ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to shed light on different spatialization and conceptualization of area studies research and institutionalizations, going beyond both a United States (US)-centrism as well as a Cold War-centrism. With its perspective on the terminologies and spatialities in the histories of area studies, the chapter neither presents a teleological narrative toward transregional studies nor does it position area studies as the failed effort to be overcome by new spatializations of knowledge production. People can observe different modes of spatialization, from territorialized logics in the US-American area studies to the transterritorial focus of the French ‘aires culturelles’ or the transregional of socialist ‘Regionalwissenschaften’. The new geographies of areas with its specific centres and peripheries furthermore were related to older imperial ones and were connected to narratives of closeness and distance, such as in the case of Soviet Oriental and African studies, where a socialist global vision created a common space.
