Reimagining Asia?
Europe is no longer the centre of gravity of the world. Whether such a revelation is an occasion for joy or cause for surprise or worry, one thing remains certain: the demotion of Europe opens up possibilities—and presents dangers—for critical thought. (Mbembe in Goldberg 2018, 1)
Writing in May 2016, the former editor of Le Monde and columnist of the Guardian newspaper, Natalie Nougayrède, observed that ‘Asia may be thriving, [but] it is haunted by the ghosts of its past—nationalist passions are high’. She went on to argue that while
Europe has built its unity on overcoming old hatreds and antagonism, Asia’s tensions have their roots not just in rivalries between countries but in a battle over memory. The traumas of the 20th century were never overcome in this region. (Nougayrède 2016)
Nougayrède cajoled her audience, assumed largely to be Europeans, to compare the continent’s ‘dazzling accomplishments over the past six decades with Asia’s reality’ which she went on to describe as ‘…a tangled web of unresolved historical disputes and rising tensions’. In this and other debates, the long-standing circular movements of people, ideas, goods and popular culture, cross-border marriages, transnational education flows, trade and infrastructural projects within Asia remained on the peripheries of an informed imagination (Lin and Yeoh 2016).
The sentiment of Nougayrède’s piece is captured in its title, Asia has yet to confront its past—be grateful Europe did. It is a title that invites further questions and elicits all kinds of emotions. Who are the parties that should be grateful? What have they received that requires them to feel the social emotion of gratitude? From whom? Which pasts have Europeans confronted—their colonial as well as their nationalist pasts? What can be read into the reproachful tenor that Asia ‘has yet to confront its past’? Is it laziness, or worse, cowardice, a lack of moral rectitude?
As it stands, the events that subsequently unfolded make it increasingly clear that Nougayrède’s triumphalist celebration of the European political project was premature. Scarcely a month after penning her column, a referendum sealed the UK’s fate to leave the European Union (‘Brexit’). Other events—the movements into Europe of refugees and asylum seekers and migrants—pitched nationalist emotions to amplitudes and frequencies that re-enacted ‘the traumas of the 20th century’ which Nougayrède had attributed to Asia.
The traumas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also seemed to preoccupy the martial artist, actor and international celebrity, Jackie Chan. When a large number of Hong Kong’s citizens took to the streets in 2019 to protest against a proposed extradition treaty with mainland China and police brutality, Chan professed to feeling ‘sad’ and ‘depressed’. China’s rapid development had, he shared, produced for him intense emotions of personal pride in being Chinese. He then went on to admonish protesters for desecrating ‘the most basic principles of patriotism: safety, security and peace’ (Atkin 2019).
In offering a more complex and variegated account of Asia, this book confronts the polemical and Eurocentric otherings of Asia as part of a broader critical focus on unsettling the premises of much nationalist discourse. We question Nougayrede’s triumphalist beliefs in Europe and her gloomy dismissal of a fragmented, fractious Asia, while taking heed of Mbembe’s warning with which we opened our chapter—that Europe’s demotion from the ‘centre of gravity of the world’ brings possibilities along with dangers for critical thought.
Nougayrède’s journalistic piece is one iteration of a long-standing set of discourses in which a united ‘West’, or Europe in this instance, governed by reason is positioned against a fragmented Asia driven by unreason and passion. There are many expressions of this binary, too many to map in detail. They extend from controversies relating to freedom of speech, to debates about the learning styles of international students (‘Asian learners’) and their alleged inabilities to demonstrate ‘critical thinking’ (see Song and McCarthy 2018). In all these discussions, a socially enlightened European sensibility, acutely sensitive to the rights of the individual and the predations of hegemonic thinking, is pitted against a non-Western sensibility blindly obedient to theological and political authority, perhaps struggling to ‘become modern’ (see Allen 2016). At the same time, as we show through our analysis of student narratives, critical thought of the kind advocated by Mbembe requires being alert to the promises and failures of nationalist modes of organisation. Like western liberal democracies, Asian nationalisms, too, have staked their legitimacies on excluding many constitutive Other(s). Collectively, these exclusions manifest in a distinctly modernist metapolitics of violence, not only against minority populations and dissenting citizens, but also to the many non-human life forms that sustain the planet (see Goldberg 2018; Mbembe 2013).
This book offers an alternative, non-Eurocentric account to those that focus on a conflict-ridden and fragmented Asia, a space colonised by the juggernaut of ‘neoliberal globalisation’. We present education mobilities as sites of possibility for regional goodwill and cosmopolitan solidarities . Our intention in taking this approach is not to deny the existence of fissures and fragmentations, including the parochial pull of self-interested nationalisms within Asia (and elsewhere). Rather we acknowledge that these are but a part of a complex and intricate tapestry. In this, we take inspiration from researchers who have positioned ‘domains of commonality’ and ‘sociabilities ’ in order to extend the focus of research beyond its current preoccupation with ‘difference’. Such fixations are bereft of analytical hope; they lend themselves to confirming separatist sentiments that differences are too hard to mediate, insurmountable even. Yet, as Nina Glick-Schiller and Ayse Çağlar (2016, 30) counsel, ‘It is through an emphasis on social relationships rather than cultural differences that we can acknowledge the possibilities and circumstances within which commonalities emerge’.
Beginning with a decidedly postcolonial tenor to ‘decentre’ Europe’s modernist claims, this book has three aims. Our first aim is to use emotions as an analytical lens from which to examine international student mobility within East Asia, an under-researched topic compared to mobilities in and out of Europe and North America. A focus on emotions provides richer understandings of student mobilities than those that position students simply as unfinished human capital and placeholders in global knowledge economies . Turning our gaze to the emotional registers within university laboratories, residential halls and clubs, cities and nation-states, we discuss the cross-cultural encounter in all of its complexity, giving shape to the plurality of spaces that define international education in East Asia. Acutely conscious of Europe’s ongoing struggles with its imperial and colonial legacies, we consider how these legacies, which are also present in Asia, shape international student encounters. We examine the kinds of emotions that might support (or prevent) expressions of political subjectivity that are simultaneously regional and cosmopolitan.
Our second aim is to build on understandings of emotions to bring a politics of critique and care not only into research debates but also into the manifold practices of international education. In this, we are sensitised by our own experiences as university educators situated geographically, politically and/or affectively in ‘Asia’. After decades of teaching, we find ourselves questioni...