ABSTRACT
Kevin Robins and I have argued elsewhere (Morley and Robins, 1992) that EuroAmerican panics about the ‘economic threat’ posed by Japan and the ‘Four Tigers’ of the South-East Asia economy (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore) have to be understood in the broader context of the destabilization posed by these developments to the established correlation between the concepts of West/East and modern/pre-modern. To that extent, the supposed centrality of the West as the (necessary) cultural and geographical focus for the project of modernity (or indeed postmodernity) is thus put into question. One effect of all this is then to highlight both the extent to which the Occident/Orient binary is itself a temporal (as much as a geographical) division and conversely, the extent to which the ‘temporal’ division between modernity and the realm of the pre-modern (or the ‘traditional’) has long had a crucial geographical sub-text. As Sakai notes ‘the West is not simply … a geographic category … [but rather] a name which always associates itself with those regions … that appear economically superior … [thus] … the historical predicate is translated into a geographical one and vice versa’ (Sakai, 1988: 476–7). If history is not only temporal or chronological, but also spatial and relational (and if, conversely, our understanding of geography itself is never historically innocent), then it follows that our analysis of ideas of postmodernity must consequently be informed by this kind of geo-historical perspective, if we are to avoid the worst excesses of EurAmerico-centrism.
