Seven poetic constellations of Asia/Pacific world-making: reflections on the diasporic life and organic-intellectual work of Arif Dirlik

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a personal, quasi-lyrical portrait of Arif Dirlik as an organic world-crossing Marxist intellectual whose mentorship and leadership proved crucial to a cross-disciplinary array of scholars and writers, including the writer. A Benjaminian mode of “constellation” is activated to portray some of the historical contexts, outlets, sites, and works Dirlik was long connected to and helped to provoke into realization across his career.

KEYWORDS:

• Organic
• radical
• hope
• diasporic
• world
• China
• Asia
• Pacific
• intellectual
• Marxist

Notes

1 On this tactic of “aftering” the work of influential leftist scholars of organic global-local impact, particularly as situated in the Asia-Pacific complexity of Japan, Tibet, Korea, and China, see the special issue of boundary 2 coedited by Rob Wilson and Paul Bove (2019), and Wilson’s introduction (2019a); see also Dirlik’s (2019) rigorous essay historically deconstructing “China” as a civilizational unity.

2 These latter-day reflections are conveyed in Dirlik (2017); and Wilson’s Pacific Beneath the Pavements: Worlding Poesis and Oceanic Becoming (forthcoming).

3 See also Rob Wilson, “Transfiguration as World-Making Practice: Norman O. Brown to Bob Dylan,” forthcoming in special issue of boundary 2 coedited by Isaac Blacksin, Christopher Leigh Connery, and Rob Wilson on Norman O. Brown’s tactics of material semiotics and “metapolitical” metamorphosis. See also Wilson (2009), chapter five on Bob Dylan as Jeremaic trickster; and Wilson’s review-essay (2019b).

4 In the special issue of boundary 2 that Arif Dirlik and I co-edited that became the book called Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995), we include works by poets like Lawson Inada and Terese Svoboda and visionary fabulists of Oceania like Epeli Hau’ofa and Theophil Reuney juxtaposed beside disciplined-based works of historians, anthropologists, cultural studies, and literary scholars. In other words, Arif took what I would come to call the world-making (worlding, deworlding, reworlding) power of literature seriously and read it with empathetic imagination and political joy. Along such historical-poetic lines of world-making signification, see Edgar Garcia’s (2020) powerful intervention into the sign systems of the Americas, North and South, and Steve Mentz’s (2020) foray into “wet globalization” and the blue humanities.

5 For insights into “profane illumination” as practiced by Beat poets like Ginsberg and Kerouac and post-Beat writers like Bob Dylan, Ann Waldman, or Hunter Thompson, whose works Arif admired and may have been influenced by in his own westward border-crossing journey from Mersin, Turkey and the Robert College Preparatory School in Istanbul to the radical left-coast atmosphere of Free Speech and People’s Park Berkeley in the 1960s, see Rob Sean Wilson (2010).

6 See Benjamin Graves, “Rey Chow—Orientalism and East Asia,” Political Discourse—Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism section in: www.poscolonialweb.org. Orientalism is more commonly ascribed to the rightist ideology of figures like Samuel Huntington or China-bashers of the Trump administration like UC Irvine’s tariff-loving Peter Navarro who has helped to re-polarize the PRC and the USA as has the “Wuhan virus” fixity of Donald Trump himself.

7 See Arif Dirlik’s critique on the rise of a one-party and post-socialist China, “Social Justice, Democracy and the Politics of Development: The People’s Republic of China in Global Perspective,” which urges at a more planetary level that “China’s problems are the world’s problems, and the world’s problems are China’s problems” (2017, 45–78, 77).

8 Dirlik’s reading of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or world revolution on the “Chinese model” moves from sympathetic to scathing the closer this gets to absorption into the mandates of global capital with human rights obliviousness in the PRC; see Dirlik (2017, 16–27). On “The Rise of China—and the End of the World as We Know It,” see Dirlik (2017, 127–147), which all but credits Global China for the authoritarian ruthlessness of the Anthropocene and the environmental deworlding of the planet.

9 The passage is cited in Roxann Prazniak’s “Theoretical History and Everyday Life: Keeping Dirlik in Focus in ‘Everyday I’m Capuling,’” included in this special issue.

10 Bob Dylan plays on this trope of dialectical multiplicity from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (Section 51), in which the bard of an American queer democracy-to-come in a song from Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) called overtly, “I Contain Multitudes.”

11 See Dirlik 1997. The title essay had initially appeared in Critical Inquiry journal in Chicago and provoked heated responses pro and con, most notably from Gayatri Spivak in the USA to Aijaz Ahmad in India (the latter now teaches at UC Irvine).

12 See Dirlik’s introduction to boundary 2 special issue on “Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made,” co-ed. Arif Dirlik, Ping-hui Liao, and Ya-Chung Chuang (2018).

13 William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children.”

14 This work of editing went into the field-shaping Korean literary anthology (one of many Peter Lee had created).

15 On these emptiness-haunted yet carnal “on the road” quests to enlightenment haunting contemporary Korean Buddhism, see the brilliantly composed South Korean temple-based movies (with screenplays based on postwar Korean novels) by the Korean film director, Im Kwan-taek, Mandala, and Come Come Fly Upward. I have written about Im’s relentlessly Korean-based localism as an uncanny globalization tactic: see Wilson (2001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rob Wilson

Rob Sean Wilson is a professor of American literature, creative writing, and poetics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His books of poetry and cultural criticism include: Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From ‘South Pacific’ to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication in 2010. Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 and reissued on Kindle Books in 2020. A dual-language poetry collection in English and Chinese called When the Nikita Moon Rose appears in the Transpacific Archipelagic Poetry Series at National Sun Yat-sen University in fall 2021.