scholars can perhaps be forgiven for being ill prepared for a federal government that demonstrates open hostility to the independent and scholarly study of our own country.

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Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK, 2015 A second case in point involves the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the United Kingdom. Some of the older associations, working with the Canadian Foreign Service, prudently raised funds separately to reduce their reliance on future governments. British scholars, for instance, were able to rely on the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the United Kingdom. When I taught in the Centre of Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, some of our funds came from the Foundation. They were more than matched by the University’s commitment. In 2015, the Canadian High Commission was involved in a dramatic re-orientation of the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK, wanting to direct the funds to different, non-academic goals. Facing opposition from the deputy chair, Rachel Killick, Professor Emeritus of Québec Studies and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, the High Commission appointees decided to depose her. Four distinguished colleagues, two of them former presidents of the British Association of Canadian Studies, resigned in protest: Susan Hodgett, Steve Hewitt, Margaret MacMillan and Diana Carney (MacKinnon 2015). In their annual reports to the UK Charity Commission, the wording of the transition is interesting. The 2013/2014 report repeated a fairly standard disclaimer about the relationship between the Foundation and the Canadian High Commission: ‘The Canadian High Commission authorizes its Academic Relations Unit to retain links with the activities of the Foundation in an arm’s length capacity’ (Foundation for Canadian Studies in the United Kingdom, 9). In the 2014/2015 report, however, the emphasis had shifted: ‘When the Board approached the High Commission to garner support to assist the Foundation through our recent transition to broaden our focus, they were pleased to do so’ (Canada-UK Foundation 2015, 4). Although the newly named Canada-UK Foundation continues to fund a good deal of academic activity in the United Kingdom, it has directed funding to other areas of public outreach. Still, the figures supporting more traditional academic activity dropped, from £67,077 in 2013/2014 to £43,000 in 2015/2016 (Canada-UK Foundation 2016, 5). Anti-Area Studies Sentiment It is possible to see the domestic critique of Canadian Studies as the blueprint for such actions. That is not to suggest that scholars like Granatstein necessarily supported such policy changes. But the polemical work he published in 1998 attracted a great deal of attention at the time and its impact on the decision seems fairly certain. As journalist John Geddes pointed out in a Maclean’s article in 2013, Granatstein is the single historian former Heritage Minister James Moore referred to in an interview with the magazine (Geddes 2013). Likewise, Jason Kenney, minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism from 2008 to 2013, had earlier praised the book’s influence on his thinking (Kenney 2000). Granatstein’s book may have provided a blueprint, but I would venture that the government may have gone

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farther than Granatstein ever intended. Indeed, Granatstein has leveled his own criticisms of the government’s approach to Canadian history (Granatstein 2012; 2014). In the context of the Harper government, international Canadian Studies has suffered from its shared name with the domestic project. Moreover, we must distinguish between the Canadian Studies within Canada and Canadian Studies outside the country. While domestically Canadian Studies represents a privileging of multidisciplinary approaches to the study of the country, externally it is the best – and only – way to ensure that a critical mass of scholars can develop a larger sense of intellectual commitment and community. The promotion of Canada abroad is largely in the purview of our federal government. With the Harper government, it became clear that it no longer provided support for Canadian Studies internationally. This support was as much moral as it was financial. In a time of financial exigency, let us remind ourselves how effective the relatively small investment was, and how local multiplier effects enhanced that investment. With the Harper government’s denigration of Canadian Studies, the profile of Canada became poorer and weaker on the international scene, and no further advanced nationally. Consequences from Cancellation of Canadian Funding During the nine years of the Conservative Party in Ottawa, many of us were surprised by its disdain for the Canadian Studies project. The 2015 election of the Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, to a majority government has certainly changed the climate, but it has not yet had a significant effect on policy. Canada-focused research and teaching will continue in Canada regardless of the health of Canadian Studies programs. The multidisciplinary teaching approach typical of the ‘Area Studies’ framework is not guaranteed. Internationally, individual scholars will likely continue to pursue their research interests, but the institutional structures that have been constructed over four decades are more fragile. More significantly, the amount of teaching on Canadian subjects will likely drop in universities outside the country. For obvious reasons, Canadian Studies cannot be linked to language(s) in the way that Chinese, Italian or German Studies may be. The goal of defining a group of international scholars who can speak authoritatively on Canadian issues, and translate them accordingly for their own geographical and cultural contexts, has been hurt. At the same time, without substantial government support, this may free scholars from any need to second-guess what the Canadian government may think about their exercise of their academic freedom. In that sense, Canadian Studies, as an ‘Area Study’ is poised to break out of the constraints of the Cold War origins of the approach. Just as scholars within Canada may do, international Canadianists may question the contours of the Canadian nation-state. They may equally decide that the polity as it is presently constituted should indeed form the basis of their analysis. In other words, we may be able to incorporate a new range of prepositions: Canadian Studies alongside the state or even Canadian Studies without the state.

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In this way, the future of Canadian Studies lies in the concept of New Area Studies, and the shared interests of scholars based within Canada and outside. By collaborating with those whose work translates Canadian realities into other scholarly idioms, researchers and teachers based in Canada may better contextualize the historical, cultural and social factors at play within their country. Reaching beyond disciplinary boundaries also serves to recognize intrinsic complexities. After all, life is multidisciplinary. The simplest justification for Canadian Studies is not some flag-waving AngloCanadian nationalism in opposition to a sense of American cultural imperialism, but rather the more straightforward argument that Canadian Studies is the study of the country in its diversity, and it involves an engagement with some things that the country as a whole handles fairly well (compared to other countries – maybe some attitudes towards multiculturalism, for instance, though I would argue that these issues are much more complex than the surface interpretations that are often given) and some things it has failed to do adequately in the past and continues to fail at. (Indigenous issues, as a reflection of the Truth and Reconciliation Report must be near the top of the list; environmental policy could at times figure here as well.) Here is a space where international and domestic Canadian Studies can together achieve their goals in encouraging international dialogue and debate about Canadian issues.

REFERENCES Angus, Ian. 1997. A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bercuson, David J., Robert Bothwell and J. L. Granatstein. 1984. The Great Brain Robbery: Canada’s Universities on the Road to Ruin. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Berton, Pierre. 1997. 1967: The Last Good Year. Toronto: Doubleday. Canada-UK Foundation. 2015. Annual Report 2014–2015. http:​//bet​a.cha​rityc​ommis​sion.​ gov.u​k/cha​rity-​detai​ls/?r​egid=​26792​7&​;subi​d=0. ———. 2016. Annual Report 2015–2016. http:​//bet​a.cha​rityc​ommis​sion.​gov.u​k/cha​rity-​ detai​ls/?r​egid=​26792​7&​;subi​d=0. Dickeson, R. C. 2010. Selecting Appropriate Criteria, in Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK, 2014. Annual Report 2013–2014. http:​//bet​ a.cha​rityc​ommis​sion.​gov.u​k/cha​rity-​detai​ls/?r​egid=​26792​7&​;subi​d=0. Geddes, John. 2013. ‘How Stephen Harper is rewriting history’, Maclean’s. July 29. http:​// www​.macl​eans.​ca/ne​ws/ca​nada/​writt​en-by​-the-​victo​rs/. George, Dan. 1967. http:​//www​.cbc.​ca/20​17/fr​om-th​e-arc​hives​-lame​nt-fo​r-con​feder​ation ​ -chie​f-dan​-geor​ge-19​67-1.​41003​18. Graham, L., and Kantor, J. -M. 2007. ‘“Soft” Area Studies versus “Hard” Social Science: A False Opposition’, Slavic Review 66 (1): 1-19. Granatstein, J. L. 1998. Who Killed Canadian History? Toronto: HarperCollins.

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———. 2012. ‘Who will preserve the past for future generations?’, Globe and Mail. June 12. https​://ww​w.the​globe​andma​il.co​m/glo​be-de​bate/​who-w​ill-p​reser​ve-th​e-pas​t-for​-futu​re-ge​ nerat​ions/​artic​le424​9438/​. ———. 2014. ‘Why is Canada botching the Great War centenary?’, Globe and Mail. April 21. https​://ww​w.the​globe​andma​il.co​m/glo​be-de​bate/​why-i​s-can​ada-b​otchi​ng-th​e-gre​at-wa​ r-cen​tenar​y/art​icle1​80563​98/. Griffith, Jane. 2015. ‘One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians: The Indians of Canada Pavilion and Public Pedagogy, Expo 1967’, Journal of Canadian Studies 49 (2): 171–204. Harper, Tim. 2017. ‘On Our 150th, a Quiet Celebration and a Quiet Strength’. Toronto Star, November 28. https​://ww​w.the​star.​com/o​pinio​n/sta​r-col​umnis​ts/20​17/11​/28/o​n-our​ -150t​h-a-q​uiet-​celeb​ratio​n-and​-a-qu​iet-s​treng​th.ht​ml. Heron, Craig. 2013. Robert Dickeson: Right for Ontario? Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. https​://oc​ufa.o​n.ca/​asset​s/Dic​keson​-Righ​t-for​-Onta​rio-C​raig-​ Heron​.pdf.​ Jung, D. 2014. ‘The Ottoman-German Jihad: Lessons for the Contemporary “Area Studies” Controversy’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41 (3): 247–65. Kenney, Jason. 2000. https​://op​enpar​liame​nt.ca​/deba​tes/2​000/3​/2/ja​son-k​enney​-1/on​ly/. Mathews, Robin. 2014. The Canadianization Struggle: A History. North Vancouver: Northland Publications. MacKinnon, Mark. 2015. ‘The Canadian High Commission, the revered historians, and the dinner invite never sent’, Globe and Mail. March 13. http:​//www​.theg​lobea​ndmai​l.com​/ news​/worl​d/can​ada-u​k-fou​ndati​on/ar​ticle​23454​967/. Moss, Jane. 2015. Personal communication. Palmer, Bryan D. 2017. ‘Canadian Studies at the Crossroad, Again!’, Journal of Canadian Studies 51 (1): 10–36 Smith, Denis. 1966. Editorial. Journal of Canadian Studies – Revue d’études canadiennes. 1 (1): 1–2. Trudeau, Justin. 2017. ‘Statement by the Prime Minister on Canada Day’, http:​//pm.​gc.ca​/ eng/​news/​2017/​07/01​/stat​ement​-prim​e-min​ister​-cana​da-da​y. Wang, Ban. 2002. ‘The Cold War, Imperial Aesthetics, and Area Studies’, Social Text 20 (3): 45–65.

IV REFLECTIONS ON NEW AREA STUDIES

13 What Have We Learned? Susan Hodgett and Patrick James

TRAVEL IS NECESSARY Travel is necessary, as things turn out, in order to understand more fully challenges that arise in a world moving faster than ever before. The earth continues to spin on its axis at the same pace from time immemorial, but the activities of people take place much more quickly as technology advances. Increasing velocity within the social world – meaning both its rate of movement and tendency to change direction – creates the most basic and urgent rationale for New Area Studies (NAS). Academic study, like our need to know more faster, encourages innovation – we must get better at our self-reflection. Moreover, there will be no slowing down for human activity.1 Chapter 1 of this volume emphasized the fact that the academic world seems to experience large-scale shocks more frequently than in in the past. For example, populist movements have resulted in unexpected and dramatic change in any number of locations, even post-industrial democracies previously deemed ultra-stable. The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States is just one event amongst several already discussed in this context. Like Brexit and other surprises in close proximity to each other, unanticipated developments combine to create grounds for reflection about the not entirely positive impact of the behavioral revolution. In particular, it becomes clear that a shift toward pursuit of breadth over depth includes unintended and negative consequences. Under such conditions, should the pursuit of context-based knowledge be given more attention than in recent decades? Do we need to know more about what people and social groups think and feel? New Area Studies answers ‘yes’ to the questions above. The resulting mission of NAS is to restore a balance between the search for, respectively, breadth and depth of experience and explanation. Too much of the former and not enough of the latter, perhaps, account for the troubling trend in the direction of major surprises around 169

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the world in the early years of the new millennium. These events cause bad feelings that linger, at least in part, because of their unexpected and often brutal nature and the searing consequences for individual quality of life. And, as Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (2008) has pointed out, our experience of global financial insecurity ensures that ‘risks . . . go beyond what any country and household can tackle [with a] . . . system [that] shifts the burden of global financial risks from players in global markets to poor countries and poor households’. This chapter continues to explore such themes in three additional sections. The second section focuses on the nature of New Area Studies as an academic riposte to questions that arise regarding surprising events in the world during the new century. Dimensions of NAS are identified and enumerated. Section three then focuses on possible directions for research based on the New Area Studies. The fourth and last section offers a few final thoughts regarding the project as a whole.

DIMENSIONS OF NEW AREA STUDIES From a place within the larger project of NAS, preceding chapters have engaged in a wide range of explorations in terms of subject matter. Taken together, the results from these chapters produce a set of conclusions about the nature of NAS. It stands as a way of proceeding under challenging conditions for academic research that follows from the increasing velocity of social life in the digital age. What, then, does NAS look like in practice? Based on the preceding chapters of this book, the review of NAS begins with a reiteration of the reasons for its existence as a would-be successor to the embattled – and in the eyes of many even repudiated – Traditional Area Studies (TAS). Some elements from TAS persist, in a positive way, within the larger and growing edifice of NAS. Movement of New Area Studies beyond Traditional Area Studies, however, is evident in several ways. Changes that are clear to see in NAS turn out to be appropriate to meet the challenges posed by the quest for a more comprehensive and comparative understanding. Treating the concept of an area as subject to debate emerges as a more panoramic and long-term priority for NAS as work based upon it proceeds on various fronts. All of these dimensions are explored as this section unfolds. Traditional Area Studies went into decline some time ago as a by-product of the behavioral revolution from the 1960s. Perhaps the single most compelling cause of the trend away from qualitative and in-depth research, which NAS seeks to interrupt in a certain way, is the rise of computing power and availability.2 Statistical analysis not only became much more feasible as a research option in recent years but tended increasingly to cause the replacement of qualitative with quantitative methods. Manifestations of decline for TAS are clear to see in terms of the evolution of the sociology of knowledge (Pickering 1997). Take, for instance, the observations of Sabatini and Albertoni about closure of Latin American Studies programs and centers at numerous colleges and universities.

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Another example is cancellation of government sponsorship for Canadian Studies in 2012. The Government of Canada, through the then Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, had bankrolled teaching and research on Canada around the world for over thirty years, but abruptly shut down support. This is an especially intense illustration of diminishing support for TAS because sponsorship of Canadian Studies undoubtedly contributed to public diplomacy worldwide as well as to academic purposes (Brooks 2018). There is no controversy over the observation that Traditional Area Studies reached its nadir around the dawn of the new millennium. The virtually uniform turn of the social disciplines toward the natural sciences and away from the humanities, however, arguably went beyond desirable limits from the standpoint of obtaining useful knowledge in an overall sense. With a dramatic shift towards pursuit of breadth in explanation, what happens to depth? TAS had provided the latter rather than the former and near-abandonment of its interpretive approach thereby creates concerns, in an overall sense, about attendant limits on what is being learned in a deeper way. This reflects what other researchers have noted over tricky interactions between mobilities or mobilizations, the static state (its borders/ boundary renegotiations) and its disassembly; and individuals versus collectives; we are in fact in the midst of a fast-moving debate on the increasing ‘disunity of science’ (Mielke and Hornidge 2017, 14–15). New Area Studies, which has emerged prominently in more recent years as a replacement for Traditional Area Studies, shares some important positive traits with it. Two characteristics, which concern pursuit of knowledge in depth, stand out in particular, and are identified by respective chapters in this volume. These traits are incorporation of history and interpretive approaches into the program of research and learning languages. One point of continuity concerns the centrality of history within area-based work. To obtain depth of understanding about experiences to accompany breadth of explanation regarding events, historical knowledge is essential. Gatrell, for instance, criticizes contemporary Refugee Studies for exhibiting a trend toward ahistorical research. History tends to be left out of Refugee Studies in recent years, yet as Gatrell points out, it is essential to the best ethnography and to a comprehensive understanding of experience. This assertion parallels what Salhi and Alfraih have to say about the value of historical knowledge in a completely different context – research on Saudi women novelists as a component of cultural studies. With a focus on one especially significant novel, Salhi and Alfraih observe that adoption of a historical lens provided a valuable means toward analysis of both religion and gender relations. Additional illustrations could be offered from the chapters of the present volume and elsewhere to establish the ongoing role of history and modern interpretive analysis in carrying out NAS more effectively than otherwise (Yanow 2000; Rhodes 2017; Rhodes and Hodgett forthcoming 2019). Language as an essential element in understanding is the other basic point of continuity with Traditional Area Studies that is manifested within New Area Studies.

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In reflections about Russia and matters of national identity, Hutchings affirms the vital role of language in accounting for preferences and actions. Language is fundamental to how members of communities see themselves. Thus area-oriented researchers must continue to obtain language skills at a relatively high level in order to achieve contextual understanding of what unfolds within localities. This capacity is essential to complement more highly aggregated studies from social scientists who are seeking breadth of explanation (Nic Craith 2006). The complementary nature of knowledge gleaned from approaches based on the humanities and social sciences is reinforced within the exposition from Sabatini and Albertoni on Latin American Studies, not to mention any number of other area-based studies from the new millennium. While learning languages and placing value upon knowledge about historical context provide points of continuity with TAS, important new directions can be identified for NAS as well. These innovations include emphasis on interdisciplinary research, cross-regional comparison, and implementation of ideas and techniques borrowed from the social sciences. Interdisciplinary research is essential for the success of New Area Studies (Hodgett forthcoming 2019). A basic reason is emergence to the surface of previously latent geopolitical configurations and associated transnational identities. For example, Hutchings asserts that, in order to understand how ethnoscapes, mediascapes and other components of the global system relate to each other, collaboration between cultural studies and various social sciences will be required. Along similar lines, Sabatini and Albertoni see interdisciplinary research as contributing effectively to the understanding of Latin America as a region. Cross-regional comparison is gaining traction among adherents to NAS. Rosenthal, for example, points to advantages accruing from a comparative North American approach and uses literature from the US and Canada for purposes of illustration. This type of research reveals that regions are not universal. These entities are neither stable nor unified but instead exist within an evolving context. Sabatini and Albertoni, from within a social scientific frame of reference, also see value in comparative analysis of regions. The focus in this instance is on how juxtaposition of areas with each other can be valuable in bringing out common and unique traits with significance. Traditional Area Studies had singularly failed to make extra-regional comparison a priority. Another innovation within NAS concerns incorporation of ideas and methods from the social sciences – systematic disciplines, as summed up by Hansen. Rather than being seen in an adversarial way, general theories from the social sciences can be brought in to complement the impressive contextual knowledge that comes from a traditional AS approach based on learning languages and reviewing history. Sabatini and Albertoni offer the same advice in the context of Latin American Studies. New approaches should be incorporated into ongoing work with a regional or national focus. In practice this could mean anything from geographic information systems to neuroscience or artificial intelligence as a complement to more

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longstanding ethnographic approaches within the area-based research. We increasingly see these multidisciplinary approaches viewed as necessary and rewarded by funding councils.3 The opportunities for implementation of additional theories and methods continue to expand. ‘Big data’, which focuses on the immense value of information created within social media and other computer-based sources, might be the most salient point of opportunity today. All of this takes New Area Studies multiple and significant steps away from Traditional Area Studies. Perhaps more than any other characteristic, NAS is defined by its quest for comprehensive understanding. The last few pages build up to that conclusion. New Area Studies is more inclusive than Traditional Area Studies in the sense of being open to ideas from a wide range of disciplines and even systematic approaches borrowed from the social sciences and beyond. At the same time, NAS reaffirms the essential value of depth obtained in research with a regional, national or even sub-national focus. Deep knowledge, Gleave observes, often is absent from comparative studies with a social scientific – and arguably superficial – character that derives from a search for universal features. Gleave adds that regional specialization can produce a sophistication of analysis that cannot be obtained otherwise. Salhi and Alfraih triangulate with that point in observing that in-depth analysis of literary works from Saudi Arabia generates insights that would be likely to prove elusive otherwise. Moreover, as Hansen observes in a series of reflections on area-based work about Central Asia, deep knowledge of societies can inform debates at a meta-theoretical level on space, identity, mobility, and transformation. With its more expansive character, New Area Studies ends up posing questions about what is meant with regard to Regional Studies in general. For example, Gatrell reflects on whether the concept of an area is something constant or in flux. The answer that emerges is that change and even transformation in thinking are not only possible but probable. Take, for example, Refugee Studies; in that context Gatrell takes up the idea of whether the sea could be regarded as a region. Such a designation could make sense for Refugee Studies, even if it might seem irrelevant to other projects. Likewise, Sadan questions whether a recent concept like Zomia proves more useful in the digital age than older established national boundaries or traditional nation-states for a mountainous South East Asia. Along similar lines consider the ways in which Denis and Amengay explore figurations of the border. Area and border clearly are concepts associated with each other; in problematizing one, Denis and Amengay expand thinking about the other. For example, they consider border-related dimensions such as fact versus fiction, the security dispositive, and interactions between seeking to cross through with officers in positions of authority who can stand in the way. Reflections upon each of these aspects of a border in conceptual terms, in turn, encourage greater in-depth thinking about the meaning of Area Studies writ large in time and space. Even more fundamental questions are raised, perhaps, about area-focused work by Sadan and Rosenthal. In particular, Sadan calls for the decolonization of Area Studies in the sense of moving beyond practices that restrict investigations and

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create knowledge communities that are to some degree exclusive of each other. A logical consequence of that position is to ask whether conventional approaches toward designating boundaries for area research might need to be reconsidered along the way. Rosenthal confirms that geographic boundaries are needed, but parallels Sadan in drawing attention to the diversified nature of any area. This is because of the complexity created by different perceptions and uses of the area concept that co-exist, sometimes uneasily, with each other. A range of potential meanings exist. Gleave brings out that very complexity in reflecting upon the possible interpretations attached to the idea of a Muslim world. New Area Studies today is the natural replacement for Traditional Area Studies. The fundamental reason being that increasing velocity of human life demands breadth of explanation and depth of understanding to be pursued in conjunction with each other. NAS is open to incorporation of techniques from disciplines previously not welcome within TAS – notably those that implement quantitative analysis. Thus, NAS is the way ahead as the millennium and history progresses.

FUTURE RESEARCH New Area Studies, it almost goes without saying, creates a vast range of possibilities for research in the future. Given constraints of space, three possibilities are explored briefly at present. Extensions of what appears already in this volume with respect to Canada in comparative perspective come first. A second, more specific and operational example focuses on elaboration of a research project already in existence and, to some degree, in line with the priorities of NAS. Third, and finally, is the highly encompassing matter of blurring genres – moving back and forth between humanities and social sciences – as an element of NAS in action. Canada is a middle-range power. As such it is often excluded from comparative exploration to the detriment of its larger southern neighbour. In historical terms it is a relatively new country with big geography and a small population. These factors make it prone to be ignored on the international stage and Canadians often complain of such. Back in 2002 Myers, writing in the Telegraph in an article entitled ‘The Country the World Forgot – Again’, described Canada as ‘the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance’.4 Fifteen years later Williamson writing in the US National Review opened his article with the words ‘it is easy to forget about the Canadians’. He commented, ‘Americans have an uncomplicated relationship with Canada. Mostly, we do not think about Canada at all. Sometimes, we joke about it, and sometimes we resent it’. And, Williamson points out, Americans think so rarely of Canada that President Trump in a recent speech to the United Nations, on America First and the Marshall Plan, mentioned ten countries, large and small. Canada, like Mexico, did not make the grade.5 The elements of NAS which may be useful for Canada as we progress into the future are numerous. As Colin Coates’ chapter demonstrates, seeing Canada in comparative perspective

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allows the country to assess how it might benefit from the learning of others overseas, so being prepared to avoid mistakes others may have made. Furthermore, rather than just eluding the negative, NAS and its comparative lens allows the country to find positive horizons which might not have initially seemed obvious. Today Canada is known internationally for a few persistent negative reasons which include seal culling and environmental degradation through tar sands oil production. NAS opens up the means to examine such difficult topics in a well-rounded and fulsome manner using big data and local meanings and feelings. And, as this volume has shown, different ways of seeing and understanding can appreciate the less well known in comparative context as Caroline Rosenthal has shown in her commentary on women behaving badly in Canada and the US. Looking more carefully at a country from a new or innovative angle is clear within Charles Batson’s revealing look at Quebec’s cultural export of cirque and the building of new (and alternative) minority identities. And stretching knowledge is what NAS is about, looking through new eyes as Denis and Amengay have done on the very elasticity of the Canadian border. NAS therefore opens up new perspectives and opportunities to see the world differently and to approach problems from unconventional angles. This proves absolutely invaluable, indeed necessary, in a world so perpetually unstable during the Trumpian era as goings on at the recent G7 summit in Canada have demonstrated (Packer 2018). Another opportunity for advancement concerns elaboration of existing programs of research in line with priorities identified within New Area Studies. In the context of International Relations, consider the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project as a salient possibility. Founded in 1975, the ICB Project focuses on crises in world politics. Its data holdings, which cover the interval from 1918 to 2015, include 456 international crises and 1,052 foreign policy crises (Brecher et al. 2017).6 These data have provided the foundation for research published in dozens of academic books and articles (Brecher 1999). How, then, does ICB fit in with, and possess the potential to benefit further from, NAS? Connections of ICB with NAS come through (i) interdisciplinarity and (ii) pursuit of breadth of explanation and depth of understanding. The International Crisis Behavior Project is interdisciplinary. For example, models of decision making incorporated within ICB reflect the ongoing dynamic tension between rational choice theory and psychology (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1997; 2000). ICB is rationalist in orientation, but its data permits models from both points of origin to be evaluated. ICB also pursues both breadth and depth through its research. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods is clear to see in the wide assortment of publications associated with the project. In fact, in a review essay of the project, Brecher (1999) labelled the dichotomy of qualitative versus quantitative methods as a ‘false dichotomy’. The ICB Project reflects this belief through its extensive consultation with area experts in the process of assembling quantitative data. This process, notably in the context of NAS, includes obtaining insights from scholars who are able to access non-English language sources with relevance to specific crises in world politics.

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How might ICB benefit from a further connection with NAS? One aspect of NAS – is the integration of approaches from the social sciences and humanities in an effort to anticipate the future more effectively. Research in the ICB Project, as it stands, to some extent pursues breadth and depth. For example, it accesses the humanities in the sense that sources from multiple languages are retrieved; historical research is carried out in a structured approach toward case studies and in the creation of data for the use of statistical analysis. However, the humanities in a broader sense are not incorporated within the ICB as it exists today. In particular, such a turn might enhance the relevance and usefulness of results from ICB research to policyrelated concerns of today – maybe even with forecasting. Put differently, humanities disciplines might be able to expand the imagination of ICB in terms of its relevance to policy. This is because the humanities can assist with discovery of new ideas, events and concepts, even if not so relevant to confirmation, in the process of research. Put another way, new and different priorities for the research agenda of the ICB Project might be identified on the basis of connecting with fields such as philosophy. What about the more panoramic matter of blurring genres? A rear-guard action has been stalking the academy quietly for some time. The Political Studies Association (PSA) of the United Kingdom is the representative body of Political Scientists in the country. Over the last twenty years the membership has been acquiring new interests. The lifetime President of PSA is Professor RAW Rhodes and leader of thinking, along with Mark Bevir (University of California, Berkeley) of Interpretive Political Studies. Their influence has been to recognise the contribution of the humanities, and specifically history, to our knowledge of politics in the round. Their oeuvre has led the way to soften the edges of Political Science, allowing in new ideas and concepts with a wider hermeneutical circle. Today, approximately a third of PSA delegates indicate a curiosity concerning interpretive approaches through its interest group in the field. This, along with governments’ increasing recognition of the need for inter- and multidisciplinary approaches to solve complex real world problems; and concentrating funding resources to maximise social and academic innovation (so requiring academics across disciplines to work together) shape the future. We see this in the United Kingdom (UK) with the establishment of UK Research and Innovation7 and the cooperation of national research council’s thematic funding streams (sometimes with individual government departments on complicated problems – like the UK Global Challenges Research Funds).8 Increasingly the blurring of disciplinary boundaries is the way to a more productive and successful research future; and so slowly the twenty-first-century educational context may begin to overturn earlier disciplinary silos (Hodgett forthcoming 2019; Rhodes and Hodgett forthcoming 2019). Academics themselves are realising the advantages and increased potential of working with those from beyond their home disciplines as the new Blurring Genres Research Network has ably demonstrated in the UK.9 Further afield, in Europe and Asia the Crossroads project on the future of Area Studies has reviewed the global inequalities of theory production and the urgent need to decolonise knowledge – insightfully concluding in the end that ‘there is a value of conducting area studies in its own right’ (Mielke and Hornidge 2017, 16).

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FINAL THOUGHTS This study has identified a further iteration of New Area Studies and explored a wide range of research inside its boundaries through an edited volume format. Work within New Area Studies is thriving and, in line with the approach itself, spans both the wider humanities and the social sciences. From an intellectual standpoint, NAS joins forces with movements in various disciplines that raise questions about whether paradigm-based research may be limiting rather than facilitating growth of knowledge in a time when the world is struggling with greater and deeper complexity. One example to consider, as the volume concludes, is analytic eclecticism.10 As articulated by Sil and Katzenstein (2010a) in an influential study, analytic eclecticism includes three components: (1) research that incorporates ideas and models from beyond the boundary of any given paradigm; (2) pursuit of middle-range theories; and (3) relevance to policy concerns. At a glance, it is obvious that NAS and analytic eclecticism show close consilience with each other. Comprehensiveness in the approach toward understanding and explanation is most fundamental to New Area Studies. In terms of explanation, creation and assessment of middle-range theories that can be linked to each other over time also is in line with NAS. Finally, relevance to policy concerns is essential to NAS because its practical purpose is to help counteract the tendency toward large-scale surprises in a world with high and even increasing velocity in terms of social interactions and potential for disruption and greater unpredictability. Analytic eclecticism is just one point of triangulation involving New Area Studies and forms of consciousness that are gaining traction in any number of disciplines. The overall purpose of this volume is to advocate in favor of NAS as one means toward coping with the intellectual and practical challenges of a world that keeps on speeding up and an academy and human population struggling daily to manage and understand an overwhelming flow of information and choice (Lee et al. 2017). Consideration of such complexity in everyday life is necessary because thinking more deeply about how we better prepare to address the large-scale shocks the world is facing (which look like they may well increase in regularity and severity) as the digitally connected globe loses both privacy and time to process information. New Area Studies requires solid knowledge acquired on our travels; knowledge of words, thoughts, meanings as well as feelings and numbers. To assuage the growing unpredictability of this complex century we require both breadth and depth of knowledge to conduct our explorations of space and place. History, language and interpretive analysis have their role to play as well as geography, culture and science. All make up what we increasingly need better to deliver cross regional comparison. In our drive to better understand the world as it is now we need every weapon in our academic armoury from ethnography to big data. To know more and better we must re-problematise that which we think we already know, along with that which we clearly do not. To succeed with grappling with a challenging future we seek a very expansive and human New Area Studies. Academic exploration itself must be decolonised of its worst fears to allow for opening up of new spaces, new places,

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new thoughts and multidisciplinary concepts to achieve wider and deeper perceptive understandings. New Area Studies, as our authors have envisaged, is but one important means of achieving this – so addressing the multiple challenges and disruptions facing us in the dawn of this technologically miraculous and most feelingful of centuries (Hodgett and Cassin 2009).

NOTES 1. Learning more about our future challenges is becoming commonplace; see BBC Future, July 26, 2018, http:​//www​.bbc.​com/f​uture​/stor​y/201​51016​-welc​ome-t​o-a-h​ome-f​ or-th​e-ins​atiab​ly-cu​rious.​ 2. Moore’s Law, put into non-technical terms to the extent that is possible, predicts the doubling of microprocessors in a per unit sense over each two-year period or even less. This prognostication from the 1960s continues to hold true today and helps to explain the greater attractiveness of quantitative research due to vastly enhanced computing power over a remarkably short period of history. 3. For example, see the AHRC-GCRF funded project, Explosive Transformations: Cultural Resilience to Natural Hazard on St Vincent and Montserrat, which brings literary studies together with volcanology and international development in order to explore the cultural presence of the volcano in the islands of the Eastern Caribbean and community responses to the risks of hazardous landscapes. See University of East Anglia, Wendy McMahon, July 26, 2018, https://people.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/w-mcmahon. 4. Kevin Myers, ‘The Country the World Forgot Again’, April 21, 2002. https​://ww​ w.tel​egrap​h.co.​uk/co​mment​/pers​onal-​view/​35756​33/Th​e-cou​ntry-​the-w​orld-​forgo​t-aga​in.​ html (accessed July 26, 2018). 5. Kevin D. Williamson, ‘Americas First’, National Review, September 20, 2017. https:​// ww​w.nat​ional​revie​w.com​/2017​/09/t​rump-​un-sp​eech-​ignor​ed-me​xico-​canad​a/ (accessed July 26, 2018). 6. While a detailed account is beyond the scope of this overview for the ICB Project, the relationship of the two types of events can be explained in a basic way. An international crisis includes the full range of experience among the states that experience it, with foreign policy crises for individual participants unfolding within it. For example, the Cuban Missile Crisis is a very famous international crisis from 1962. Three foreign policy crises, experienced by the US, USSR and Cuba, exist within its boundaries. This also explains why there are quite a few more foreign policy crises than international crises. 7. UK Research and Innovation, https://www.ukri.org/ (accessed July 26, 2018). 8. UK Research and Innovation, Global Challenges Research Fund, https​://ww​w.ukr​i.org​/ rese​arch/​globa​l-cha​lleng​es-re​searc​h-fun​d/ (accessed July 26, 2018). 9. Ulster University, Faculty of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Blurring Genres, https​://ww​w.uls​ter.a​c.uk/​facul​ties/​arts-​human​ities​-and-​socia​l-sci​ences​/scho​ols/a​pplie​d-soc​ ial-p​olicy​-scie​nces/​resea​rch/b​lurri​ng-ge​nres (accessed July 26, 2018). 10. While put forward within the domain of International Relations, there is nothing that prevents analytic eclecticism from being applied to academic disciplines in general. In fact, it is beginning to connect with Area Studies. For a valuable introduction to Comparative Area Studies, which emphasizes the pursuit of eclectic, middle-range theories, see Ahram, KÖllner and Sil (2018).

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REFERENCES Ahram, Ariel, Patrick KÖllner and Rudra Sil, eds. 2018. Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brecher, Michael. 1999. ‘International Studies in the Twentieth Century and beyond: Flawed Dichotomies, Synthesis, Cumulation: ISA Presidential Address’, International Studies Quarterly 43: 213–264. Brecher, Michael, and Jonathan Wilkenfeld. 1997, 2000. A Study of Crisis. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Brecher, Michael, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Kyle Beardsley, Patrick James and David Quinn. 2017. International Crisis Behavior Data Codebook, Version 12. http://sites.duke.edu/ icbdata/data-collections/. Brooks, Stephen. 2018. Canadian Studies Abroad: Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko. 2008. The Human Impact of the Financial Crisis on Poor and Disempowered People and Countries, UN General Assembly: Interactive Panel on the Global Financial Crisis, http:​//www​.un.o​rg/ga​/pres​ident​/63/i​ntera​ctive​/gfc/​sakik​o_p.p​df (accessed April 2, 2018). Hodgett, Susan and Marguerite Cassin. 2009. ‘Feelingful Development: Redefining Policy through Interpretation’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 25 (2): 269–286. Hodgett, Susan. Forthcoming, 2019. 21st Century Area Studies: Blurring Genres, Evolutionary Thought and the Production of Theory, Z. Milutinovic, The Rebirth of Area Studies: Challenges for History, Politics and International Relations in the 21st Century, London, I.B. Tauris. Lee, Sun Kyong, Nathan Lindsey and Kyun SooKim. 2017. ‘The Effects of News Consumption Via Social Media and News Information Overload on Perceptions of Journalistic Norms and Practices’, Computers in Human Behavior, 75: 254–263. Mielke, K. and Hornidge, A. K. (2017) Area Studies at the Crossroads: Knowledge Production After the Mobility Turn. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Nic Craith, Mairead. 2006. Europe and the Politics of Language: Citizens, Migrants and Outsiders, Houndmills: Palgrave MacMilllan. Packer, G. 2018. ‘Donald Trump Goes Rogue, 25th June, Comment’, New Yorker, https:// ww​w.new​yorke​r.com​/maga​zine/​2018/​06/25​/dona​ld-tr​ump-g​oes-r​ogue (accessed July 26, 2018). Pickering, Andrew. 1997. ‘Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, Social Epistemology 11 (2): 187–192. Rhodes, R. A. W. 2017. Interpretive Political Science: Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhodes, R. A. W. and Hodgett, S. Forthcoming, 2019. What Political Science Can Learn From the Humanities – Blurring Genres. London: Palgrave. Sil, Rudra, and Peter J. Katzenstein. 2010a. Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yanow, Dvora. 2000. Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. London: Sage.

Index

AAASS. See American Association for the Advancement of Slavic and East European Studies ACQS. See American Council for Québec Studies Afghanistan, 68, 76; Russian Invasion of, 92; war in, 67 Albahari, Maurizio, 48 Algerian refugees, 50–51 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic and East European Studies (AAASS), 32 American Council for Québec Studies (ACQS), 130–31 Amrith, Sunil, 51 analytic eclecticism, 179 Appadurai, Arjun, 37, 70, 73–74 Arab Spring, 9, 34 The Arcades Project (Benjamin), 145–46 Area Studies (AS), 3, 112; assessments of, 67–68; Canadian Studies and, 158, 160, 166; CAS and, 78; Cold War and, 6, 69–70, 130; comparative, 117–20; crisis in, 31; Crossroads Project and, 4, 178; decolonization of, 175–76; history and, 173; international affairs and, 90; Islamic Studies and, 93; Lambert on, 4– 5; language and, 40, 173–74; MES and, 87–88; Muslim World Studies and, 95; myth of crisis of, 4; ologising of subject matter and, 5; paradigm shifts in, 118;

Refugee Studies and, 10, 45, 48–49; the region in, 38; religion and, 90; spatial representations in, 118 Area Studies at the Crossroads (Mielke and Hornidge), 4 Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity (Clowes and Bromberg), 4 Aronczyk, Melissa, 136–37 AS. See Area Studies Asia: East, 21; Indian Ocean Studies and, 21; internet and, 25–26; South, 21, 27–28; TAS and, 21, 22–23, 26–28; Trans-Himalayan Studies and, 21–22, 25; Zomia and, 9, 22–27. See also Central Asian Studies; South East Asia asylum seekers, 147; Trump and, 13, 141, 146 authoritarianism, 56 Aydin, Cemil, 87 BASEES. See British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies BBC. See British Broadcasting Corporation Behind Harem Walls (Khalf Aswār al-Ḥaramlak) (al-Hashr), 105; gender identity in, 107 Benjamin, Walter, 144; The Arcades Project by, 145–46; on awakening, 145, 151; on Marx, 145–46 Berton, Pierre, 161 Besteman, Catherine, 48 181

182

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big data: Latin American Studies and, 60; NAS and, 173 blat (informal networks based on kinship, friendship or patronage), 77 Blurring Genres: Recovering the Research Methods of the Arts and Humanities for Political Science and Area Studies, 4 Border Studies: area in, 52, 141; asylum seekers and, 13, 141, 143, 146–47; Benjamin on, 144–46, 151; border definition in, 142; bureaucracy and, 143–44; community and, 148; dangers and, 141; decolonization and, 142; dialectical image and, 144–46; as dispositive, 148–51; Djiekanski and, 150; fences and, 147; figurations in, 142–43; globalization and, 143; location and, 142; making and, 151; Otuteye and, 141, 143, 146; in post-9/11 period, 148; sexual molestation and, 50; spacetime and, 148–50; Trump and Mexico border wall in, 148, 151; zone in, 141– 42. See also Canada-US border BRAIS. See British Society for Islamic Studies Brexit (2016), 6, 8, 36, 38, 143, 145, 169 BRISMES. See British Society for Middle Eastern Studies British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), 32 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 35, 37; Winter Olympics (2014) and, 39–40 British Empire, 24–25, 28 British Society for Islamic Studies (BRAIS), 94–95 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), 92 Bromberg, S., 3; Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity by, 4 bureaucratic authoritarianism, 56 Butler, Judith, 107–8 Byatt, A. S., 100 Canada, 8; Literary Studies and French, 12, 131; NAS and, 174–75; refugees in, 50; space and, 118, 123–25. See also Border Studies; Québec Studies

Canada and the Idea of North (Grace), 124 Canada-US border, 149–50; asylum seeking laws for, 146–47; Otuteye and, 141, 143, 146; Trump and, 13, 141, 146 Canadian Studies, 13, 131; AS and, 158, 160, 166; anti-Americanism and, 159; Centennial year and, 160–61; Cold War and, 162; Conservative government and, 163–64, 166, 173; critics of, 158, 160, 165–66; diversity and, 167; Foundation for Canadian Studies in UK, 165; government support for, 163–64; Granatstein on, 158, 165–66; indigenous peoples and, 161, 167; international level of, 161–66; NAS and, 167; origins of, 158–59; State against, 157; TAS and, 157; Trudeau and, 166; Vietnam War and, 159. See also Québec Studies CAS. See Central Asian Studies Castells, Manuel, 73–74 Central Asian Studies (CAS): AS and, 78; Afghanistan and, 67, 68, 76, 92; boundaries for, 68–69; constructing Central Asia in, 71–73; development of Central Asia in, 76–78; global economy and, 77; identity and, 71–72; mobile societies and, 73–75; NAS and, 11, 68, 71, 73, 78–79; orchid disciplines and, 10, 67; politics and, 68–69; Soviet Union and, 68–70, 72, 77; space and, 72–73; structures and agency in, 70–71. See also Afghanistan Chassé, Isabelle, 135, 136 China, 21, 22, 26; trade routes of, 8; Uyghur population in, 69, 73 circus culture, Québécois, 133; creativity and, 135; NAS and, 12–13, 129–30, 137; National Circus School and, 129; nouveau cirque and, 134, 135; Quiet Revolution and, 134–35 Cirque du Soleil, 129; founding of, 134; minorities in, 135; nationalism and, 136–37 Cirque Eloize, 129 Clifford, James, 119 Clowes, E., 3; Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity by, 4

Index Cold War, 3, 56; AS and, 6, 69–70, 130; Berlin Wall and, 147; Canadian Studies and, 162; Eastern European politics in, 51–52; 9/11 attacks and, 34; Québec Studies and, 130; Refugee Studies and, 46, 51 colonialism, 7; experts and, 90–91; Khosrowjah on, 133; Muslim world and, 87; Québec Studies and, 131 Colson, Elizabeth, 47 Columbia University, 55 communism, 9, 31–32 Comparative North American Studies, 117 Connor, Steven, 102 Cooke, Miriam, 109 Cresswell, Tim, 119 Cribb, Robert, 20, 26 Critical Geopolitics, 38 Crossroads Project, 4, 176 Cultural Studies, 37, 174; Literary Studies as, 33, 125; Mobility Studies and, 119; Saudi women novelists and, 171 cyber-attacks, 9 de Beauvoir, Simone, 107 decolonization, 6; of AS, 173–74; Border Studies and, 142; Postcolonial Studies and, 119; South East Asia model of, 27 democratization, 56 dependency theory, 56 development, 76–78 development theory, 76 Djiekanski, Robert, 150 East Asia, 21 Eastern European Studies, 91 ECLAC. See United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America Elias, Norbert, 13, 142, 143 emotional subjectivities, 7 al-Fassi, Hatoon Ajwad, 103 female novelists, in Saudi Arabia, 11–12, 99–100; content and form for, 104; current issues and, 102; gender roles and, 102; on Grand Mosque seizure, 104; al-Hashr as, 100, 104–9; identity

183

and, 101–2; al-Khamis as, 101; taboos and, 102. See also Fragmentation female road novels: NAS and, 12; space and, 120. See also Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Kind of Thing (Lopez); No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (van Herk) feminism: female identity and, 107; al-Hashr and, 105; history and, 101; Islamic, 109; nomadism and, 126; in SA, 11, 99, 111 Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Kind of Thing (Lopez): contradictory themes in, 121; gender reversal in, 122; gender roles and identity in, 121–22, 125; mobility routes in, 122; narrator of, 120; national myths in, 122; parody in, 121; queerness in, 121; space in, 119 Ford, Rob, 150 Fragmentation (al-Tashaẓẓī) (Al-Hashr), 100; customs and religion in, 109–10; female complexity in, 112; gender identity in, 107, 108; juxtaposition in, 106; misogyny in, 110, 111–12; omniscient narrator in, 104; patriarchy and Islam in, 109–12; religious extremism in, 106, 110, 111–12; al-Utaybi in, 105–7, 111; women and restrictions in, 106–7 France, 36, 38 Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, 172 gender identity and roles: Butler on, 107–8; de Beauvoir on, 107; female novelists in Saudi Arabia and, 102; female road novels and, 120; in Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Kind of Thing, 121–22, 125; in Fragmentation, 107, 108; in Behind Harem Walls, 107; al-Hashr on, 108; history and, 109; in No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey, 125; patriarchy and, 108; space and, 125 Gender Trouble (Butler), 107–8 geographies of ignorance, 9 George, Dan, 161

184

Index

German Council for Science and Humanities, 10–11 Gilroy, Paul, 49 globalization, 39, 130; Border Studies and, 143; German Council for Science and Humanities on, 10–11; NAS and, 7; spatialization and, 75 global power relations, 4 Global Studies, 10; Latin American Studies and, 58, 60–63; Regional Studies and, 55 Google Earth, 9 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 32, 34–35 Grace, Sherrill, 124 Granatstein, J. L., 158, 165–66 Grand Mosque seizure, Saudi Arabia, 100; female novelists on, 104; Islamic movements and, 104; misogyny and, 112; al-Qahtani and, 103; al-Utaybi and, 103–4; women and, 103–4, 111. See also Fragmentation Great Recession (2008), 8, 34 Gulf War, 99 Hale, Charles: four principles of, 58–60; on Regional Studies, 58–59, 61–62 Hansen, Claus Bech, 10–11 Harrell-Bond, Barbara, 46 al-Hashr, Aisha: Behind Harem Walls by, 105, 107; feminism and, 105; Fragmentation by, 100, 104–12; on gender identity and roles, 108 Heryanto, Ariel, 26 Hirschon, Renée, 47 history: AS and, 173; feminism and, 101; fiction in SA and, 99–101; gender identity and roles and, 109; of Latin American Studies, 56–57; Refugee Studies and, 47–48, 52. See also female novelists, in Saudi Arabia Hodgson, Marshall, 92; Venture of Islam by, 93 Hornidge, A. K., 4 Hurley, Erin, 133, 134, 136 Hutcheon, Linda, 121 ICAS. See International Convention of Asia Scholars

ICB Project. See International Crisis Behavior Project India, 68, 73; British Empire in, 24–25, 28; India Today and, 35 Indian Ocean Studies, 21 indigenous peoples, 9, 10, 56, 57; Canadian Studies and, 161, 167; Zomia and, 23, 24–25 International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS), 27 International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, 175–76, 180n6 interpretive approaches, 7 Iranian Revolution, 11, 94; Islam and, 91 Islam: feminism and, 109; Iranian Revolution and, 91; MES and, 11, 88, 90, 91–92, 95; patriarchy in Fragmentation and, 109–12; rise of, 11; al-Utaybi and Islamic movements, 104; women's rights in, 109. See also Grand Mosque seizure, Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia (SA) Islamic Studies, 90; AS and, 93; BRAIS as, 94–95; Hodgson and, 92–93; Jihadism and, 34, 91, 92, 94–96; Smart and, 93; as strategic subject, 94; in UK, 92–95; world events and, 95–96 Jacob, Pascal, 134 Jihadism, 34, 91, 92, 94–96 Jinping, Xi, 6 Kennedy, John F., 147 Kerouac, Jack, 121 Khalf Aswār al-Ḥaramlak (al-Hashr). See Behind Harem Walls al-Khamis, Umayma, 101 Khosrowjah, Hossein, 130; on colonialism, 133 Klein, Naomi, 6 Kubik, Jan, 39 labour migration, 38, 74 Lalala Human Steps, 134, 138n10 Lambert, R., 4–5 language: AS and, 40, 171–72; NAS and, 31, 33; Russia and, 40; TAS and, 130; UK degrees in, 33–34, 40

Index Latin American Studies, 10, 55, 172; big data and, 60; cross-regional research and, 62; democratization and, 56; generational transitions of, 60–61; Global Studies and, 58, 60–63; history of, 56–57; MENA and, 59; recommendations for, 61–62; Regional Studies and, 56, 58, 61–62; social movements and, 56; in US, 56–58, 60 Le Pen, Marine, 36, 38 Leuvrey, Elisabeth, 50–51 Lévesque, René, 135, 161 Literary Studies, 118; as Cultural Studies, 33, 125; French Canada and, 12, 131 Loizos, Peter, 47 London, 3, 14n6 Lopez, Erica, 119–25 Ludden, David, 130, 137–38 MacLennan, Hugh, 132 Macron, Emmanuel, 6, 8 male road novels, 121 Malkki, Liisa, 47 Mannik, Lynda, 50 ‘Mapping as Metaphor’ (van Herk), 124 Marx, Karl, 145–46 Mecca. See Grand Mosque seizure, Saudi Arabia Mehrez, Samia, 102 MENA. See Middle East and North Africa MES. See Middle Eastern Studies Middle East and North Africa (MENA): Latin American Studies and, 59; terminology and, 88–89 Middle Eastern Studies (MES): AS and, 87–88; Arab-Israeli conflict in, 91; BRISMES and, 92; ethnic identification and, 88; Iranian Revolution and, 11, 91, 94; Islam and, 11, 88, 90, 91–92, 95; Muslim World Studies and, 11, 87, 95–96; need for, 91–92; 9/11 attacks and, 94; Oriental Studies and, 89, 90–91; al-Qaida and, 91, 93–94; terminology for, 88–90. See also female novelists, in Saudi Arabia; Islamic Studies Mielke, K., 4

185

misogyny: Grand Mosque seizure and, 112; religious extremism in Fragmentation and, 110, 111–12 Mitchell, W. J. T., 38 mobility: CAS and, 73–75; Cultural Studies and, 119; labour migration and, 38, 74; movement and, 75; NAS and, 120; routes in Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Kind of Thing, 122; space and, 119–20; of women, 120. See also Border Studies Mobility Studies, 119 modernity, 76 modernization theory, 56 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 101 Muslim World Studies, 11; AS and, 95; colonialism and, 87; Jihadi narrative and, 95–96 Myanmar, 27–28, 68 NAS. See New Area Studies National Circus School, 129 New Area Studies (NAS), 3–6, 8, 180; analytic eclecticism and, 179; approaches to, 172–73; area in, 52, 125; big data and, 173; breadth and depth of knowledge for, 9, 169, 171, 174, 175–76, 177; Canada and, 174–75; Canadian Studies and, 167; CAS and, 11, 68, 71, 73, 78–79; circus culture and, 12–13, 129–30, 137; comparative North American approach to, 125; comprehensive understanding and, 173; cross-regional comparison in, 172, 177; Crossroads Project and, 4, 178; dimensions of, 170–74; female road novels and, 12; future research for, 174–76; globalization and, 7; ICB and, 175–76, 180n6; interdisciplinary research of, 8–9, 174; as language-based, 31, 33; mission of, 169; mobility and, 120; new areas and, 22; in post-9/11 period, 3, 8; Québec Studies and, 130, 133; Regional Studies and, 55, 175; selfreflection and, 169; in South East Asia, 28; statistical analysis and, 170; TAS compared to, 171–72, 174; theorizing, 8; Zomia and, 22, 25

186

Index

new media environment, 34; India Today and, 35; RT and, 35–36 No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (van Herk): gender in, 125; Greek mythology in, 123; mapping in, 124; parody in, 122; rhizome in, 123; sexual encounters in, 122–23; space in, 119, 124 Noiriel, Gérard, 47 nomadism: feminism and, 126; philosophy and, 119, 126n4 North Korea, 8 nouveau cirque, 134, 135 One Belt One Road, 6 On the Road (Kerouac), 121 orchid disciplines, 10, 67 Oriental Studies, 90–91; otherness and, 89 otherness: Oriental Studies and, 89; in Québec Studies, 131, 132 Otuteye, Mavis, 141, 143, 146 Pakistan, 73 Palmer, Bryan, 157 Panama Papers, 77 parochialism, 3–4 patriarchy: gender identity and roles and, 108; Islam in Fragmentation and, 109–12 performance cultures. See circus culture philosophy: nomadism in, 119, 126n4; rhizome in, 119, 126n3 picaresque novel, 126n5 Political Studies Association (PSA), 178 politics: CAS and, 68–69; Cold War and Eastern European, 51–52; Critical Geopolitics, 38; religion and, 59 Pomerantsev, Peter, 35 populism, 169 post-9/11 period, 9; Border Studies in, 148; NAS in, 3, 8 post-Cold War period: security interests in, 7; TAS in, 7 Postcolonial Studies, 119 postmodern theory, 119 post–truth era, 9, 36 Potsdam University, 117 PSA. See Political Studies Association

Putin, Vladimir, 9, 32; state propaganda and, 35; Trump and, 36 al-Qahtani, Muhammad, 103 al-Qaida, 91, 93–94 Québec Studies, 129; ACQS as, 130–31; Cold War and, 130; colonialism and, 131; either/or paradigms and, 138; French Atlantic scholarship and, 132– 33; as global and local, 137; identity in, 132; MacLennan and, 132; NAS and, 130, 133; otherness in, 131, 132; queerness in, 133. See also circus culture, Québécois; Cirque du Soleil queerness: in Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Kind of Thing, 121; in Québec Studies, 133 Reeves, Madeleine, 49, 52, 74 REF. See Research Excellence Framework refugees: from Algeria, 50–51; in Canada, 50; forced migration and, 10; in Syria, 48. See also asylum seekers Refugee Studies: AS and, 10, 45, 48–49; area of state and, 48–49; Besteman and, 48; Cold War and, 46, 51; history and, 47–48, 52; as interdisciplinary, 46–47; origins of, 45–46; policymaking and, 36; refugee experience in, 46–47; scale and, 48; upheavals and, 49 the region, 38 Regional Studies: Global Studies and, 55; Hale on, 58–59, 61–62; NAS and, 55, 175; need for, 61; new approaches to, 62. See also Latin American Studies religion: AS and, 90; and customs in Fragmentation, 109–10; misogyny and, 110, 111–12; politics and, 59; religious extremism in Fragmentation, 106, 110, 111–12; women's rights and, 109. See also Islam Research Excellence Framework (REF), 41n8 rhizome: in No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey, 123; in philosophy, 119, 126n3 Roberts, Katherine, 131 Rogozin, Dmitrii, 35

Index

187

Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (Clifford), 119 RT, 35–36; Winter Olympics (2014) and, 39–40 Russia, 6, 41n2, 49; Afghanistan invaded by, 92; Gorbachev in, 32, 34–35; as Great Power, 9; labour migration to, 38, 74; language and, 40; national identity and, 174; new agendas and paradigms in, 36–39; new media environment and, 34–36; Putin in, 9, 32, 35, 36; Rogozin and, 35; RT in, 35–36; Transitology and, 32, 34; Ukraine and, 9, 34–35, 37; Winter Olympics (2014) in, 39–40. See also Sovietology; Soviet Union

Soviet Union: CAS and, 68–70, 72, 77; identity and, 72; informal economy and, 77 space: Canada and, 118, 123–25; CAS and, 72–73; culture and, 118; female road novels and, 120; in Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Kind of Thing, 119; gender and, 125; mobility and, 119–20; in No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey, 119, 124; sea as, 10; South East Asia and intellectual, 9; space-time and Border Studies, 148–50; US and, 118, 125 Struck, Peter, 67 Syria, 14n6; refugees in, 48

SA. See Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia (SA), 11–12; feminist awakening in, 11, 99, 111; fiction and history in, 99–101; Grand Mosque seizure in, 100, 103–4, 111, 112; Gulf War and, 99; al-Khamis in, 101; women in, 99–100, 103–4, 111. See also female novelists, in Saudi Arabia Saunders, Robert, 38 Schierenbeck, I., 7 Scott, James C., 23–25 sea, as space, 10 The Second Sex (de Beauvoir), 107 September 11 (9/11) attacks, 41n10; Cold War and, 34; MES and, 94 Les 7 doigts de la main (The 7 Fingers), 129, 135, 136 Shacknove, Andrew, 46 Sharma, M., 6 Shock Doctrine (Klein), 6 Smart, Ninian, 93 Smith, Denis, 159, 160 South Asia, 21; Myanmar and, 27–28, 68 South East Asia, 51; Area programs in, 19–20; decolonized model for, 27; idea of, 9; intellectual space of, 9; NAS in, 28; South East Asian Massif, 22; as total fact, 20 Sovietology, 9, 32, 38; Cold War and, 31; cross-disciplinary collaboration barriers and, 33

TAS. See Traditional Area Studies al-Tashaẓẓī (al-Hashr). See Fragmentation Third World, 131; East-West binary and, 51–52; religion and politics in, 59 Traditional Area Studies (TAS), 3–5, 8–9; Asia and, 21, 22–23, 26–28; behavioral revolution and, 172; Canadian Studies and, 157; decline of, 170–71; defining, 25; language and, 130; NAS compared to, 171–72, 174; in post-Cold War period, 7; universalism and, 34; Zomia and, 9, 22–27 TransArea Studies, 117, 125 Trans-Himalayan Studies, 21–22, 25 Transitology, 32, 34 transnational corporations, 7 La traversée, 50–51 Trudeau, Justin, 166 Trump, Donald J., 6, 8, 38, 169; asylum seekers and, 13, 141, 146; Canada-US border and, 13, 141, 146; on Mexico border wall, 148, 151; Otuteye and, 141; Putin and, 36 Ukraine, 9, 34–35, 37 United Kingdom (UK), 31; austerity budgets in, 37; BBC and, 35, 37, 39–40; Brexit and, 6, 8, 36, 38, 169; BRISMES in, 92; British Empire in India and, 24–25, 28; Canadian Studies in, 162–63, 165; Foundation

188

Index

for Canadian Studies in, 165; Islamic Studies in, 92–95; language degrees in, 33–34, 40; London in, 3, 14n6; PSA in, 176; REF in, 41n8 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), 60 United States (US), 10; Canadian Studies and anti-Americanism, 159; Canadian Studies in, 162–64; Latin American Studies in, 56–58, 60; post–truth era in, 9, 36; space and, 118, 125; women in, 12. See also Border Studies; Canada-US border; Trump, Donald J. University of Halle, 117 Urry, John, 73–74 al-Utaybi, Juhayman: in Fragmentation, 105–7, 111; Grand Mosque seizure and, 103–4; Islamic movements and, 104 van Herk, Aritha: ‘Mapping as Metaphor’ by, 124; No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey by, 119, 122–25

van Schendel, Willem, 9, 22–27 Venture of Islam (Hodgson), 93 Vietnam War, 159 Viner, Katharine, 36 White, Ben, 49 Winter Olympics, Sochi (2014), 39–40 Wolff, Janet, 119 women, 175; in male road novels, 121; mobility of, 120; in SA, 99–100, 103–4, 111; in US, 12. See also female novelists, in Saudi Arabia women's rights: in Islam, 109; religion and, 109 World War II, 4 Zamindar, Vazira, 49 Zhurov, Evgenii, 35 Zimmerman, T., 101 Zomia: indigenous peoples and, 23, 24–25; NAS and, 22, 25; Scott and, 23–25; van Schendel and, 9, 22–27

About the Contributors

Ibrahim A. I. Alfraih is Lecturer at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia. His research interests include modern Arabic literature, gender and narrative in the Gulf, postcolonialism and the East-West encounter. Abdelkarim Amengay is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Ottawa and Sciences Po, Paris. He is a recipient of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Scholarship. His thesis analyses how media content related to immigration and crime, among other issues, favoured the electoral success of the French radical right-wing party Front National. Previously, he published peer-reviewed articles on French politics in Political Science Review and the Revue française de science politique. Charles R. Batson is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Union College, Schenectady in New York, and currently serves as President of the American Council for Québec Studies. He is the author of Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theatre (2005), co-editor of journal issues devoted to a Queer Québec appearing in Québec Studies and Contemporary French Civilization, and co-editor of a special double issue of Contemporary French Studies on the legacy of Lawrence R. Schehr. He has published work on French and Francophone cultural production and performance in such journals as Performance Matters, SITES, Québec Studies, Gradiva, Dance Chronicle, Nottingham French Civilization, Contemporary French Studies and French Politics, Culture and Society. He co-edited, with Louis Patrick Leroux, a compendium of essays on Québec’s contemporary circus called Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries (2016), and he is co-convening a series of research encounters in the field of inquiry currently called Circus and Its Others.

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190

About the Contributors

Colin Coates is Coordinator of the Canadian Studies Program at Glendon College, the bilingual campus of York University, Toronto. He was formerly Director of the Robarts Centre of Canadian Studies and Canada Research Chair in Canadian Cultural Landscapes at York University, and Director of the Centre of Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He was the first President of the Canadian Studies Network – Réseau d’études canadiennes. He has published widely in the fields of the history of French Canada, environmental history and Canadian Studies. Claude Denis is Full Professor in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa, and co-editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies. He is author of We Are Not You. First Nations and Canadian Modernity (1997), of many articles, and editor of two books. He works on the politics of nationalism, democracy, citizenship and rights in Canada and Mexico. He has published on Indigenous politics and Francophone minorities in Canada. At the University of Ottawa, he has been Vice-Dean, Gouvernance and Internationalisation (interim) at the Faculty of Social Sciences; Full Professor (2003–2016) and Director (2013–2014) at the School of Political Studies; Director of the Centre on Governance (2003–2005) and Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Canadian Studies (2006–2012). He has been Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerika Studien, Freie Universität, Berlin (Germany), the Department of International Relations and History, Universidad de las Americas – Puebla (Mexico); and the departments of Sociology of the Universitie de Montréal and the University of Victoria (Canada). Peter Gatrell teaches history at the University of Manchester where he is affiliated with the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. He is the author of a trilogy of books on refugee history, including  A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War  I (1999) and  The Making of the Modern Refugee  (2013), as well as books on Russian economic history. His latest book, co-edited with Lyubov Zhvanko, is  Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War, 1912–1923 (2017). He is currently completing a history of migration in/to Europe since 1945, which will appear in May 2019. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He chaired the sub-panel in Area Studies for REF 2014. Rob Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter, UK, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. He is principal investigator of the European Research Council advanced award, “Law, Learning and Authority in Imami Shi’ite Islam”, and Project Leader of the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) Project USPPIP (Understanding Sharia: Past Perfect Imperfect Present). His research focuses on Shiite Islam and Muslim legal theory and hermeneutics.

About the Contributors

191

Nicolas Albertoni is a doctoral student in Political Science and International Relations at University of Southern California and Associate Researcher at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. He received a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Claus Bech Hansen holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and his work focuses on migration, development and state transformation. Currently, Hansen is working as a migration and development specialist at UNICEF’s Division on Data, Research and Policy. Prior to joining UNICEF, he was a Senior Researcher at the University of Bonn where he led the research consortium Crossroads Asia. He is the author and co-author of several publications, including  Protected on Paper?  An Analysis of Nordic Country Responses to AsylumSeeking Children (2018), Harrowing Journeys: Children and Youth on the Move across the Mediterranean Sea (2017), The Crossroads Perspective (2017) and Rethinking Area Studies: Figurations and the Construction of Space (forthcoming). Susan Hodgett is Professor and Director of Area Studies at the University of East Anglia, England. She has published widely on Area Studies, narratives and the Capability Approach. She is currently Chair of the Area Studies sub panel in the UK Research Excellence Framework to 2021 and is a Council member of Research England. She was Principal Investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Blurring Genres Network to 2018 with Professors R. A. W. Rhodes (University of Southampton) and Mark Bevir (University of California, Berkeley) and is currently writing on What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities – Blurring Genres with Rod Rhodes (forthcoming, 2019). She was formerly President of the International Council for Canadian Studies, the British Association for Canadian Studies and the UK Council for Area Studies Associations. Previously, she was General Secretary of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. Stephen Hutchings is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester. He worked previously at the University of Surrey (1996–2006) and the University of Rochester, New York (1990–1996). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. He was a member of the RAE 2008 subpanel for Russian and Slavonic Languages and Cultures. Stephen is Associate Editor of the Russian Journal of Communication and is on the editorial boards of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media and IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies. His research interests are in contemporary Russian media, film and cultural studies. He has won over £6 million in research grants since 2000. His most recent monograph, co-authored with Vera Tolz, is Nation, Race and Ethnicity on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference (2015).

192

About the Contributors

Patrick James is Dornsife Dean’s Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California (PhD, University of Maryland, College Park). James is the author or editor of twenty-eight books and over one-hundred-and-fifty articles and book chapters. Among his honours and awards are: Louise Dyer Peace Fellowship from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Thomas Enders Professorship in Canadian Studies at the University of Calgary; Senior Scholar Award from the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC; Quincy Wright Scholar Award from the International Studies Association (ISA; Midwest); Beijing Foreign Studies University Eminent Scholar; Eccles Professor of the British Library; and Ole R. Holsti Distinguished Scholar of the ISA (West). He is a past President of the ISA (Midwest) and the Iowa Conference of Political Scientists. James has been Distinguished Scholar in Foreign Policy Analysis for the ISA (2006–2007) and Distinguished Scholar in Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration for ISA (2009–2010). He served as President of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (2007–2009); President of the International Council for Canadian Studies (2011–2013); President of the Peace Science Society (2016–2017); and President of the ISA (2018–2019). James also served a five-year term as editor of International Studies Quarterly. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor of American Literature at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany. She has published on Comparative North American Studies; Canadian literature, culture, and literary theory; city fiction and spatial theory; and Gender Studies. Books include New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban (2011); Disrespected Neighbo(u)rs: Cultural Stereotypes in Literature and Film (2018, ed. with Volkman and Zagratzki). Her current research interests are related to Mobility Studies, TransArea Studies, and Ecocriticism. Christopher Sabatini is Lecturer of International Relations and Public Policy at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University and founder and executive director of the new research non-profit Global Americans, www.TheGlobalAmericans.org. With support from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Ford Foundation, Global Americans conducts research on social inclusion and foreign policy and democracy and human rights. From 2005 to 2014 he was the Senior Director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). He has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development and has published numerous articles on Latin America, US foreign policy, democratization and economic development. He has testified before the US Senate and House of Representatives and is contributor to Foreign Affairs, recently publishing ‘Inter-American Relations in the Trump Era’; ForeignPolicy.com on the decline of Venezuela and Brazil’s foreign policy ambitions, titled “The Sad Death of the Latin American Left’; and the New York Times, where he wrote the op eds ‘We Shouldn’t Ignore Cuba’ and ‘Tillerson’s Attempt to Mend Ties in Latin America’. Sabatini regularly provides

About the Contributors

193

interviews for Bloomberg News, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, NPR, The News Hour, the Miami Herald, CNN, the Washington Post, and CNN en Español. Mandy Sadan (SOAS, University of London) is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of borderland regions in Asia, with a particular interest in issues of historical representation, memory, conflict and gender. She has been researching, writing and teaching about the northern borderland regions of Burma/ Myanmar, India, China and Thailand for more than two decades. She is author of numerous articles on related issues and, in 2015, was awarded the inaugural EuroSEAS Nikkei Asian Review Prize for Best Book in the Humanities for her first research monograph, Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma (2013). Zahia Smail Salhi is Professor and Chair of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester. She served as a member of Sub-Panel 27 Area Studies of the Research Excellence Framework in the UK (2010–2014) and as Executive Director of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (2008–2010). She was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (2013–2016) and is currently Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and Vice President of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies. Her research focuses on women and gender in MENA, Postcolonial Studies and the East-West encounter.