Virginia de la Fuente

 He is a British political scientist and student of the Arab world.  Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University.  He is a supporter of the academic boycott against Israel.

 The author found the origins of Area Studies at the beginning of 1930s, instead of being a response to WWII and Cold War.  Delayed of Area Studies creation due to some crisis in US: 1. Sputnik crisis 2. Brown v. Board of Education.  In the interwar period, scholars turned to study Oriental civilizations.  In US, the Egyptologist Henry Breasted founded in 1919 the Oriental Institute of U. of Chicago.  In Princeton, there were connections with the Arab world.  In 1927, Princeton established the country’s first department devoted to Oriental studies.

 In London, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the 1930s commissioned a survey of Western impact on the Arab world since  The authors, Gibb and Bowen, wanted to study Moslem societies, and hoped to produce a “synthetic study of problems… as a whole”.  Gibb and Bowen’s program shaped the development of Middle Eastern studies in the US.  By the end of WWII appeared in Britain many scholars with Arab background.

 Two factors set back the development of Middle Eastern area studies, besides the US growing interest then in Soviet Union: 1. No funds until Sputnik crisis. 2. US universities were already divided into separate social science department.  Nationalization of social knowledge.  The social science disciplines were reorganized around objects which assumed the structure of nation-state as their universal social template.  US did not seem appropriate for the study of non-West regions, so this revealed the importance of Area studies.  The development of area specialists would provide the detailed knowledge of regions required to universalize the science of politics.

 The new structure of expertise in the US university represented a particular relationship between global and local.  What today we call “global” was represented as US claim to universalism (the belief that social sciences could not cover the rules and categories of human society).  While Social Science occupied the place of the global, Area Studies occupied the realm of the local.

 The crisis of Area Studies is the problem of how area fields are related to the academic disciplines.  The disciplines can claim to be more universal, but Area Studies needs to refuse it.  The inability of culture, the state, the economy, or society to survive as distinct territories of social scientific investigation, called “deterritorialization” of the disciplines, reflects another deterritorialization in the contemporary global history.  Social scientists’ response to this deterritorialization was to rely on another means of defining their distinctiveness.

 The current problems of area studies are related to the crisis in social science.  The course of every discipline can affect what happens to area studies.  The consequence between discipline and world region’s relationship is that the object of study remains defined only in the West.  This has caused difficulties to Area Studies, for instance in the case of Middle Eastern Studies.  When comparing Europe and Middle East, the comparison is normally focus on Europe.  Due to the scarcity information about Middle East, their studies have been explained from the Western view.

 For Chaudhry, it is necessary to insert Middle East Studies into the general field of political economy, because it is the piece of the puzzle that is missed.  She exposes that the diversity of languages in which communities articulate their political demands and identities are to be translated into the universal language of political economy.  Because the market is understood as a universal form, it cannot be something “cultural”. The cultural refers to the particular, the province of area studies.

 There have been many attempts to rethink the relationship between the local and the global.  The author’s advice is to stop talking about global and local. Because their distinction always awards the universal essence, but forget the “cultural”.  That is why he trusts to find a new approach where a global reach has been achieved through interaction with groups and relations. Such view of the phenomena of global would help to abandon local and global terms.