“What constitutes Asia?” is a question central to the field of Asian Studies. A geographical term that is attached to a seemingly stable, objectively defined, landmass, “Asia” is in reality a socially constructed concept that has constantly been reshaped or appropriated with changing emphasis. This study considers the question of how Asia and South Asia are portrayed (represented, framed, constructed) by the maps on the covers of books and scholarly journals and by map logos of professional associations. It asks how each region (South Asia and Asia generally) is defined, which features are emphasized or marginalized, and what sorts of distortions are evident. An old adage admonishes us not to judge a book by its cover, but the covers of books and journals are designed to attract readers, to allude to content and to connect with existing perceptions. It is worthwhile to explore what these map illustrations reveal.

Examples of such portrayal may be seen in the two scholarly books that initially prompted this inquiry. Both showed South Asia, but the maps were truncated, distorted or otherwise modified. The cover of C. Raja Mohan's Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy (2003) shows a map of India in vivid orange. Border areas are sufficiently blurred so that one cannot read the names of any other countries except India and Nepal. The map on the cover of Baldev Raj Nayar and T.V. Paul's India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status (2003) appears to be looking eastward at India on a globe. India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar (Burma) are labelled, as are the visible Indian states, but the map is truncated at top and bottom so that three northern states (Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir) and three southern states (Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu) are not visible or labelled. Pakistani territory is shown but not labelled as such.

There may be various reasons for such distortions, including having an “eye-catching” book cover, but there also appear to be geopolitical considerations. The former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir has been a source of conflict between India and Pakistan since the two countries became independent in 1947. India regards all as an integral part of the Indian Union. Pakistan regards the entire state to be disputed territory.

Taiwan Studies is a relatively new field of research which challenges the conventional model of area studies. Taiwan Studies started off as an emancipatory project in Taiwan itself and has since spread to the regional and global sphere. The notion of Taiwan that is constructed through academic discourse remains a contested subject and is influenced by power configurations.

Taiwan Studies as a new field of academic research has evolved at a time when area studies in general have experienced a serious crisis of legitimacy. They have been challenged due to their roots in the colonialist tradition, their frequent political complicity with U.S. policy during the Cold War and a growing awareness of the contingency of boundary drawing and calls for more universalist knowledge in the age of globalization (Palat 2000).

Contrary to this trend, Taiwan Studies has emerged as a new academic field in the United States and Europe very recently, since the late 1980s, and has expanded since then. It differs from traditional area studies, which were often set up by hegemonic powers seeking to gain knowledge and control over their colonial territories or partitioning the world into regions according to the geopolitical settings of the Cold War. It could be argued that the debate on area studies has had limited impact. The revival of area studies in the United States with regard to the Middle East, the Arab region and Central Asia demonstrates how acute security concerns make specialized regional expertise appear immediately relevant again. The contested claim of sovereignty over Taiwan creates a potential security risk in East Asia, which could spread to the United States as Taiwan's key ally. While the status quo is already built on weak foundations — essentially the fiction that the Chinese Civil War has never ended — recent developments in Taiwan have complicated the situation even more. A growing sense of Taiwan identity on the island has gradually undermined the one-China principle upon which the alleged stability of the status quo rests. It is therefore not surprising that Taiwan's domestic developments have received particular attention from outside it.

This, however, does not explain why Taiwan has been taken out of the larger context of China Studies and developed as a distinct field. Converging perspectives on Taiwan as a distinct region cannot easily be explained by hegemonic power interests.

The turbulence of internal conflicts, the takeover by the Khmer Rouge (1975–79) and the Vietnamese intervention (1979–89) attracted international media attention to the Kingdom of Cambodia. The United States and France stand out among the nations that became entangled in the geopolitics surrounding Cambodian affairs in these years. Their political perspectives also dominated media debates, referred to here as “mediatizations” because of the non-fact-based nature of these discourses that express a partisan view. The dynamics of the media's “agenda-setting” and “framing” of Cambodian issues have distinct qualities, which will be examined in this chapter (Lippman 1922). These dynamics are understood as the selective influencing of perceptions in the representation of Cambodian issues in the French and American press, thus the mediatization of practices outside of the country. Descriptions, examples and case studies will show how the social construction and evolution of these media frames are related to geopolitical relations and scholarly traditions. The findings contribute to the understanding of how and why the period of the Khmer Rouge is labelled as “genocide” while not actually fitting the conditions that define this category. The labelling as genocide, nevertheless, evolved into a discourse adopted by, among others, the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University and has been attached to the international perception of Cambodian society ever since.

A study of the geopolitical dimension of the mediatization of Cambodian affairs is relevant, as few analyses have been conducted on the distinct character of the framing of issues in the decades following the traumatic events of the Khmer Rouge. The dynamics and their relation to geopolitical as well as national trends and traditions have not been studied as an integrated Cambodian history. While both France and the United States have produced their fair share of “leftist”, socialistinspired, and “rightist”, conservative-inspired, reporting, they have their basis in different traditions. As documented in, among others, Clymer (2007), Edwards (2007), Gunn and Lee (1991) and Wijers (2013), France's relations can be characterized as founded in a paternalist discourse on Cambodia as a former colony with a rich cultural heritage and a “sweet-natured and innocent” population. In contrast, the United States rather seemed to perceive Cambodia as a pawn in Cold War politics and a supportive neighbour to a former U.S. foe, Vietnam.

Asian Studies as a constituent of area studies has constantly been framed by the discourse of a nation-state both as an object of study and as the subject generating demand for such knowledge. In particular, it holds true to nation-state debate in area studies which questions methodology, as well as the organizational principles of area studies based on the concept of the nation-state. However, the predominantly outward orientation of Western Asian Studies, preoccupied with postcolonial discourse, has given less attention to frameworks and strategies of engagement with Asia from the perspective of non-colonial nations in Europe or of those deprived of statehood and sovereignty through occupation, as was the case with the Baltic states in 1940. What is specific about engagement with Asia in these stateless countries is that, instead of producing knowledge in the service of the state, the local academies and in particular the cultural activists set out to appropriate orientalist knowledge for the construction of national identity aimed at resisting the colonial regime.

Lithuania is a clear example of a European nation which, since the late eighteenth century, more than once experienced the loss and regaining of statehood. The epoch of more than six centuries of early statehood, which began in the early thirteenth century, ended with the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (also known as the Commonwealth of Two Nations) by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795. Established in 1569, the commonwealth was a confederal state where Lithuania and Poland maintained their statehood. The collapse of Lithuania's political life was the result of its losing its status as an active state in the region — a position it had held since the early eighteenth century. The Third Partition marked the beginning of a stateless period under Russian rule which lasted for over a hundred years. After the abolition of the Russian monarchy and the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution, the Lithuanian Council, or Taryba, proclaimed the declaration of independence on 16 February 1918. The period of interwar independence lasted until the de facto Soviet annexation of Lithuania in 1940, although the loss of political status as a state had already been determined on the eve of WWII when the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact, known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, on 23 August 1939. The pact included secret protocols whereby Moscow and Berlin divided their spheres of interest within the region.

Between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British Singapore was a popular destination for migrants. The ample supply of labour helped the British develop the port city as a midway point between India and China. By the turn of the twentieth century, the proliferation of trading networks that converged in the port city also turned it into an emporium of British textiles. Later, after the 1910s, when Japan launched its agenda of southward advance to the region known today as Southeast Asia, Tokyo journalist Inoue Kiyoshi spent a year touring the region and concluded that Singapore was “the threshold of the South Seas” (Inoue K. 1913, pp. 17–65).

South Sea — or nanyang in Chinese and nan'yō in Japanese — was the term the Chinese and Japanese adopted to refer to the region generally called Southeast Asia in the post-war years. My choice of naming the region South Seas was to emphasize the contested responses to the changes in the region generated from the imposition of the British free-trade imperialism in the long nineteenth century. As pointed out by Prasenjit Duara, the British system intensified “some of the old relationships and generat[ed] new linkages between the cities (and hinterlands) of Aden, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai as enterpôts and financial centers for Asian trade” (Duara 2010, p. 964). The rise of Japanese power in the late nineteenth century, however, challenged the British imperial regional formation. Japan looked at the South Seas — including the natural resources, markets and land — as its economic frontier. The Japanese pan-Asianism thus entailed an anti-imperialist tone from the beginning (Duara 2010, pp. 969–73). Therefore, regardless of the formation of the Anglo– Japanese alliance that lasted between 1902 and 1923, and despite the fact that the initial goal of southward expansion of the Japanese was primarily economic, not territorial, tension between the two empires was inherent. Both the Anglo–Japanese economic competition in the South Seas and the white supremacy of racial disparagement against the non-white Japanese accounted for the final military confrontation in the Pacific War (Best 2002; Horne 2005).

The role of the Chinese overseas residing in the South Seas in general and in Singapore in particular was key to understanding the Anglo–Japanese rivalry.

Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary programmes like Asian Studies can be found in many universities, particularly those located in Western societies. This is, by and large, a result of a curiosity over Asian “exotic others” and a reflection of colonial tradition to a certain extent. By contrast, Asian universities that have not inherited a Western colonial legacy have no strong tendency to maintain Asian Studies as a separate discipline. However, in part due to the influence of the United States (on the development of area studies) and the colonial legacy in other countries, area studies by region and country exist in Asian universities. In Japan and South Korea, for instance, East Asian area studies by and large started with Chinese language and literature and later embraced regional social sciences. Area studies ([chiki]) in Japan started to appear in the 1950s, and the discipline expanded in the 1980s and 1990s. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies was the first university to offer such programmes (Takeuchi 2012, p. 10). In Korea, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies has language- and area-based departments. Later, the Kim Young Sam government (1993–98) of South Korea, which rapidly embraced a globalization discourse (sekyehwa) as an important state agenda, established a set of nine graduate schools of international or area studies in 1997. In addition, the shortage of experts on trade and international political economy provided the impetus to establish more area studies programmes.

There is a rationale for comparing the development of Chinese Studies in Japan and South Korea. First, as neighbouring countries in East Asia, China, Japan and Korea have cultural proximity and shared histories. Second, the region is facing issues of sovereignty over Dokdo/ Takeshima Island, which has an impact on relations between South Korea, Japan and China. Japan has been in conflict with both China and South Korea over sovereignty issues involving Diaoyus/Senkaku Island in the South China Sea and Dokdo/Takeshima Island in the East Sea/Japan Sea. Third, relations among the three countries are inevitable; they are economically interdependent. China is the largest trading partner for Japan and South Korea. Fourth, the human flow of Chinese international students and tourists to Japan and South Korea is larger than to any other country (Lee 2014). Therefore, there are strong motivations for Japan and South Korea to know about China.

One of the most salient, and longest-running, public discussions about Asian Studies in Australia is the “Asia literacy” agenda, which commenced in the early 1970s and has experienced discontinuous federal government funding through to present times. In essence, “Asia literacy” focuses on encouraging more Australian students to take up Asian languages and Asian Studies in Australian education systems. Much of the debate about Australia's “Asia literacy” has concentrated on the need for corresponding increases in education funding and other resources in order for participation targets to be achieved. This includes training and retraining programmes to boost the stock of “Asia-literate” teachers able to deliver these courses in Australian schools and universities.

To view Asia literacy in such narrow “supply and demand” terms or to focus on unmet participation targets, however, is to overlook the ways in which Asia literacy is framed by Australian geopolitical and social perspectives. Underscoring these concepts is a spatial assumption that “Australia” and “Asia” are separate geographical and cultural categories: that “Australians” cannot also be “Asians” and vice versa.

In this chapter, I argue that an analysis of Asia literacy reveals deeper truths about how Australians view “Asia” and their own geopolitical place in the world, as well as the make-up of Australian society. Asia literacy has been framed as an educational and geopolitical project aimed at “knowing Asia”, which has also been equated to knowing others. This dismisses the fundamental concept of Australians knowing themselves.

In this chapter, I first present a background of Australia's Asia literacy. I then separately examine geopolitical and social framings of Asia literacy. From a spatial perspective, which can also be thought of as the “where” of Asia literacy, I draw on Lewis and Wigen's concept of “metageography” to reveal the geographical and geopolitical assumptions that underpin Asia literacy, particularly in terms of thinking about Australia as part of Asia and as a member nation of an “Asian neighbourhood”. I then explore Asia literacy from a sociocultural viewpoint, which is a function of the “who” of Asia literacy. I use this perspective to analyse agency, and I consider Ang's work on “hybridity” as an alternative to the apparent “Australia” and “Asia” categories that permeate Asia literacy. Ultimately, these two perspectives of Asia literacy — geopolitical and social — demonstrate that concepts of space and place are fundamental to Australian framings of Asian Studies.

Southeast Asian states and Russia are not often seen as natural partners or countries engaged in a tight web of interconnections. They lack the geographical proximity which usually drives such interconnections in the political, economic and intellectual spheres and creates a shared space, literally and figuratively, of mutual practices, narratives and academic discourses. Southeast Asia would also seem to have lower strategic appeal for Russia compared to the larger entities like China or India. Historically, the region was not a sphere of colonial expansion for Russia, nor had Russia and Southeast Asia enjoyed shared cultural features which could have generated mutual interest. However, Southeast Asian Studies in Russia has not only managed to take shape but has also resulted in several wellestablished academic schools focused on area studies, linguistics and international relations in the region.

Southeast Asian Studies in Russia may be seen as falling into different periods — first, fragmented interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then a well-grounded rise in the Soviet period, a dramatic decline in the 1990s, and more or less pragmatic stabilization in recent years. Geopolitical and structural factors shaped the background conditions for Southeast Asian Studies during each of these periods. The USSR's role as one of the geopolitical centres in the bipolar system during the Cold War presupposed its global reach both politically and intellectually. In contrast to this outreach, the early 1990s witnessed a sharp “shrinking” of Russian foreign policy. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia rapidly transformed from a power with a visible presence in all regions of the world, including Southeast Asia, to a state with limited economic capacity and internal structural problems. However, the intellectual asset of Southeast Asian Studies did not vanish overnight.

This chapter thus argues that it was mainly the geopolitical context of the Cold War that shaped Southeast Asian Studies in Russia (and the USSR). Though Southeast Asia was not a high geopolitical priority for the USSR relative to larger Asian countries like China or India, the logic of Cold War competition with the United States, which unfolded in virtually all parts of the world, provoked not only academic but also practical interest in this region.

Modern Indian academic interest in East Asia has a multilayered context. Historical connections built through the movement of ideas and material objects were decisively reshaped during the colonial period so that these earlier linkages were always in tension with the colonial construction of the “East”. These ways of understanding created tensions and ambiguities in Indian engagement with countries in East and Southeast Asia. The writing of India's past was an enterprise carried out under British supervision, but also in resistance to it. In this enterprise, India's historical relationship with Asia played an important role in highlighting the unique qualities of Indian civilization — ideas that continue to shape contemporary thinking and, perhaps, account for the lack of an “Asian” boom in Indian intellectual circles.

India has yet to witness studies of Japan or China comparable to what has occurred in Europe, the United States and many other countries. That is not to say that Asian countries have not been studied, or that there is no sustained engagement with these countries. Rather, it is to suggest that this “past” has been marginalized or forgotten, and recovering this history provides a way of relocating India as part of a larger regional community. In this chapter I argue that Indian “understandings of Asia” have a different and layered history, and exploring these provides a way of thinking about knowledge production and its relationship to both civil society and the state.

I begin the chapter by first discussing the idea of Asia and the historical development of modern Indian conceptions of Asia. I look at four defining moments. The first is the pre-modern basis for Indian engagement, which began to change sometime in the early eighteenth century. The second came during the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries when Indian intellectuals engaged directly with China, Japan and other parts of the Asian region. This first modern engagement, often in colonial capitals, grew out of the anticolonial struggle and resistance to Western intellectual domination, where the idea of “community” was on resistance. In fact, often India was projected as the core element of “Asia”. The third moment was in the year of independence, the Asian Relations Conference held in New Delhi. This could be called an “Afro-Asian” moment, for it built on the idea of resistance that included not only geographical Asia but all the former colonized territories.

During the month of Ramadan on 30 August 2009, a female reporter interviewed the Fourth Region army commander for the evening TV news about the unrest in the Deep South, a region that fell under his jurisdiction. She asked him why the number of violent incidents had dramatically increased during the month, and he replied that it was mainly because the insurgents had distorted Islam to serve their cause. He explained:

The commander's explanation was supported by prominent stateappointed Islamic religious leaders and scholars. They gave interviews clarifying that Islam neither encourages nor condones any violence or killing, which in fact is a sin in Islam. Importantly, during the month of Ramadan, they said, Muslims are specifically required to refrain from committing any sin. Rather than double merits, to commit violence, especially killing, during the month of Ramadan would burden Muslims with double sins instead

Whether or not killing for Islam during the month of Ramadan brings Muslim perpetrators double merits is a question Guba residents find difficult to answer. Saifuldin said that while watching the news, he was uncertain about the insurgents’ claim because his knowledge about Islam is just rudimentary. Aiman did not say anything but hinted that this is a serious question in need of thorough pondering and strong reference. Daessa felt uncomfortable when I addressed the issue to her and suggested that I seek the “correct” answer from knowledgeable persons. In general, the residents felt they had been put on the spot when I asked them this question. This is not only because the question is difficult for some of them to answer or because it is the first time they have had to answer the question, but also because how they answer it reflects what kind of Muslims they are and the extent to which they feel obliged to Islam.

Late one afternoon, the back of the house of the family I stayed with was converted into a place to perform a ritual in response to a misfortune that had befallen the family's horse. Seven offering trays were placed in the middle of the space, and they were surrounded by family members, relatives, and acquaintances; Jaafar, Guba's leading ritual specialist, acted as leader. After Jaafar finished the first part of the ritual, Aiman, the horse's owner and also known to be a ritual specialist, continued the ritual by touching each tray while chanting to give the offerings to revered spirits. The spirits include family ancestors, art masters, the village founder, the Prophet and a Raman sultan, each of whom represents an authority figure in each domain of importance to the residents, namely kinship, art or tradition, community, religion and polity, respectively. While the authority figures representing the first four domains are non-controversial, that representing polity vividly points to conflict and that side of the conflict residents associate themselves with — Raman rulers vis-à-vis Patani rulers. Aiman told me later that, unlike people on the east coast of Thailand's Deep South who associate themselves with the Patani Sultanate, Guba residents are tightly connected to the Raman Sultanate in various ways. Guba was founded as a place for training the war horses and elephants that Raman rulers used in their wars with Patani, and Guba's founder had been appointed by a Raman ruler. In addition, Raman rulers also adopted several Guba children, and many Guba residents worked in the palace. The bonds between the people of Guba and Raman's rulers are deep and cordial and still strongly felt to the present day.

That Guba associated itself with Raman rather than rival Patani is crucial. Thailand's Deep South is often indiscriminately regarded as a region of the ancient kingdom of Patani, with Langkasuka1 as its predecessor. Other interior polities, especially Raman, were considered by Thai and Malay nationalist historiographies as “a unilateral Siamese initiative” in Siam's attempt to dissolve Patani into more manageable petty states. Separatists of past decades as well as present-day insurgents have invoked this historical construct to justify their means and goals.

The notion of sovereignty has captured attention across academic disciplines, especially in anthropology. Although Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2006, p. 296) argue that the return of sovereignty as a central concern in anthropology has been informed by the work of Giorgio Agamben, the discussion of sovereignty in anthropology is also informed by Michel Foucault's works. Foucault cautions readers not to view the emergence of governmentality in terms of total replacement. Rather than the elimination of sovereignty by discipline and of discipline by governmentality, what exists, argues Foucault, is a triangularity of sovereigntydiscipline- governmentality, which “has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security” (Foucault 1991, p. 102). Foucault reminds readers of the existence of sovereignty in contemporary power relations, although he has not demonstrated how it operates and converges with the two other modes of power.

Anthropologist Aihwa Ong elaborates on the notion of sovereignty using Foucault as a backdrop. She argues that Agamben conceptualizes the notion of exception too narrowly, regarding it only as a fundamental principle of sovereign rules. The exception, she maintains, can be conceptualized more broadly as “an ordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as to exclude” (Ong 2006, p. 5). She argues that, in practice, sovereignty is manifested in multiple, contradictory strategies. Rather than a singularity or a simple opposition of normativity and exception, as Agamben suggests, sovereign power is a “shifting and flexible ensemble of heterogeneous calculations, choices, and exceptions that constitute security, life, and ethics” (Ong 2006, p. 10). Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality — the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end (Foucault 1991, p. 93) — Ong proposes a notion of neoliberal exception, arguing that, rather than simply an economic doctrine, neoliberalism is the most recent development of biopolitics and in particular a governmentality that “relies on market knowledge and calculations for politics of subjection and subject-making” (Ong 2006, p. 13). In addition, Ong maintains that governmentality involves two entangled processes of subjectification: “one is subjected to someone else by control and dependence [subjection], and tied to one's own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge [selfmaking]” (Ong 2003, p. 15).