European Journal of Cultural Studies
2014, Vol. 17(1) 3­–15
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549413501475
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european j o u rnal o f
The spectre of Europe:
Knowledge, cultural studies
and the ‘rise of Asia’
Yiu Fai Chow
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Jeroen de Kloet
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Abstract
This introduction starts with an exploration of the ambiguity of the idea of Europe.
In particular, two tropes – Europe-as-theory and Europe-as-power – continue to
haunt knowledge production and cultural studies in Asia. How to proceed? What
should cultural studies do if it is to embrace this historical conjuncture of shifting
modes of knowledge and power production, how to deal with its Anglocentrism
and Eurocentrism? While this special issue allies itself with attempts to unsettle
Eurocentrism in knowledge production, it is not making any plea for regionallyrooted
practices or theories. It argues for better understanding, dialogue and crossfertilisation
between cultural studies and area studies. The former needs the latter’s
sensibility to spatial and cultural context as much as the latter needs the former’s
theorisations. This introduction is an opening. It opens up not only to the ensuing
articles but, more importantly, an occasion for the inevitable encounter argued for
in this special issue.
Keywords
Area studies, Asia, Asiacentrism, cultural studies, Europe, Eurocentrism, Orientalism,
Occidentalism, postcolonial theory
Universalist arrogance serves only to keep new possibilities from emerging, since
it allows only one set of accepted analytic language to enter the dialogue and is itself a
product of a specific set of historical experiences. (Chen, 2010: 245)
Corresponding author:
Yiu Fai Chow, RRS608, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist
University, Waterloo Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Email: yfchow@hkbu.edu.hk
501475ECS17110.1177/1367549413501475European Journal of Cultural StudiesChow and de Kloet
2013
Article
4	 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(1)
[T]here is no ‘context’ anymore, other than cascading glimpses of splintered
Othernesses on the world screen of mechanically reproduced imagery. In this world the
glimpse, like the sound-bite and the after-image, is where the action is,
Dada-like impulsions of Othernesses hurled at disconcerted beings splayed open to the
future. (Taussig, 1993: 249)
Looking after Europe
This special issue aims to look after Europe in the sense of being concerned with what
Europe, and more generally, ‘Western theory’, has to offer in this conjuncture. It also
aims to look after Europe in the concomitant sense of looking at a world after Europe,
and seek what trajectories outside of Europe are possible, desirable and feasible. While
this special issue allies itself with attempts to unsettle Eurocentrism in the domain of
knowledge production, particularly in cultural studies, it is not making any plea for
regionally-rooted practices or theories per se. We try to walk on a tightrope; we are
interested in provincialising cultural studies, but at the same time are aware of the problems
of parochialism. Are we to believe in an Asian retreat to local knowledge and
indigenous theory? Are we already living in a world after Europe, after a shift of theoretical
and empirical paradigm that even the critique of Eurocentrism, or, in Ien Ang’s
witticism, Europe-bashing (1998: 76) has become passé? We do not think so. Taking
Europe as power, and Europe as theory, we argue for better understanding, dialogue and
cross-fertilisation between cultural studies and area studies. The former needs the latter’s
sensibility to spatial and cultural context, as much as the latter needs the former’s
theorisations. Therefore, we take this introduction as an opening. It opens up the
European Journal of Cultural Studies to the ensuing articles informed by the authors’
experiences with Asia, as well as an occasion for the inevitable encounter that we argue,
and have been waiting for.
That the special issue in the end appears in the European Journal of Cultural Studies,
rather than Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Boundary, Traces or positions, underlines our
wish to speak to Europe, to proceed in the current historical conjuncture of rapid geopolitical
changes which may propel a changing mode of knowledge production in ‘the
Asian century’. To mention something of the obvious, regional and global economies
have been so differently configured in the new century that the wealth and power imbalances
between foreign observers and native informants, between those who study and
those who are studied, particularly in the East Asian area, have morphed into quite a
different scenario, impacting on how knowledge in the field is being produced (see
Miyoshi and Harootunian, 2002; for a discussion on the persistent inequalities in the
South East Asian area, see Heryanto, 2007).
In this introduction, first we will discuss the ambiguity of Europe, which is neither
here nor there. What is Europe to us? Why is it ambiguously there? Second, we ask ourselves
how to move on, and what has been done already. Then, what should cultural
studies do if it is to embrace this historical conjuncture of shifting modes of knowledge
and power production, how to deal with its Anglo- and Eurocentrism? Finally, how to
read the special issue?
Of course, Europe is not one – or in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty:
Chow and de Kloet	 5
there were and still are many Europes, real, historical, and fantasised. Perhaps the boundaries
between them are porous. My concern, however, was the Europe that has historically haunted
debates on modernity in India. (2000: xiv)
The colonising spectre of Europe remains a paramount global presence.As Partha Chatterjee
argued two decades ago, in his critique on Benedict Anderson:
Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not
only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial
resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.
(1993: 5)
Furthermore, a conflation of ‘Europe’with ‘the West’is highly problematic: other studies
have analysed how it is often that the US academy makes, for example, French theory
global (see also Kuipers in this issue).
For us, ‘Europe’ refers, first, to the role that European theory continues to play in
global knowledge production and, second, to the role it has played as a colonial power
– a role that remains relevant until today, as Chen Kuan-hsing argues so convincingly in
his Asia as Method (2010), echoing the position of Chatterjee. Both tropes – Europe-astheory
and Europe-as-power – continue to haunt knowledge production and cultural
studies in Asia. As Chakrabarty (2000) argues, if Europe is both indispensable and inadequate,
this special issue testifies to that indispensability and inadequacy.
For the two authors of this introduction, such ambiguous entanglement with Europe
is as personal as it is political. Allow us to foreground our speaking positions in order to
elucidate the urgency, for us, to initiate a conference, and subsequently this special issue.
For Yiu Fai Chow, his growing up experience, particularly that of education, in Hong
Kong when it was still under British colonial rule meant that he became familiarised to
things loosely considered British, European or Western as much as, if not more than,
things Chinese, Asian or Oriental. Embedded in the logic of cultural imperialism, this
process of Europeanisation was not only considered natural, but actually preferred. In
1992, Chow migrated to the Netherlands, where he continued to ‘naturalise’ himself
culturally, ultimately in terms of nationality. At the same time, he was increasingly aware
of his otherness. During his PhD period, Chow was one of the few ‘ethnics’minorities in
his research school. Similar dynamics of ethnicisation and marginalisation flared up at
conferences prefixed with ‘European’, where white academics dominated. For all that
Europe speaks to him, or in him, to the extent that he was staying there for decades and
making it his home, he feels something not unlike what Ien Ang wrote on her migration
experience in the Netherlands: ‘I never quite became a “real” European’ (Ang, 1998: 80;
emphasis in original).
Jeroen de Kloet experiences this European indispensability and inadequacy in different
ways. Born and bred in the Netherlands, white, having a typical Dutch name,
de Kloet might not have to question his Europeanness, if not due to his research interest.
Unlike Chow, he was interpellated not so much by who he was, but by what he did. For
his PhD project, he chose China as his research site. Since then, his academic work
almost always has been preoccupied with China or Asia in general. Based in Amsterdam
6	 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(1)
and operating not primarily in the field of area studies, he is confronted with similar
dynamics of marginalisation when he must explain Super Girls or Korean Wave to his
colleagues, while he is expected to be informed of the latest trends as well as the general
history of Western popular culture. In other words, if Chow never quite became a real
European, de Kloet became not quite the real European that he ever was.
In short, our biographies, whether understood personally or politically, have been
urging us to deal with the spectre of Europe. Again, given our biographies – we are
not quite the ‘real’ Asian either – we understand that Asiacentrism is as untenable as
Eurocentrism, and the appeal to rethink knowledge production and cultural studies is
not only directed towards Western scholars. Elsewhere, we have taken up our struggle
with the entanglement of Europe and Asia by comparing the grunge band Nirvana’s
album Nevermind with the cinema of Zhang Yimou, thus pushing at the boundaries of
comparative research and forging unexpected alliances (de Kloet and Chow, forthcoming).
It will be published in the Chinese language, addressing a somewhat different
readership in a volume edited by a fellow contributor to this special issue,
Kwai-Cheung Lo. As far as this special issue is concerned, the authors and their narratives
included are wrestling with a Europe that, despite or precisely due to its apparent
evanescence, reappears like a spectre.
As a spectre goes, it is often shadowy, without depth. Whereas we are all too familiar
with Asia being flattened and stereotyped, we are aware that some contributions in this
special issue may be read as doing the same, but now reversed, as if Orientalism is in the
current conjuncture overtaken by Occidentalism – a term that refers to the essentialistic
rendering of ‘the West’. As Sun Ge writes, ‘Occidentalism had, at least in the modern
history of East Asia, once played a key role in mediating the self-knowledge of the
nations within the East with important questions being stirred up in the process’ (2007:
9–10). The past tense seems unqualified to us, as occidentalist discourses, like its orientalist
counterpart, are still very much in place today. We do not wish simply to critique
Europe as a self-aggrandising move, as Ang wrote, ‘a militant, self-righteous, hyperoppositional
stance serves only to deflate itself through the unproductive demonisation
of a grandiose, abstract, Euro-Other’ (1998: 76). However, if Occidentalism does creep
into our analyses, we believe that it is a productive one, as it summons every one of us to
be more critical of our speaking positions, presumptions and our own spectres of the East
and the West, in the end more willing to proceed with rethinking knowledge and cultural
studies in a world that is so profoundly in flux.
The closing keynote of the 2012 Paris Crossroads conference by Walter Mignolo took
precisely this theme. In his talk ‘Spirit Returns to the East: The Racial Distribution of
Capital and Knowledge’, Mignolo discussed how recent geopolitical changes increasingly
will marginalise knowledge production from the West in favour of the rest (a ‘rest’,
we want to add, that may well be dominated by the BRIC countries, just as ‘Asia’ may
well be dominated by East Asian localities) – a process, he argues, that in modern history
can be traced back to the 1955 Bandung Conference. Whether such assertions are true is
not the point here; what is important is what is going on in the production of knowledge
in the current global geopolitical conjuncture, and how cultural studies deals with it. This
is important because global power balances are shifting rapidly. In another essay published
in the journal Cultural Studies, Mignolo reminds us:
Chow and de Kloet	 7
Although silenced in mainstream media, multiple fractures are creating a larger spatial
epistemic breaks (e.g. geopolitics of knowledge) in the overarching totality of Western global
and universal history that from Hegel to Huntington was successful in negating subjectivities
from non-Western, non-capitalist, non-Christian nations. (2007: 493)
Informed by our experience as ‘not quite a real European’, we take those multiple fractures
not so much as matters of fact, but rather as matters of concern (Latour, 2005).
While we hesitate to provoke with a return of the spirit to the East, we want to build on
such multiple fractures and, to borrow Mignolo’s terminology, feed into this process and
movement of ‘de-linking’ from the spectre of Europe.
Provincialising cultural studies?
Ackbar Abbas and John Erni state:
[A]lthough the dominance of cultural studies as a NorthAtlantic ideal or ideology or educational
practice is evident, that ideal has become part of international consciousness, a lens through
which to see the development of critical cultural studies movements elsewhere in the world, as
well as a discourse capable of potent reflexivity and self-challenge. (2005: xxv)
Later in the same book, they claim that ‘whether it is about combating academic imperialism,
performing critical comparisons, or rediscovering alternative traditions, cultural
studies need to be inclusive of a wide array of diverse speaking positions’ (2005: 7).
Eight years after this appeal, our academic experience informs us that much is yet to be
done to de-link Europe from theory as well as from power.
Fortunately, recent years have seen a rise of publications that focus on the question of
global knowledge production and cultural studies. In addition to Abbas and Erni’s
Internationalizing Cultural Studies (2005), we want to specifically refer to and build on a by
no means exhaustive or encompassing selection of scholarly projects explicitly connected to
Asia. We are thinking of Laurie Sears’ edited volume, Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects
(2007),inparticularSears’co-authoredintroductionwithCarloBonura;MargaretHillebrand’s
editedspecialissueinPostcolonialStudies(2010)andheropeningarticle‘Communitarianism,
or, How to Build East Asian theory’; Chen Kuan-hsing’s Asia as Method (2010); Emma
Baulch and Julian Millie’s edited special issue on Indonesia in International Journal of
Cultural Studies (2013); and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project.
The last mentioned on the list is particularly noteworthy, as it is one of the most productive
forces that looks for, or aims at, a de-centred mode of knowledge production and
cultural studies. It is framed clearly as an attempt to move beyond the spectre of Europe,
as Chen and Chua state in the introduction of The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader:
The West has mediated and shaped the mode of knowledge production in the analyses of Asian
societies, politics and cultures, and in self-understanding. The hegemony of ‘the West as
method’ blocks the possibility of us looking toward relatively similar historical experiences
shared in Asia, Latin America and Africa. [The movement aims to] open up the West-oriented
singularity and to multiply frames of reference and sites of identification. (2007: 1)
8	 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(1)
To quote from its official website:
Since the late 1990s, the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project has worked towards the imagination
and possibilities of diverse forms of intellectual integration in Asia. Besides publishing
intellectual work produced out of Asia since 2000, the IACS has also organized various
activities to contribute to the interaction of scholars working in and onAsia. (Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies Society, 2013)
Intertwined with this project is the highly influential Asia as Method: Toward
Deimperialization (2010; first published as an essay in Chinese, later in book form in
English) by Chen, one of the key figures in driving the project forward. Can we summarise
its thrust by paraphrasing Chakrabarty, that is, to provincialise cultural studies?
For Chen, deconstructing or provincialising is not enough. In his words: ‘To provincialise
Europe is a process that will loosen but not change the structure of the dialogue. A
more active process needs to be initiated in order for a dialogue among sites outside
Europe to take place’ (2010: 219). However, a developing country nativism, which
‘assumes that there is an indigenous consciousness and selfhood which has not been
touched by colonial subjectivity’ (2010: 221) remains locked in a model in which ‘the
West’ serves as a singular ‘Other that conditions the anxiety of the nativist’ (2010: 222).
For Chen, ‘in a close reading of these postcolonial strategies of response, we cannot help
but see that the West as the location of the Other is a perspective shared by all of the theorists
discussed here’ (2010: 222). How to move beyond the formula of the West and the
rest (Hall, 1992)?
Situating his argument in the ‘problematic of decolonisation, deimperialisation, and
de-cold war’ (2010: 212), Chen posits that Asia should become a method rather than
remaining an object of study. According to Chen, ‘using the idea of Asia as an imaginary
anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so
that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt’ (2010:
212). Europe then becomes just one out of many possible sources of reference: ‘Once
recognizing the West as fragments internal to the local, we no longer consider it as an
opposing entity but rather as one cultural resource among many others’ (2010: 223).
Chen’s plea for such a method of engagement is made in the context of Eurocentric
experience that intellectuals in Asia are inclined, or simply persuaded by academic
habits, to connect with the West rather than among themselves. (See Iwabuchi’s article
in this special issue on inter-Asian referencing; and Kwai-Cheung Lo’s article on ‘Asia
as method’.)
Speaking from similar discontent with the persistence of Eurocentrism, Hillebrand
observes that in East Asian Studies, ‘it is the “old masters” of Western theory who continue
to describe the broad contours and grand features of the intellectual landscape, and
whose influence is writ large all over the canvas’(2010: 317). This subsequently inspires
her to urge East Asianists to shed their reluctance and ‘get on with the hard graft of turning
the regions’ thinkers, theorists, and philosophers into shining icons who can shed
their light across our fields’ (2010: 324), to build an ‘East Asian theory’. Such trajectory
may inspire, for example, translations of scholars who are not allowed entry into the
charmed circle of cultural studies.
Chow and de Kloet	 9
While this special issue allies itself with the above-mentioned attempts to unsettle
Eurocentrism in the domain of knowledge production, it is not making any plea for
regionally-rooted practices or theories per se. Chen acknowledges the current and historical
power dynamics in the region, and questions the use of Asia ‘as an emotional
signifier to call for regional integration and solidarity’(2010: 219). However, when Chen
writes that ‘[t]he task for Asia as method is to multiply frames of reference in our subjectivity
and worldview, so that our anxiety over the West can be diluted, and productive
critical work can move forward (2010: 223)’, we cannot help but wonder: who is included
in this ‘our’, and who is excluded, and based on what premises: locality, ethnicity, nationality,
blood? Indeed, to insist on the multiplicity of either Europe or Asia runs the risk of
ignoring the power structures that render some Asian (or European, or Western) voices
more vocal than others. Hillebrand notes that the field of East Asian studies has ‘now
shrugged off its subaltern epistemological status, so much so that parts of it have developed
colonizing ambitions themselves’ (2010: 319). The current proliferation of China
studies programmes and centres around the world provides a case in point, and hints at a
political economy underpinning knowledge production. Indeed, some localities, languages,
local knowledges and speaking positions are privileged above others, and it is
part of the thrust of cultural studies to try to question and critique such emerging new
colonialisms. Or, to put it in the words of Rey Chow:
If one of the major tasks of cultural studies is that of bringing the entire notion of ‘culture’ into
crisis rather than simply that of assembling different cultures for their mutual admiration, then
a localist and nationalist strategy as such, which returns culture to the status of some origin,
property, or set of attributes – such as ‘Chinese,’ ‘French,’ ‘American’ – that everyone owns
prior to language and discourse, would precisely put an end to the critical impetus of cultural
studies. (1998: 9–10)
Indeed, ‘the advocacy for a return to indigenous theory and culture usually masks, with
the violence of “the West,” the violence of the cultural politics that is within an indigenous
culture’ (Chow, 1998: 9; emphasis in original). They are precisely the problems of
parochialism that dislocate an author such as Ien Ang from the Inter-Asia cultural studies
movement, as her plea for a truly transnational cultural studies movement is at odds with
a specific regional project. Similarly, as we have just read, the work of Rey Chow steers
away from any attempt to localise knowledge and parochialise knowledge production;
instead, it aims relentlessly to interrogate any form of knowledge, warning against ethnicity
as an index of authentic cultural knowledge and ‘the fraught trajectory of coercive
mimeticism’ (2002: 124). Seeking to de-link from the ‘Totality of Western epistemology’,
Mignolo cautions:
We are not, of course, looking to retrieve an authentic knowledge from Chinese, Arabic or
Aymara; but, rather, we want to include the perspective and in the foundation of knowledge
subjectivities that have been subjected in and by the colonial matrix of power. (2007: 493)
While the spectre of Europe keeps on haunting global knowledge production, as all contributions
in this issue attest to, it seems likely that Mignolo is right to claim that centres
10	 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(1)
of knowledge production are shifting, and with them possibly also the parameters of
what constitutes good knowledge, and what makes theory work or not. Western scholarship
has long been blatantly ignorant and indifferent about both knowledge as well as
cultural practices beyond its own boundaries; this ignorance and indifference is increasingly
difficult to sustain under current geopolitical changes. However, as we have argued
previously, we are highly sceptical of a retreat to local knowledge and indigenous theories,
and their exclusionary tendencies. The biographies of both authors of this introduction
inform such scepticism. As noted earlier, we are not quite the real European, neither
are we quite the real Asian; if we are not comfortable with a Eurocentric mode of knowledge
production, we are also wary of an Asiacentric way of explaining the world. We are
not sure to what extent we feel included in the ‘our’ of Chen. If, to cite Ang’s critique of
Eurocentrism, the ‘European Subject cannot imagine that non-European others might
have some pertinent role to play in the deconstruction and reconstruction of “Europe”’
(1998: 89), we want to imagine differently in the current power shifts coded as the Asian
century.
In that sense, our position is closer to what Bonura and Sears explicate in their introductory
chapter to the book Knowing Southern Asian Subjects (2007), which explores
‘how the changing hierarchical relationships between Southeast Asia and the EuroAmerican
“West” have resulted in parallel changes in scholarship in Southeast Asia’
(2007: 3). Their central concern is to rethink disciplinary and regional claims to represent
South-East Asia, with the fundamental argument that ‘all claims to disciplinary knowledge
must recognize the limits on their ways of knowing’ (2007: 4). The special issue
shares this concern, with the tactical difference that it is not speaking primarily to area
studies.
Rather, our preference in publishing this special issue in the European Journal of
Cultural Studies is to urge the inevitable encounter between cultural studies and area
studies in the changing cartography of knowledge production. Introducing their special
issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Baulch and Millie offer a compliment-cum-critique
to cultural studies, that it requests rightly the ‘area subject’ to speak
for itself, forgetting that it must speak ‘in its own language and conceptual repertoire’
(2013: 237–238). Zooming in on Indonesia, the focus of the special issue, they conclude:
‘What is clear, however, is that the two disciplinary worlds are complementary, together
creating a necessary and productive context for seeking understanding of media and their
meanings in contemporary Indonesia’ (2013: 238). Ariel Heryanto, one of the issue’s
contributors, probes the possibility of converging cultural and area studies with reference
to South-East Asia. Like us, Heryanto cites the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project as an
example, alluding to the internationalisation of cultural studies as one scenario of producing
knowledge in the area, or in his words, ‘a Southeast Asian-focused cultural studies’
(2013: 304). As this special issue shows, when doing cultural studies in Indonesia,
one is bound to engage with area studies. Indeed, the moment that cultural studies moves
out of its Eurocentric comfort zone, one faces the uncanny proximity between cultural
studies and area studies (see Chow, 1998). While area studies is burdened by a history of
colonialism, Cold War rhetoric and imperialism (Chen, 2010), cultural studies is burdened
by its Eurocentrism. When a turn to local or indigenous knowledge runs counter
to the project of cultural studies itself – that tries to put the cultural adjective under
Chow and de Kloet	 11
erasure – an uncritical globalisation of western knowledge is equally problematic. Both
need each other, so it seems, but what is often lacking in disciplines located outside area
studies is a sensibility to the importance of place, resulting in an implicit claim to universalism.
It is our contention that area studies needs the theorisations of cultural studies,
just as the latter needs area studies’ sensibility to spatial and cultural context.
Here, we like to add one final note before we further elaborate the thematic structure
of this special issue: namely, the notion of context. Our questioning of the ‘our’in Chen’s
work can be coupled to a questioning of the stability of locality. Whereas context sounds
more neutral than culture, in the end it may well serve the same ideological purposes of
conveniently categorising and essentialising places, histories and people. According to
Lawrence Grossberg:
[C]ontext is spatial, defining a bounded interiority, a stable island of ordered presence in the
midst of an otherwise empty of chaotic space; second, context is relational, constituted always
by sets and trajectories of social relations and relationalities that establish its exteriority to
itself. (2010a: 30)
This inspires him to a plea for a radical contextualism, for which he borrows heavily
from the thinking of Hall as well as Deleuze and Guattari, to move subsequently from
context to conjuncture. For Grossberg,
conjuncturalism is a description of change, articulation, and contradiction; it describes a mobile
multiplicity, the unity of which is always temporary and fractured … Conjunctural analysis has
to look at the non-necessary articulations of the socio-material, the lived-experiential, and the
ontological realities of the conjuncture. (2010a: 41, 43)
We cannot help but feel estranged from this abstract and placeless language, one that is
firmly grounded in the established canon of cultural studies which, as we have argued,
privileges certain (Euro-Anglo-based) contexts above others, and one that in the end consistently
arrives at a similar conclusion: that everything is complex and contradictory. The
opening quote of this introduction from Michael Taussig shares this mistrust in contextualism,
radical or not, and in our reading flags up a warning towards area studies as well as
Grossberg’s plea for a radical contextualism. Contexts have become like chambers of
mirrors, endlessly reflecting and refracting. What is left in today’s globalised world are, at
most, glimpses of splintered Othernesses, power ‘keeps ricocheting from West to Other,
from mimesis to alterity, and back again in what can only be thought of as endless mobility
one step ahead of interpretative discharge’ (Taussig, 1993: 249). This kind of global
moving and spinning contextualism and conjunturalism makes the question of how to
proceed in knowledge production in cultural studies in today’s world as urgent as it is difficult.
This special issue presents one modest attempt to tackle this difficulty.
Three themes
While the central theme of this special issue is knowledge production in the current historical
conjuncture, in particular the role of cultural studies in what is often claimed to
12	 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(1)
have become the ‘Asian Century’, we propose to read the contributions along three interlocking
axes: contemplation, elucidation and intervention.
Contemplation
Writing about the significance of cultural studies, Lawrence Grossberg claims that:
[T]he project of cultural studies is to tell better stories about what’s going on, and to begin to
enable imagining new possibilities for a future that can be reached from the present – one more
humane and just than that promised by the trajectories we find ourselves on. (2010b: 241)
We want to add: who is in a better position to tell these better stories? All of our contributions,
some more explicitly than the others, seek to contemplate this thorny issue of
knowledge production, namely: who holds the power and the right to tell what is going
on? Who is being silenced?
Rey Chow, in discussing the filmic works of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jia
Zhangke, delves into the contestation of native informants and foreign observers in
deciding and claiming what is real. As the opening piece for this issue, she reconfigures
their contestation into a poignant question: ‘like men and women, native informant
and foreign observer are forever thrown together and must coexist, collaborate,
and communicate as though there were a relation somewhere. How to proceed?’
(p. 17). Kwai-Cheung Lo writes a genealogy of Takeuchi Yoshimi’s idea of ‘Asia as
Method’, and explains its contingency on Europe, drawing partly on the idea of Asia
as method that has been recently pushed forward so prominently by Kuan-Hsing
Chen. For Takeuchi, Lo argues, ‘“Asia as method” may mean Asia courageously
embraces the negativity brought by Europe as the path to a higher stage of freedom
and equality’ (p. 31).
Koichi Iwabuchi engages with the question of what knowledge production in Asia is
and can be. Moving towards a more regionalist approach, Iwabuchi reviews the rise of
research on local, East Asian, media culture connections, and considers the significance
of inter-Asian referencing and the next step to be taken, with the provocative conclusion:
‘So much needs to be done. We are too busy to look after Europe’ (p. 55).
Finally, in the closing piece of this issue, Giselinde Kuipers turns our gaze back to
Europe. Contemplating the question of the publics and ethics of academic virtues, she
poses the central question for which we, cultural studies scholars, write while proposing
the important virtue of doubt in knowledge production.
Elucidation
These contributions not only contemplate who is to tell what is going on; on a more
empirical level, they also try to tell what is going on. Jeroen de Kloet investigates contemporary
cultural practices, to explore how Europe haunts China and with what
effect, and which possibilities of resistance or a reworking of ‘Europe’ are available.
Intrigued by what he calls the ‘hyper-European’ style of new architectures that he has
seen in Beijing, de Kloet engages with publicity materials of real estate developers and
Chow and de Kloet	 13
an animation film by an overseas Chinese artist to analyse the translation of Europe to
China when Europe is turned into a façade.
Chow connects a documentary by Antonioni with a film by Jia Zhangke, and probes
into (Chinese) documentary realism in the age of digital synchronisation. According to
Chow, ‘What Jia’s films make explicit, then, is much less documentary realism in the
old-fashioned sense than the cultural politics of a new conceptual project. This is the
project of imagining modern China, first and foremost, as medial information, a project
that takes the documentary-ing of China as its key engagement. Moving from cultural
practices to academic practices, Kuipers draws on her experiences in the European academy
of our time. While teaching Bourdieu’s (1984) quadrant of class and tastes, she
asked students to describe the tastes of people working in different fields, and the cliché
answers came readily. One year, she asked again: What would people working in social
science departments at universities like? ATaiwanese student volunteered: ‘Gucci bags’.
Indeed, why would educated Europeans not buy Gucci bags? Her encounter with Asia in
a European classroom guides her to ‘new questions and debates, and to the sudden loss
of relevance of old ones’ (p. 77). Drawing similarly on academic practices, Lo and
Iwabuchi explore the working of the Asian academic context, in which cultural studies is
necessarily entangled with area studies and postcolonial studies.
Intervention
While the contributions can be read individually for their thoughts on knowledge production
and elucidation of what is going on, they also should be understood as a collective
effort to intervene in the Eurocentric mode of knowledge production. We are aware
that critique of Eurocentrism has been going on for quite some time (Sohat and Stam,
1994). Ien Ang observes that ‘as the end of twentieth century draws near, “world history”
is no longer explainable from an exclusively Eurocentric point of view’ (1998: 89). She
understands Hans Enzensberger’s proposition of ‘reluctant Eurocentrism’, as ‘a “politically
correct” version of a more general, unreflexive European chauvinism which is quite
widespread throughout the continent’ (1998: 89).
More than one decade further in the 21st century, we agree with Hillebrand’s (2010)
observation that critique of Eurocentrism may have become commonplace, or even
unfashionable – and yet it still exists. In this case, we still need to intervene through
rethinking knowledge production, and rethinking cultural studies that concern with
knowledge production, both of which must wrestle with the legacy of European domination.
Remembering Shu-mei Shih’s caution that ‘[c]harges of repetition and yawns of
familiarity then, may be hazards one must anticipate in insisting on continuous dissections
of Eurocentrism’ (Shih, cited in Hillebrand, 2010: 4), we hope that the contributions
in this issue can serve as active interventions. It opens with Rey Chow’s contribution,
which sets out the basic parameters, and asks the central question: how to proceed. Then,
de Kloet follows a more conventionally empirical track, after which Lo and Iwabuchi
reflect on doing cultural studies in Asia. All of them demonstrate in their works attempts
to proceed which, at the same time, should be taken as attempts to intervene in modes of
knowledge production and possibilities of doing cultural studies. The special issue is
closed by Giselinde Kuipers’ contribution, which, finally, brings the perspective back to
14	 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(1)
Europe and the role of cultural studies in Western academia, inserting one keyword into
whoever is seeking to know: doubt.
This insistence on doubt, we believe, serves as an important reminder that in all our
scholarly work there is the need to be unsure, to be puzzled and to be cautious, to be
insistent on the specificity of our claims and their contingency upon time and place.
These may read like trivial statements, but until today, ‘Western’ scholarship can still
conveniently ignore these specificities (as signalled by universal pretentions implicit in
book titles such as ‘Gender Trouble’), whereas scholars working on places outside the
West carry time and again the geopolitical burden of representation. This anthropological
and geopolitical deadlock haunts cultural studies and knowledge production in general.
With the alleged rise of China, or the heralding of the Asian century, the need for new
modes of knowledge production becomes more urgent than ever, so that we may develop
tools to negotiate not only the spectre of Eurocentrism, but also the possible emergence
of Asiacentrism. If only things indeed could fall more apart, if only the centre truly could
not hold.
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Biographical notes
Yiu Fai Chow is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong
Kong Baptist University. His publications concern Chinese diaspora, gender, popular culture and
creative industries, and have appeared in Cultural Studies, Signs, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and
China Information. In 2013, his book, co-authored with Jeroen de Kloet, titled Sonic Multiplicities:
Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image, was published by Intellect.
Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies in the Faculty of Humanities, University
of Amsterdam, and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies. He works on the
cultural implications of globalisation in China. His monograph China with a Cut: Globalisation,
Urban Youth and Popular Music was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2010.