This wide-ranging volume falls into eight chapters, preceded by an introduction by the editors. The editors and contributors are European, Australasian and American historians mostly based at institutions outside Asia. It is a useful collection that broadens the growing interest in Asianism, as articulated in Asia and – in an innovative move that stretches the conventional understanding of the term – also by primarily Anglophone Westerners outside Asia. The book is technically flawless and praise is due for this to the copy-editors and all involved in its production.
In chapter 2, Maria Moritz deals with Anagarika Dharmapala's “vision of Buddhist Asianism” around the year 1900. This substantially influenced Blavatskyan Theosophy, which can therefore “best be understood as an institutionalization of this idea of a new global civilization” (p. 9). Dharmapala reversed the European imperial notion of civilizing mission by promoting the idea of an “Empire of Righteousness” conceived of as a global Buddhist transformative mission for equality between Asians and Europeans. He strove simultaneously to turn Buddhism into a globalizing Asia-centred religious force and into the foundation of Asian modernization and unification, with Japan as a model for, especially, India to emulate.
Carolien Stolte's chapter 3 seeks to answer the question of which cartographies of Asia were imagined in India from 1930 to 1955, which is to say the decades surrounding the attainment of independence. Asianism was an answer to the question of how an independent Indian state would work to “create a postcolonial, post-war world of greater justice and equality” (p. 49). As Stolte sees it, the recent surge in interest in Asianism has “largely bypassed South Asia”, and the chapter seeks to redress this imbalance by delving into Indian Asianism as expressed in four coexisting cartographies of Asia with “very different ideas of what Asia constituted” (p. 51). To “showcase the different ways in which Asia could be viewed from India” (p. 52), Stolte examines the Asias imagined by Mahendra Ratap, Rameshwari Nehru, Aga Khan III, and Veer Savarkar, which respectively emphasized links with Central Asia, the Soviet Union, West Asia and East Asia.
Chapter 4, by Stefan Hübner, looks at the history of the Far Eastern Championship Games from their foundation by the American YMCA in 1913 to their demise in 1934. It is seen as a process of Asianization and nationalization, in which national rivalries and Japanese hegemonic ambitions ultimately undermined collective anti-Western emancipation; once Asianization had been achieved, it could not be held together without common opposition to the American missionaries. In a move similar to what Moritz described in chapter 2, Japanese, Chinese and Filipino amateur sports officials creatively engaged with the Western notion of civilizing mission and the values of sportsmanship to mobilize them against American tutelage. They sought to develop “an Asian civilizing mission” which would “end the former colonial power asymmetry between the West and Asia” (p. 77), but the growing tensions between Japan and China could not be contained by a movement “held together not by intrinsic commonalities but by an external foe” (p. 8).
Where each of the previous chapters dealt in depth with strictly delineated single historical cases, Tani Barlow's chapter 5 on “Missiology and pan-Asia” stands out as a more programmatic and wide-ranging argument against so-called “faux scholarship” and a call to arms for scholars to “take responsibility as public intellectuals and critically displace these ideas” (p. 124). The object of Barlow's attention is thus the “faux erudition infused in US popular thinking about Asia, capital accumulation, natural law and sexuality, natural rights and liberation” (p. 101). What “faux scholarship” is remains rather loosely defined as some form of ideologically-driven “popular, middlebrow, highly invested writing” and comes close to Edward Said's idea of Orientalism without being as “inaccurate, essentializing, ambivalent, indiscriminate and culturalist” (n. 6, p. 126). In by far the longest chapter in the book, Barlow covers Hillary Clinton's “international feminism”, a number of nineteenth-century Christian missionary writings on women in China, and James Clavell's “male interest fiction.” What unites these different strands is their “erudition” and ideological function as “faux scholarship” producing dubious “knowledge” about Asia. The ambition of this chapter cannot be contained within the strictures of the format and would have been fulfilled in a longer text that developed its arguments in more detail. Valuable points of political theory are raised, but the treatment remains superficial and disconnected, with much left to insinuation. A more developed account of the relationship between Christianity, capitalism, imperialism, and liberalism, the Lockean self-ownership basis of “international feminism”, a more robust development of the distinction between the author's claims to truth and the false “erudition” of the literature criticized, and a more precise specification of the need to supplement or replace the idea of Orientalism with “faux scholarship” would have helped.
While also dealing with American views of Asia, Fabio Lanza's chapter “‘America's Asia?’ Revolution, Scholarship and Asian Studies” is thematically and chronologically tighter, dealing with the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike earlier Asian Asianisms, the Asianism of the CCAS was part of “the more general shift in the global, political and intellectual frame of reference” of its time, “when what was happening in Asia acquired a new centrality for people all over the world” (p. 136). In contrast to other Asianists, these politically engaged American scholars did not base themselves on ethno-culturally defined notions of Asian unity or myths of Asian ascendancy, yet they shared a utopian vision with Asian revolutionary nationalist and anti-imperialist movements as offering a universally valid “viable political alternative” (p. 135). The viability of this alternative was, however, overtaken by the actual course of Asian and world history. With the changing conditions of the Cold War and incorporation into capitalism, the “CCAS experienced a profound crisis” and “eventually disbanded in 1979” (p. 137).
Tessa Morris-Suzuki's chapter 7 extends Patricia Steinhoff's arguments about Japan's “invisible civil society” to the corresponding realm of the “invisible Asianisms” that emerged since the 1970s. What Morris-Suzuki wishes to highlight is the neglected “role of grassroots civil society in linking Asian societies across borders” (p. 157). Like the left-wing scholar-activists discussed by Lanza in the previous chapter, Morris-Suzuki's “Asianisms from below” were informed by the new left and acutely aware of diversity, conflict, and of transnational grassroots solidarity in a fragmented region as a source of political critique. She also highlights the role of non-metropolitan movements outside Tokyo, gender and the “Asia within” of the Korean minority in Japan.
Torsten Weber continues the theme of contemporary non-governmental Asianisms by focusing, on the one hand, on a narrower range of thinker-activists and, on the other, broadening the geographical scope to consider transnational Sino-Japanese intellectual networks. These have emerged in tandem with official – and largely unsuccessful – efforts at reconciliation and elaboration of consensus on the politics of history. Weber labels these epistemic networks “micro-East Asian communities” and argues that they are the first steps “towards the creation of a transnational public sphere in East Asia” with a “principally positive stance towards Asianisms” (p. 185). Chinese and Japanese intellectuals are thus jointly reassessing the legacy of Asianism in “civil society-driven efforts at historical reconciliation” (p. 202) through critical appropriation of such past thinkers as Takeuchi Yoshimi and Sun Yat-sen.
Nicola Spakowski concludes the collection with a dissection of the Western discourse of an “Asian Century” as an influential, recent manifestation of Asianism. What characterizes it is that it is “future-oriented and makes use of particular claims and rhetoric to substantiate visions of an Asia-dominated future” (p. 209). As a Western ideological discourse, it has much in common with Barlow's “faux scholarship” and similarly relies on pseudo-scientific rhetoric to paint a simplistic, developmentalist picture that glosses over the diversity of Asia. It is a bipolar emotive discourse moving between optimistic “globalist” visions of the benefits of economic development to dystopian “realist” fears of military security threats, with the former dominating and being the author's main concern. The foremost source of this “Asia hype” are “investment funds and investment companies” which, in interaction with “historians, business journalists and international institutions” (p. 13), disseminate an amoral, ahistorical and abstract utopian vision of “a relocation of Eurocentric modernity” (p. 226).
The volume is conceived as a conscious and laudable attempt to move “far beyond the more well-known Japanese Pan-Asianism of the first half of the twentieth century”. It seeks to break new methodological ground by engaging in “transnational and transcultural research” and adopting “a decidedly transnational perspective” (pp. 2, 3). This being the case, the regional focus is narrower than one might have expected of a work that prides itself on the fact that “its geographical scope transcends Northeast Asia” (p. 5). This is true, insofar as it brings in South Asia and North America, but Korea and all of Southeast Asia (with the partial exception of The Philippines in chapter 4) are not covered, and China is covered in half a chapter with Japan. The geographical coverage is thus slanted towards South and Northeast Asia as well as beyond to Europe and the US in the chapters by Moritz, Hübner, Barlow and Spakowski. As the editors point out, this feature of the volume is original in the “variety of different movements and circulations of ideas” traced. With Tessa Morris-Suzuki's and Torsten Weber's chapters being substantially about Japan, and in the latter case including China, Japanese Asianism still features prominently, albeit with a novel historical and social focus.
The subtitle “Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration” would suggest a more social-scientific orientation than is represented in the contents. Relatively little is said about material interactions and political and economic integration processes. The emphasis is on discursive and historical aspects. While the editors are aware of how “disciplinary boundaries within Asian Studies have inhibited transnational and transcultural research”, and while the volume is very diverse, the unifying disciplinary standpoint from which the various Asianisms is approached is that of interpretive history rather than social science or political theory.
As the editors point out, their purpose is to “problematize issues that transcend the usual approach to Asianisms (the political)”. This is done by offering “insight into Asianisms in religion, sports, academics, popular science and business” (p. 5). Precisely how this transcends the political is not clearly spelt out, and even if the sectors studied are not political thought and practice in a narrow sense, Asianisms as conceived and analysed in the volume remain as political as ever. The book may not deliver on its promise of “transcending the political”, but it does treat Asianism in a much broader sense than the conventional view of it as a collective term for a diversity of elite political ideas and movements articulated in modern Asia to further regional solidarity and integration. It most notably does this by including female, non-metropolitan, civil society perspectives and views that recognize the diversity, fragmentation and exploitation of actual intra-Asian relations along with Western Asia discourses in a broadening of the semantic scope of Asianism. The latter is the most contentious and some may view this move as a problematic loss of focus, as Asianism has historically been treated as defensive Asian responses to Western hegemony. It may require stronger persuasion to convince many that James Clavell and the Western-language business press are engaged in the same political and intellectual project as Takeuchi Yoshimi or Wang Hui. There is a risk of imprecision by conflating too much thinking and writing about Asia as Asianism. The collection's main innovation may thus also be its main weakness. Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions & Asian Integration is nevertheless an altogether fine effort and valuable contribution to the field. As such it deserves a wide readership and to be followed up by more studies of Asianisms, in particular with reference to China, Korea, Southeast Asia and other neglected Asian sub-regions.
