Bruce Cumings, Boundary Displacement

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Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War

It is a curious fact of academic history that the first great center of area studies . . . [was] in the Office of Strategic Services. . . . It is still true today, and I hope it always will be, that there is a high measure of interpenetration between universities with area programs and the information-gathering agencies of the government. McGeorge Bundy, 1964¹

by Bruce Cumings*

In this article I propose to examine the displacement and reordering of the boundaries of scholarly inquiry in the postwar period in two phases: the first, the determining burst of academic work that began during World War II but vastly expanded in the early years of the Soviet-U.S. confrontation, which is the necessary prelude to understanding the second phase, namely the contemporary revaluation of American studies of the rest of the world occasioned by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Western communism. My position is that the ultimate force shaping scholarly studies of what used to be called "the non-Western world" is economic and political power, but the most interesting effects of such power are often the least observed, taking place" at those local points or "ultimate destinations" (in Foucault's phrase) where power "becomes capillary,"² like universities and academic departments, and the organizations that mediate between academe and the foundations -- for example, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). In this process of power-becoming-capillary but in newly rearranged rivulets, we can discern both the original strengths and weaknesses of the "area" boundaries, the disordering occasioned by watershed changes in power politics and the world economy, and emergent new relationships between power and knowledge.

The artilce is here:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/cumings2.htm

Slavoj Žižek: For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square

"One cannot but note the "miraculous" nature of the events in Egypt: something has happened that few predicted, violating the experts' opinions, as if the uprising was not simply the result of social causes but the intervention of a mysterious agency that we can call, in a Platonic way, the eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity.

The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society. In contrast to Iran's Khomeini revolution (where leftists had to smuggle their message into the predominantly Islamist frame), here the frame is clearly that of a universal secular call for freedom and justice, so that the Muslim Brotherhood had to adopt the language of secular demands."

Disuniting America?

“North American societies are not experiencing a disuniting, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. despaired a decade ago, echoed by similar statements in Canada. Rather they are witnessing the final collapse of minority claims to hegemony, institutional privileges, and structural preferences.”

- Dirk Hoerder, “From Euro- and Afro-Atlantic to Pacific Migration System: A Comparative Migration Approach to North American History,” p. 222 in: 

Rethinking American History in a Global Age
Edited by Thomas Bender
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520230583