Orientalism and Asian Studies: How to Teach Asia?

Abstract

Few works have exerted as profound and enduring an influence on Asian Studies as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). In the decades since its publication, countless books and articles have appeared, attesting to its continuing relevance not only within Asian Studies but also across related disciplines and fields of inquiry (e.g., Ahmad 1992; Asad 1993; Lie 1994; Brennan 2000; Kumar 2012; Shatz 2019; Nebot and Boubrit 2023, to name only a few). Orientalism challenged college teachers of Asian Studies to move beyond simply introducing “Asia” to students; it urged them to interrogate Western constructions of Asia through comparative and dialogic approaches, including radical reappraisals that even question the very category of “Asia” as a geographic or cultural unit (Chen 2010). Nearly fifty years after Orientalism, the pressing question remains: where do we stand—and where might we go next—in our practice of teaching Asia in American college classrooms?

We have come a long way since the late 1970s, and even a simple glance at the demographic breakdown of students in Asian Studies classrooms would provide clear evidence of this assertion. In 1998, reflecting on the challenges of teaching Asia critically in the American classroom, Asian Studies scholar Yoshiko Nozaki suggested, among other things, that we move beyond the East/West binary, and “represent the multiplicity of identities that exists within any Asian nation” (Nozaki 1998: 150); in 2025, my classroom at Rice University is the multitude of identities that exists within Asia—and elsewhere. According to class profile data collected by Rice University’s Office of Admissions in August 2024, Asian American students formed the largest cohort in the class of 2028, accounting for thirty-four percent of the total, followed by Caucasian students at thirty percent. Seventy of the total of 156 international students came from China, while two-thirds (101) of the entire international student population of this class came from Asian nations (https://admission.rice.edu/apply/class-profile).

American campuses are more multinational—and more Asian—than ever. In 2000, foreign students constituted 11 percent of U.S. higher education enrollments, rising to 21 percent by 2014. The number of students from Asia alone increased from 259,893 in 1995 to 627,306 in 2014 (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_310.20.asp). Despite the pandemic-era dip, by 2024 more than 60 percent of the 1.1 million international students in the U.S. came from Asia  (https://opendoorsdata.org/annual-release/international-students/). College enrolment rates among Asian and Asian American populations continue to be higher than those of other demographic groups. In 2022, according to the Institute of Education Sciences, Asians recorded the highest college enrolment rate in the 18-24-year-old age bracket at sixty-one percent, followed by Whites at forty-one percent (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpb/college-enrollment-rate). Indeed, despite fees having risen threefold between 2000 and 2025 to $86,926 per year, thirty-seven percent of students in Harvard’s class of 2028 were Asian or Asian American (https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics). 

Enter digital technology and social media, the staples of the twenty-first century. Today’s students inhabit a radically different information environment than their late-twentieth-century counterparts—both in how they absorb knowledge generally and in how they encounter Asia specifically. This shift carries considerable implications for the field of Asian Studies. Many students now participate in and contribute to the online circulation of globalized Asian culture: K-pop and J-pop, multilingual memes that evolve at lightning speed, emoji and other transnational communicative tools, and the shifting lexicons of messaging and texting. Together, these elements form the digital lingua franca of their daily lives. Crucially, this exposure begins well before college. Prospective Asian Studies majors often arrive already socialized into Asian linguistic and cultural worlds through video games, anime, manga, webtoons, Netflix, and even tools like Google Translate. From yet another angle, language-learning apps such as Duolingo have turned smartphones into good-enough entry-level language instructors, normalizing casual engagement with foreign languages.

Today’s classroom is marked by diversity and disparity, with students identifying across multiple dimensions: race, class, nationality, visa status, sexual orientation, gender, political orientation, academic major, and future career path. On U.S. campuses, moreover, Asians and Asian Americans no longer occupy the position of minority. These conditions make it all the more urgent to ask: How should we teach Asian Studies in the college classroom today?