The Imagined Globe: Remapping the World Through Public Diplomacy at the Asia Society
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The Imagined Globe: Remapping the World Through Public Diplomacy at the Asia Society Sarah E.K. Smith 1 & Peggy Levitt 2 & Rebecca Selch 3 Accepted: 25 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Debates about public diplomacy have recently turned to the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in what had been primarily a conversation about state-to-state affairs. We contribute to this conversation through an in-depth analysis of the Asia Society. Founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1956, the Asia Society was established to educate Americans about Asia at a time when there was much less contact between the USA and Asia. Since then, the institution has undergone several reinventions, each contributing to and reflecting changing understandings of Asia and its relationship to the USA. We track the kinds of artwork the Asia Society collects and puts on display, the range of countries it categorizes as Asian, and the goals and content of its programming to reveal these shifts in scale and focus and demonstrate how they mirror and drive forward shifts in US-Asian relations. We argue that understanding how cultural institutions contribute to changing geographic imaginaries and geopolitics is an important, often overlooked aspect of public diplomacy. They are both a catalyst and reflection of changing political economic dynamics that, in turn, shape how citizens imagine their world and their nation’s place within it. Keywords Public diplomacy . Cultural diplomacy . Asia Society . Transnationalism . Museums . Cold war
Introduction In their 1997 book, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigens argued that we need to rethink how we classify the physical world (Lewis
* Peggy Levitt [email protected]
1
School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
2
Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA
3
Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Smith et al.
& Wigens, 1997). Dividing the globe into continents, they wrote, relies on Eurocentric understandings of social and political life—an atavistic legacy of colonial slicing and dicing. It artificially groups “similar” peoples and regions together, glossing over important differences between them. It reifies a hierarchy of value that wields devastating consequences for those countries on its lower rungs. Lewis and Wigens’s call for a new cartography underscores the ways geographic relations are socially constructed. There is nothing given or factual about how relations across space are organized and classified—which countries are deemed poor or rich, modern, or underdeveloped, and which nations are “natural” partners or antagonists. So, how and where do our ideas about how to slice and dice the world get challenged and changed? How does the way we imagine national and regional communities produce new configurations of physical and, therefore, social and political space? What role
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