Regionalism, Area Studies, and the Accidents of Agency

Abstract

THERE IS LITTLE CERTAINTY AND LESS CONSENSUS, writes Celia Applegate, about the meaning of the word region where Europe is concerned, while in East Asia there is similarly a long and unsettled history of debating just what exactly counts as observes Karen Wigen. The fundamental ambiguity of the regional in both areas owes something to its historical role as a social diacritic. It sets off and distinguishes one place or people from another from the point of view of a third, a setting off that also involves the deployment of such temporal markers as classical, feudal, or modern. As both essays make clear, the region is that which can alternately or simultaneously appear in various guises: politically as an administrative unit, culturally as an ethnic enclave or linguistic community, economically as zones of production and exchange. It is that which figures the local, the parochial, and the particular in contrast to the national, the cosmopolitan, and the general. As such, it has tended to be seen as backward if not reactionary from the vantage point of the nation-state and urban elites. Yet it has also been valorized as the locus of civilizational authenticity and nostalgic longings, the location of a desirable otherness rendered exotic and available for sacralization as well as commodification. The regional, then, has been neither just symbolic nor just material but both at the same time, circulating in the imagination as much as in the marketplace. For this reason, it has served in a prosthetic capacity as the essential supplement of post-Enlightenment and postcolonial modernity. In any and all cases, the regional only comes into view comparatively: vertically related to that which seeks to maintain and subsume it, such as the empire, the nation-state, or the metropole; and horizontally in a relation of complementarity and conflict with other regions. Rather than think of regions as sovereign or autonomous entities, Applegate's and Wigen's essays suggest the historical persistence of regimes of regionalities: ways of making and unmaking the peripheral relative to the core, thus practices of locating and relocating the local that are constitutive of and never merely additive to the centers of power. The practice of spacing implied by regionalisms, however, has also complicated the claims of powerful centers. The indefiniteness of its ontology, the porousness of its borders, and the mobility of its geographical location have made the regional ineluctably unstable and arguably destabilizing. Thus has it also furnished sites for surprising insurrections and recalcitrant alterities. For whatever else the local might seem in various discourses of regionalism, it acts to designate some other place,

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