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Part front matter for Part I Reshaping Area Studies in an Era of Globalization
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Published:April 2010
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A sense of contemporary crisis in area studies can be ascribed to recent real shifts in the global geopolitical landscape engendered by the end of the Cold War, the (uneven) globalization of capitalist production, and various challenges to the sovereign power of the national state. However, the three chapters in this section together show that the apparently clear and fixed boundaries of the areas that we studied were always little more than arbitrary fictions convenient for instrumental purposes. Arif Dirlik points out, for example, that “there is nothing innocent about our spatializations of the world,” while Martin Lewis shows that none of the spatial units we use to understand the world are foundational, and Neil Smith asks why we use particular fictional categories and not others. Without coherently defined and consistent areas, how can we defend the institutional project of area studies?
These contributions work together to expose the inadequacy of the conceptual categories we have used to bring order and stability to the temporal and spatial flux of our world. As they explore various frameworks proposed as alternatives to area studies, however, they also find them wanting. The challenge is not to find a convincing substitute for existing regional geographies as much as to problematize the spatializing project itself. Area studies must be more critically reflexive regarding its categories for ordering the world and more attentive to social geographical theory.
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