Verge: Studies in Global Asias

112 A & Q Encountering the Euro-­ American Hegemonic Past Erica F. Brindley As a scholar working in the fields of ancient and premodern East Asian history and philosophy for the past twenty years, I’ve come to appreciate the complicity and deep genetic entanglement of academia with Eurocentrism (more precisely, Euro-­Americanism). Euro-­Americanism is associated with modernity and, by definition, the recent past. So deep is this entanglement that it not only occurs in institutions and departments located in either Europe or America; it is also, to a lesser extent, found in institutions, disciplines, and scholarship produced globally, in East Asia and other non-­Euro-­American regions.1 Euro-­American concepts of time and the selective prioritizing of a certain lineage, or identity-­ based history , manifest in structural ways that determine what is important and worthwhile in intellectual pursuit. These temporal values and norms in turn express themselves through scholarly approaches, hiring practices, the creation and composition of departments, and the very understanding of innovative and meaningful scholarship. The legacy of Euro-­ American identity shapes our evaluation of time because it, and only it, is projected into and imagined in the deep past. In its most simplified form, this identity consists of an American sense of history rooted in its European past, which is then grafted onto a European identity going back to ancient Greek and Roman forebears (hence “Classics” as an academic field). Intriguingly, this premodern past is devoid of any hint of Islamic, Arabic, African, or Eastern influence, as it leap-­ frogs seamlessly (and misleadingly) from the Greco-­ Roman traditions to European Renaissance and Enlightenment periods and the ages of exploration, science, and industrialization. So although this narrative does indeed extend into the premodern past, such a past is but a single, highly manicured one. One might dub this the “legitimate” or “hegemonic” past. There have been important attempts to change this situation in recent years, as demonstrated by the emergence of debates around Black Athena in Classics, the “Orientalization” of Homer and his legacy, and the validation of “nonhegemonic” elements within the Western tradition.2 In my own field, scholars of premodern Asia gather to discuss global networks, transnational interactions, and power dynamics in what we dub the SEAMZ (Southeast Asian Maritime Zone, including all of South China), creating a space for the agency and global impacts of a vast array of actors before the introduction of European maritime activities in that A & Q 113 part of the world. However, despite these limited efforts, the notion of modernity still looms large. It is still a fiction that propagates stories, knowledge systems, and structures for the so-­ called winners of global history. The hegemonic past is a teleological narrative of modernity. It retells the progressive achievements of selected peoples and lineages, such as the British and northern Europeans, who are cast as victors destined to enjoy world power. Accordingly, the premodern past of any culture that is not a part of this hop-­scotching history is not merely ignored and considered irrelevant; it is excluded and denied at an existential level. Simply put, in this tale of white, scientific, rational, technological, philosophical, and culturally superior Euro-­American champions of modernity, there is little space for a non-­ Euro-­ American past. At the same time that it lifts up the heroes and primary agents of change, it excludes and denigrates all others as belonging to the “premodern world,” an intrinsically less interesting academic ghetto. 6 Impacts on Academic Institutions and Scholarship The effects of the Euro-­ American past can be felt throughout academia. By considering the numbers of faculty and the types of disciplines and subdisciplines in most European and North American universities, we can quickly begin to fathom the unbalanced and unequal distribution of scholarship. While it is true that universities do hire scholars working on traditionally less-­ represented parts of the world, including Africa, East Asia, South Asia, India, Oceania, and the Arabic parts of Eurasia and beyond, the numbers are still predominantly skewed toward English or European languages. At a large research institution like my own, the English department is home to fifty-­ plus tenure-­ track faculty working mainly in scholarship involving the English language, literature, and film...