Geography and area studies as critical bedfellows? The view from Singapore

Abstract While Geography and Area Studies both share the burden of the colonial past and entrenchment in American‐Eurocentrism, there is something to be gained from greater critical rapprochement between the two fields of knowledge. From Singapore as a vantage point, producing geographical knowledge through immersion in the area—broadly defined as ‘Asia’—is both an expectation and a comparative advantage. At the same time, as Singapore‐based geographers operate both inside and outside the Euro‐American intellectual heartlands, the study of area is not valorised on its own terms but pressed into service to turn the wheels of (western) critical theory to recuperate ‘other’ ways of thinking. Such a strategy has encouraged engagement with the region while ensuring legibility of knowledge production in terms of a largely western‐based reputational calculus. It also runs the risk of being largely unidirectional, translating empirical material into theoretical insights for a western audience without challenging existing hierarchies of knowledge production. There is hence a need to explore other pathways to recuperating geographical knowledge and addressing current inequalities. First, ‘Asia as method’ advocates ‘inter‐referencing’ across Asia, that is, a process of writing from Asia, and not as Asia seen in relation to the West, by drawing on regional cases that are less familiar while resisting the need to justify through western reference points. Second, over seven decades, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography has wrestled with presenting ‘the tropics’ as a complex and contested field of geographical inquiry, providing academic space for both local scholars working from within the tropics and those from the ‘outside’. In these ways, the study of area—rich with diverse connections and worthwhile comparators, historically constructed rather than naturally given, and fluid rather than fixed in its boundaries—offers Geography multiple ways to imagine the world differently.