Inter-Asia and Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore: A Personal Evaluation

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<p>This paper explores how Southeast Asian Studies can benefit from, but also contribute to, efforts to rethink Asian alterities within Asia by using institutional and disciplinary developments at the National University of Singapore. It shows how revisions of Asian Studies in the aftermath of the Orientalist critique have produced a critical brand of Inter-Asia discourses that provincialize dominant/Western narratives in order to recover autonomous Asian thought and action. However, an over-emphasis on Inter-Asia studies risks submerging a sub-regional field like Southeast Asian Studies that has long been concerned with the problem of autonomous differences. Furthermore, Inter-Asia insistence on regional alterities comes with the attendant risk of exclusivism that closes off any translatability between (Southeast) Asia and the West/the rest of the world. How then can the quest for Asian differences contribute to more inclusive or democratic understandings of human diversity and possibilities? This paper argues that intercultural approaches developed within Southeast Asian Studies fill gaps in Inter-Asia discourses by bringing incompatible differences into dialogue to reveal and reinstate unexpected interdependencies, thereby arriving at renewed understandings of the inseparability and parity of radical differences.</p>

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