The Japanese invented Southeast Asia. This is just one of the pieces of intellectual dynamite that Benedict Anderson tosses into the reader's lap with this extraordinary set of essays in theoretical provocation.
Anderson also has the gift of prophecy. Published before the recent horrors in East Timor, "The Spectre of Comparisons" anticipated the birth of Timorese independence. In his mental powers, Anderson must be the envy of his discipline.
As for the notion that the Japanese invented Southeast Asia, he is entirely serious. He contends that power makes geography. If we understand the world as a collection of regions, it is because, at some crucial phase of its history, a region was given unity and coherence by a great power. Regionalism begins with hegemony.
The logic carries conviction even where Anderson does not apply it. Take, for example, Europe, that most turbulent of regions. Its geographic "unity" has been repeatedly reaffirmed by conquest, from ancient Rome, through Charlemagne, down to Napoleon and Hitler. The Third Reich defanged European statism, thus opening the way for the rise of the European Union. The English are the odd folk out precisely because Hitler lost the Battle of Britain.
Elsewhere, the logic of hegemonic creation cuts more confidently through a myriad of surface details. Thus, Britain created North America, India and Australia, just as Spain and Portugal invented Latin America. The Near East is mainly the handiwork of the Ottoman Turks, as China is of the Han.
By contrast, Northeast Asia lacks conviction as a region because it has never been ruled by a single power. In a similar vein, the Pacific Rim has proven to be a weak geographic idea because the United States' attempt to dominate the area militarily was thwarted in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. Japan's postwar economic ascendancy illustrates the complementary truth that money is not enough to nurture a plausible region.
Anderson insists that Southeast Asia, as we think of it today, was created by the triumph of Japanese arms in 1941-42. Southeast Asia is Imperial Japan's most consequential geographic legacy because it was the first and only power to dominate the region as a whole.
To roll back Japan's offensive, the British, who have named and organized more of the planet than any rival imperial power, mobilized Louis Mountbatten's "South-East Asia Command" in 1943. Thus, according to Anderson, the British gave a name to a Japanese fact, and a geographic idea was born.
Western scholars rushed to harvest the consequences of Japanese blitzkrieg. Indeed, "Welfare and Progress in South-East Asia" by John Furnivall, the British colonial administrator and influential expert on Burma, appeared in 1941, the year that Pearl Harbor was attacked.
In 1942, an American team of political scientists published "Government and Nationalism in Southeast Asia." This launched political science's rise to what Anderson believes is its dominant role within Southeast Asian studies. It also signaled the future pre-eminence of U.S. universities in the field.
Anderson's attention to the history of Southeast Asian studies is more than a scholar's search for roots. In "Orientalism," Edward Said's troubling masterpiece, the now-forgotten classics of Middle East studies were put on trial as exhibits of how Western scholarship legitimized Western rule of the nonwhite world. As much of the humanities and several of the social sciences are now caught in the "Age of Edward Said," it is hardly surprising that "The Spectre of Comparisons" bears a Saidian stamp.
Behind Said stands Michel Foucault, and it is this French philosopher's relentless assault on power as power that offers the most compelling explanation of what inspires Anderson's attack on what he sees as the myth-driven nationalism of Southeast Asia. For Anderson and the leftwing scholars of his generation, successful nation-building is always the foe because power always corrupts.
This perception stands behind the huge revolution in contemporary Southeast Asian studies, from fierce anticolonialism to fierce antinationalism. Thus, the progressive Western scholar is sympathetic to the East Timorese, for example, only as long as they are victims. Let them achieve independence, build a state and foster a nationalist myth to sustain it, and they, too, will be condemned to the outer illiberal darkness. In the Anderson school, "Asian values" are a crime and the "miracle" in Asian miracle always appears in scare quotes.
In dissecting the nationalist myths of Siam, the Philippines and Indonesia, Anderson seizes on "the specter of comparison." He takes the phrase from the novel "Don't Touch Me," by Jose Riza, one of the earliest "postcolonial" Philippine thinkers. Riza is tormented by the fact that colonialist realities are always obscured by metropolitan (Paris, London, New York) spectacles, but they offer the only coherent vision available to the anticolonialist.
Anderson is haunted by this insight. Properly understood, the act of comparison is the core intellectual exercise of all modernizing societies. Meiji Japan and the postwar Japanese miracle are unthinkable without this act of liberation. Spurred by comparison, China shook off the humiliating hand of Western power, Vietnam destroyed the myth of U.S. battlefield invincibility, and Japan nearly shattered white domination of the global economy.
In reading this set of discursive, sometimes contentious, but always stimulating, essays, the specter of comparison that matters most, however, is the question of Anderson's own vocation, talent and values. Given the huge barriers -- racial, linguistic, religious, cultural, political and economic -- that stand between postcolonial reality and the value-laden Western university, how is the truth to be discovered and communicated?
Violating social science's strictest rule -- values must not be confused with facts -- Anderson exploits his frustration and outrage with the sometimes cruel and often corrupt values of Southeast Asian nationalism to lend explosive force and drive to his narration of postcolonial facts.
In the hands of the amateur, this method can be disastrous. It wrongly suggests that one has only to learn a little Thai or Vietnamese (or Japanese, for that matter), blend in some uncongealed liberal prejudice, and your Ph.D. thesis is half-written.
Anderson is no amateur. He makes Southeast Asia come alive. His excited cross-referencing of politics and literature, journalism and philosophy qualify him as a distant heir of the splendid Louis Massignon, the French polymath and dazzling Orientalist.
All this makes Anderson indispensable. He keeps Southeast Asian studies bubbling in much the same way as Chalmers Johnson and Naoki Sakai keep contemporary Japan studies at the boil.
Like Sakai, Anderson teaches at Cornell. This U.S. university has long been a powerhouse in area studies. Anderson proudly recounts that as a graduate student at Cornell in the late 1950s, he could pick the brains of George Kahin, Claire Holt and John Echols and, at one remove, Harry Benda and Clifford Geertz.
This constellation of talent, and the tradition of excellence it has generated, may explain why Steven Sinosky, one of Microsoft's revolutionaries, wondered if he had missed his calling by not majoring in social science when he was at Cornell. Even in the age of the Web, mastery of another culture remains one of the most compelling intellectual endeavors the thinking man or woman can pursue. If you want proof, read this book.
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