Why Decolonising Area Studies is Not Enough: A Case Study of the Complex Legacies of Colonial Knowledge-Making in the Indo-Myanmar Borderlands
Why Decolonising Area Studies is Not Enough: A Case Study of the Complex Legacies of Colonial Knowledge-Making in the Indo-Myanmar Borderlands
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为什么非殖民化区域研究还不够：印缅边境殖民知识创造的复杂遗产案例研究
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发表时间：
2020
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通讯作者：
Mandy Sadan
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作者：
Mandy Sadan
近年来，非殖民化已成为学术机构和更广泛社会的一个重要议程。然而，这个词很少被充分地批判或解构，以准确地确定“殖民地”在特定的学术背景下指的是什么，因此非殖民化的过程应该包括什么。它仍然是一个相对过于简化的议程，很容易成为战略性的，而不是知识机构的变革。重点是重组可识别的组成部分，如阅读清单，限制了讨论和批评非殖民化作为一个内在的更复杂的挑战应该涉及什么。与区域研究相关的教学和研究为学术界尚未解决的“非殖民化”挑战提供了一个有趣的例子。本文反映了复杂的不连续性的理解“殖民地”在印缅边境地区，挑战我们更充分地反映什么“非殖民化”应该涉及到这个空间的学术互动。具体而言，它考虑了跨帕特凯山脉的地区，其走廊今天将现代印度东北部与缅甸实皆市和克钦邦的北方尖端连接起来。本文通过考虑殖民知识的形成与当代关于这一地区的知识的形成的交叉方式，以及这些历史建筑在现在的遗产，将自己与关于非殖民化的广泛文献区分开来。学者和“专家”在维持殖民表征方面常常是无意识的，这种殖民表征嵌入了这一地区的经济和政治边缘化，即使他们认为对非中心化的“地方”声音的关注正在被放大，也意味着需要更深入地思考这一领域知识的非殖民化。本文旨在为这场辩论做出贡献。
Decolonisation has become an important agenda both within academic institutions as well as within wider society in recent years. Yet the term is infrequently sufficiently critiqued or deconstructed to identify precisely what ‘the colonial’ refers to in specific academic contexts and therefore what the process of decolonisation should entail. It remains a relatively over-simplified agenda that easily becomes strategic rather than transformative of knowledge institutions. The focus on restructuring identifiable components, such as reading lists, limits discussion and critique of what decolonisation as an inherently more complex set of challenges should involve. The teaching and research related to Area Studies makes for an interesting example of the unresolved challenges of ‘decolonisation’ in academia. This paper reflects upon the complex discontinuities in understandings of ‘the Colonial’ in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands, challenging us to reflect more fully on what ‘decolonisation’ should entail in relation to academic interactions with this space. Specifically, it considers that region of the trans-Patkai mountain range where its corridors today connect modern north east India with the northern tip of Sagaing Division and Kachin State in Myanmar. The paper distinguishes itself from that broad literature on decolonisation by considering the ways in which colonial knowledge making intersects with contemporary knowledge making about this region, and the legacies of those historical constructions in the present. The often-unconscious ways in which academics and ‘experts’ are culpable in sustaining colonial representations that embed this region’s economic and political marginalisation, even when they assume that attention to a decentred ‘local’ voice is being magnified, means that there is also a need to think about the decolonisation of knowledge of this area more deeply. This article intends to contribute to that debate.