Response to Comments on “Asia Redux”

Summary

Over the last year, as I have presented this paper at various venues, I have received a range of responses. One of them is that this paper is less a disinterested study and more like advocacy. I have hastened to confirm that mine is a position of ethical advocacy, but not without an empirical basis. Objectivity, impartiality, and autonomy from political positions are important ideals in the academic profession, and I count myself among the more enthusiastic supporters of such values. At the same time, I am not so naive as to believe that scholars do not inescapably reflect the intellectual and political positions to be found in the world out there. It is vital to acknowledge this connection because, in doing so, we subject our position and judgement to the scrutiny of their basis in objectivity and accuracy.

What is to be scrutinised are the materials and case I am presenting for a reemergent Asia. My understanding of the material leads me to believe that some form of region making will continue to emerge. Where my personal ethics and preferences play a role lies in my advocacy of one direction among others, that this development could take in the future.

Turning to the question of the ethical aims of such a project, Wang Hui's typically thoughtful considerations give us a good point of entry. Wang appears to be in fundamental agreement with my account, but he seeks to clarify the goals: how can this emergent Asia make a difference? His concluding summary puts it pithily, “the issue of Asia is not simply an Asian issue, but rather a matter of ‘world history.’” Reconsidering “Asian history” is at once to reconstruct nineteenth-century European “world history,” and an effort to break free of the twenty-first-century “new imperial” order and its associated logic. The critique of Eurocentrism, he argues, cannot be an affirmation of Asiacentrism, but rather an attempt to transform a logic dominated by “egocentrism, exclusivity, and expansionism.” I endorse this vision and find it fully compatible with the thrust of my paper.