Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ lecture
Kuan-Hsing CHEN
ABSTRACT Takeuchi Yoshimi was a leading thinker in Postwar Japan. The originality of his work has been rediscovered in the past decade. Based on the present author’s Asia as Method—towards De-Imperialization (2010) as a point of dialogue, this essay rereads his intuitive formulation of 'Asia as Method' in the 1960 and tries to pinpoint different characteristics of knowledge conditions between now and then. It discovers that the ‘Inter-Asia methodology’ imagined in Takeuchi’s time is still a viable proposition to be implemented today, if we hope to break away with the dominant mode of thought which has been trapped in the colonial structure of academic institutions.
Author’s biography
Kuan-Hsing Chen teaches in the Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His most recent publication is Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Duke University Press, 2010).