Arif Dirlik

Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, And The Nation

This article seeks to view colonialism in a historical perspective, including the perspective of the future. It argues that, in spite of the devastation it has wrought globally, colonialism has transformed the identities of the colonized, so that even claims to precolonial national identities are products of colonialism. Recent postcolonial insistence on the hybridization of identities has revealed the irrelevance of the search for national identity that was prominent in the postcolonial thinking of the 1960s. Nationalism itself, the essay suggests, is a version of colonialism in the suppression and appropriation of local identities for a national identity. All identity, historically speaking, is a product of one or another form of colonialism, and hybridization of identities is an ongoing historical process. What is particular about modern colonialism, the article concludes, is its relationship to capitalism, which a preoccupation with colonialism and national identity has driven to the margins of political and cultural thinking. This relationship, which was central to postcolonial thinking earlier, needs to be foregrounded once again without, however, dissolving colonialism into capitalism.

Critical reflections on “Chinese capitalism” as paradigm

A culturally shaped Chinese capitalism has received much attention over the last decade, accompanied by a renewed interest in Confucianism as the marker for Chinese culture. This essay argues against culturalist explanations of the successful economic development of Chinese (and more generally, East Asian) societies. The flourishing of capitalism in these societies, it argues instead, is best understood with reference to developments within capitalism globally. Rather than a source of capitalist development, a Chinese culture conceived homogeneously provides an ideological alibi to new developments within capitalism, as well as a means to check the disruptive effects of capitalist development in Chinese societies. An insistence on Chineseness conceived culturally disguises, and seeks to contain, the social and cultural dispersal of Chinese populations, the so‐called Chinese diaspora.

Postsocialism? Reflections on “socialism with Chinese characteristics”

In the discussion below, I consider the interpretive possibilities of a conceptualization of Chinese socialism that is primarily deconstructive in intention, although it may also provide an occasio...

Reversals, Ironies, Hegemonies: Notes on the Contemporary Historiography of Modern China

come to the fore in recent years raise a number of broad interpretive questions in their relationship to economic and political changes in China and globally. It is not possible to discuss these questions exhaustively within the confines of an article. I focus below on those questions that illustrate significant shifts in historical thinking on China from previous years. The contemporary state of historiography on China can be characterized as a move away from totalizing interpretations and toward a proliferation of approaches in which the historical field appears most prominently in its disjunctures. Disjunctures in historical interpretation point to new hegemonies as well as new critical possibilities in our consciousness of the past.

The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking

In the early afternoon of May 4, 1919, three thousand students from three Beijing universities gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to demonstrate against the Versailles Peace Conference decision in favor of Japan on the Shandong Question. The students had originally intended to continue their demonstration in the Foreign Legation quarters in Beijing, but finding their way blocked by the Legation police, they proceeded instead to the house of Cao Julin, a Foreign Ministry official who had drawn the ire of the patriotic students for his pro-Japanese sentiments. The students were stymied momentarily by the police, who had cordoned off the house, and the imposing wooden gates that shut them off. Suddenly, a fourth-year Beijing Normal University student from Hunan named Kuang Husheng rushed to the house, smashed the thick wooden shutters of the gate window, climbed in, and flung open the gates to let the rest of the students in. He then took the initiative in setting the torch to the house with the matches with which he had come prepared. Kuang was an anarchist (Kuang Husheng, 1979: 498; Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1983: 121).’

Mass Movemen ts and the Left Kuomintang

Mass movements were a central issue in the Kuomintang crisis that followed upon the termination of the united front with Communists in 1927. The shift in the configuration of forces within the party in 1926-1927 led to the replacement of the radical leadership of the immediately preceding years by militarists and by rightists who had lost much of their formal power in the party subsequent to the 1924 reorganization. After 1927, the issue of mass movements was inextricably tied in with the left’s attempts to make a political comeback. Although the left failed to regain power and the turn to the right remained permanent, ultimately with leftist acquiescence, attitudes toward mass movements at this time shed some light

Mirror to Revolution: Early Marxist Images of Chinese History

Historical materialism entered Chinese thought as part of the new wave of socialism during the New Culture movement. By the late 1920s, during the ebb of communism as a political movement, it had gained a foothold in the consciousness of many Chinese intellectuals. Its application to the analysis of Chinese history reached its peak in the “social history controversy” of the late twenties and early thirties. 1 After the mid-thirties interest in the Marxist discussion of history dwindled, not reaching a comparable degree of intensity until its revival after 1949.

Developmentalism: A Critique

Marxist or Marxism-inspired criticism focuses on global capitalism for having exacerbated problems of social injustice and conflict in contemporary societies globally. The discussion here suggests the necessity of closer attention to an ideological and cultural predisposition that has facilitated the globalization of capitalism: developmentalism, or the fetishization of development, that has rendered development into a horse race between nations and corporations regardless of its consequences for human welfare. The discussion takes up ten problems that are revealing of the sharpening contradictions of global capitalism, followed by a critique of developmentalism informed by seminal works of Indian scholars who played a leading part in raising the issue beginning in the 1960s. It suggests by way of conclusion that given the looming ecological crisis sharpened by global capitalism, closer attention is called for to philosophical systems that stress harmony between humans and nature, prominent among them those associated with indigenous belief systems.Marxist or Marxism-inspired criticism focuses on global capitalism for having exacerbated problems of social injustice and conflict in contemporary societies globally. The discussion here suggests the necessity of closer attention to an ideological and cultural predisposition that has facilitated the globalization of capitalism: developmentalism, or the fetishization of development, that has rendered development into a horse race between nations and corporations regardless of its consequences for human welfare. The discussion takes up ten problems that are revealing of the sharpening contradictions of global capitalism, followed by a critique of developmentalism informed by seminal works of Indian scholars who played a leading part in raising the issue beginning in the 1960s. It suggests by way of conclusion that given the looming ecological crisis sharpened by global capitalism, closer attention is called for to philosophical systems that stress harmony between humans and nature, prominent among them tho...

empire? Some Thoughts on Colonialism, Culture, and Class in the Making of Global Crisis and War in Perpetuity

I review below some of the arguments proposed in Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in light of the events of 11 September 2001 and the apparent determination of the United States (seconded by the United Kingdom) to recolonize Southwestern Asia. The discussion proceeds in two directions. I first consider the implications of this explicit revival of colonialism for Hardt and Negri’s argument that imperialism is no longer an appropriate concept for understanding the contemporary world. I suggest that contrary to seemingly clear evidence of the persistence of colonialism, reconfigurations of power globally make evidence quite ambiguous and present us with a novel situation – where imperialism no longer suffices as an explanatory concept, or a point of departure for transformative politics, which now has to contend not only with new forms of colonialism but also with reactionary revivals of reified cultural traditions, as well as the transnational class alliances of Global Capitalism. This is a situation that I describe as Global Modernity. In the second part of the essay, I proceed to evaluate the ways in which the arguments in Empire concerning sovereignty and radical politics may be enabling in grasping and acting upon a situation where war in perpetuity has become the excuse globally for the intensification of a surveillance society and the extinction of any form of transformative politics that seeks to imagine an alternative to present configurations of political and social power.

What's in a Rim?

“Pacific Rim” and a variety of terms cognate to it, such as “Pacific Basin” and “Asian‐Pacific,” have become commonplace in geopolitical vocabulary over the last decade. And yet, what these terms mean remains unclear. The immediate reference is obviously physically geographic: Pacific Rim (or Pacific Basin) refers to societies situated on the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and within it. Discussions of the Pacific Rim, however, rarely account for all the societies thus situated, more often than not referring primarily to societies of the northern hemisphere and sometimes using the term euphemistically as a contemporary substitute for what used to be called East Asia.