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The Imagined Globe: Remapping the World Through Public Diplomacy at the Asia Society

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Abstract

Debates about public diplomacy have recently turned to the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in what had been primarily a conversation about state-to-state affairs. We contribute to this conversation through an in-depth analysis of the Asia Society. Founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1956, the Asia Society was established to educate Americans about Asia at a time when there was much less contact between the USA and Asia. Since then, the institution has undergone several reinventions, each contributing to and reflecting changing understandings of Asia and its relationship to the USA. We track the kinds of artwork the Asia Society collects and puts on display, the range of countries it categorizes as Asian, and the goals and content of its programming to reveal these shifts in scale and focus and demonstrate how they mirror and drive forward shifts in US-Asian relations. We argue that understanding how cultural institutions contribute to changing geographic imaginaries and geopolitics is an important, often overlooked aspect of public diplomacy. They are both a catalyst and reflection of changing political economic dynamics that, in turn, shape how citizens imagine their world and their nation’s place within it.

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Notes

  1. Today, the Society has twelve outposts: three museums (New York, Houston, and Hong Kong) and nine other offices globally. Some of these international locations, such as the Zurich office, were opened in the following institutional period “Being Global.”

  2. Gordon B. Washburn, director of the Asia House Gallery from 1962 to 1974, wrote that the Asia House Gallery had a rule “for never showing contemporary artists […] because our programs relate to our intention to inform visitors of the ancient cultures of the Orient” (March 1974, p. 1).

  3. How the Asia Society defined Asian American is unclear. In 1994, the Society presented a touring exhibition dedicated to Asian-American artists: Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art. Of the twenty artists featured in the show, all but four emigrated to the USA over the age of 18 and none were born in the USA. Nearly all of the remaining artists moved to the USA for schooling in their twenties.

  4. This rebranding scheme came as early as 1976, when Alan Renouf, acting on behalf of the Australia Department of Foreign Affairs, proposed to JDR that the 1977 Williamsburg corporate conference be held in Australia (Renouf, 1976).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

    Sarah E.K. Smith

  2. Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA

    Peggy Levitt

  3. Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Rebecca Selch

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  1. Sarah E.K. Smith
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  2. Peggy Levitt
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Correspondence to Peggy Levitt.

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Smith, S.E., Levitt, P. & Selch, R. The Imagined Globe: Remapping the World Through Public Diplomacy at the Asia Society. Int J Polit Cult Soc 34, 419–435 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-020-09387-z

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