Presidential Address: Area Studies as a Critical Discipline

Extract

As we all know, the modest, colorless, and ambiguous term “area studies” emerged during the course of World War II as a way of describing one minor enterprise in the war effort. It was an enterprise designed to achieve an encapsulated understanding of the unknown areas of the world in which we suddenly found ourselves engaged. During and after the war, most area studies were contemporary in orientation and, given the circumstances of their origin, extremely vulnerable to the charge of serving “nonscholarly” political or military interests.