ABSTRACT
In the 1990s I started to take an interest in the networking capacity for cultural studies when I saw how Kuan-Hsing Chen set up the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Group, an alternative intellectual knowledge exchange which now has an eponymous (Taylor and Francis) journal and a vital and well-funded network of scholars working in Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Korea, etc. For younger scholars in the humanities this network has effectively displaced any need for them to work within the older area studies frameworks controlled by Anglo-American universities, nor do they necessarily feel the need to go to one of those universities for their graduate training. The local training in Taiwan or Hong Kong still uses English a lot, as a lingua franca, and still uses many canonical cultural studies texts, but the decolonisation process is well-advanced. It is an extraordinarily successful network, using interdisciplinary theory as another kind of lingua franca, breaking the hegemonic hold of the older disciplines and their area studies foci, and opening up new specifi c areas of study not visible to those older networks: new media, gender studies, alternative globalisation studies.
