Asiacentricity

Asiacentricity is the metatheoretical notion that insists on placing Asian worldviews at the center of inquiry in order to see Asian phenomena from the standpoint of Asians as subjects and agents. Inspired by Molefi Kete Asante's legacy of Afrocentricity and Paul Wong, Meera Manvi, and Takeo Hirota Wong's Amerasia Journal article, “Asiacentrism and Asian American Studies?” Yoshitaka Miike has developed the idea of Asiacentricity and envisions an alternative research paradigm based on the Asiacentric principle. As a metatheoretical and methodological concept, the definition and scope of Asiacentricity are still evolving and expanding.

There are six dimensions of Asiacentricity that Miike highlighted for the sake of conceptual clarification after he reviewed Asante's key constituents [Page 47]of Afrocentricity. Asiacentricity is (1) an assertion of Asians as subjects and agents, (2) the centrality of the collective interests of Asia and Asians in the process of knowledge production about Asia, (3) the placement of Asian cultural values and ideals at the center of inquiry into Asian thought and action, (4) the groundedness in Asian historical experiences, (5) an Asian contextual orientation to data, and (6) an Asian ethical critique and corrective of the dislocation and displacement of Asian people and phenomena. Hence the paradigm of Asiacentricity demands that Asian peoples or texts be viewed as subjects and agents in their narratives; Asian interests, values, and ideals be prioritized in the discourse on Asians and their experiences; and an Asian person, document, or phenomenon be located in the context of her or his or its own culture and history.

It is important to note that the terms subject and agency here signify “self-definition,” “self-determination,” and “self-representation.” The subject–object distinction concerns the question of how researchers approach a person, text, and document. Rather than scrutinizing the person, text, and document and treating them as if they were objects of analysis and critique, researchers must attend genuinely to them as subjects of voices, as they tell their own stories about their cultural worlds. The concept of agency brings researchers’ attention to the activeness–passiveness distinction. It raises the question of uncovering the activeness and actor-ness of a person or a person in a text and document instead of its passiveness and spectator-ness. Furthermore, the idea of cultural “center” in the Asiacentric project should not be misunderstood as the pure “essence” of an Asian culture or Asian cultures. Although Asiacentricity is about Asian shared identities and collective representations, Asiacentrists have no intention of creating one center in Asia.

Asiacentricity is not ethnocentrism. Asiacentricity is not a universalist position but a particuralist stance. Asiacentricity does not present the Asian worldview as the only universal frame of reference and impose it on non-Asians. Asiacentric proponents assert that to theorize from the vantage point of Asians as centered is the best way to capture the agency of Asian people and the cultural world of Asia. They do not deny the value of other, non-Asiacentric perspectives on Asians. Nevertheless, they reject the hegemonic ideology that non-Asiacentric theoretical standpoints are superior to Asiacentric ones and therefore can grossly neglect the latter in the discussion and discourse surrounding Asian people and phenomena.

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