Between 'Here-Now' and 'There-Then': The West and Asia's Colonial Entanglements in International Higher Education

Drawing on a review of international higher education (IHE) policies, priorities, and literature from the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK over the course of a 16-year period (2000-2016), this article identifies a strong scholarly and policy preoccupation with the urgency of the global knowledge economy and cognate discourses of 'Asia Pacific century', an emerging economic and geopolitical configuration that is considered threatening to the historic and ideological Western superiority in IHE relations. As such, the export commodification and transnationalization of higher education of the last decade is conceptualized as Western responses to an increasingly Asia-driven global economic order. This, we suggest, is an analytical lens which approaches time--as in knowledge economic time--and space--as in the West and Asia--in rather absolute, contained, and hierarchized terms, overlooking how both the West's coming to terms with postcolonial Asia, and the postcolonial Asian states' desire for Western knowledge and modernity re-cast broader transnational inequities established by colonial practices. In contrast, the concept of 'spacetime entanglement' is proposed to develop a necessary analysis as well as a critique of the transnationalization of capitalist colonial relations via discourses and practices of contemporary IHE.