Abstract

When Asia is cast as Europe’s ‘Other,’ it is facilely assumed that European spatial imaginaries are unproblematically accepted by the peoples of Asia themselves. Yet, the changing imaginaries of India from being virtually synonymous with Asia to being virtually excluded from reigning conceptions of the continent challenge this assumption. I trace spatial imaginaries of the people living in the cartographic quadrant called Asia and then show how these were subverted on its incorporation into the capitalist world-economy. I then chart the changing imaginaries of Asia within the capitalist world-economy as it passes through the phases of British and American hegemony to the contemporary phase of neo-liberalism and the resurgence of the giant Asian economies of China and India.

Bio

Ravi Palat is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and has previously taught at the universities of Auckland and Hawaii. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and is currently a Visiting Professor at the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg. He has also been a Senior Research Fellow at the East-West Center and and at the Center for Asia-Pacific Social Transformations at the University of Woolongong, Australia. He has written Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim, and several articles on area studies, Asia-Pacific economies, the rise of China and India, economic history of Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Activity within the research group Cities, Cultures, and Architecture (CCArq)  and the Doctoral Programme "Cities and Urban Cultures"