ABSTRACT
In recent decades, Asian studies has become more dispersed, adapting itself to a new educational terrain, the liberal arts environment. Focusing on the goal of liberal education and on the relationship of Asian studies to humanistic study, newly minted Asianists may need to "remap" their goals as teachers and scholars. Today, those who teach Asian studies in colleges and universities, many of them trained as specialists of a particular Asian time and place, are appropriately wary about using "the East" or "the Orient". An imprecise way of speaking about culture as if it were synonymous with persons does not provide the conceptual tools to think our way around the difficult issues of race, a task fully as important in Asian studies classrooms as in American studies classrooms. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems.
