“Everyday I am Çapuling”: Keeping Dirlik's theoretical history in focus

ABSTRACT

Four years after his death and in a world significantly transformed by recent events, Arif Dirlik’s final thoughts carry a heightened urgency for discussions of critical theory and the actions they might inspire. Considering the panoply of topics that concerned his acute intellect, Arif identified two issues he deemed most important for the present state of humanity: an historical understanding of the construct of “China” and the legacy of the French Enlightenment. Other problems, as he saw it, depended on getting these two multifaceted and far-reaching cases of contested history right. Critical analysis employed in this exploration would by extension connect with and continue to animate current debates on race, environment, and democracy. In a concluding thought experiment intended to spin his theoretical history approach into future scholarship and activism, Dirlik explored the complexities of class and racism in a series of incidents from late Qing dynasty/US relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical theory
• Kexue fazhanguan
• complicities
• Liu Xiaobo
• zhongguo
• enlightenment
• ecological civilization
• Snake River Massacre of 1885
• racism
• Gezi Park

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 Arif Dirlik, Lucky Baklava or Random Thoughts on the Way to the Exist (23 September 2017 –?); unpublished manuscript, 47.

2 2014 Interview, 5 of rough draft.

3 2014 Interview, page 9 of draft.

4 Dirlik, Random Notes, 41.

5 Dirlik, Random Notes, 37.

6 Hwang (2006).

7 Hwang (2006).

8 Yang (2018), 248

9 2014 Interview, English copy, 29–30

10 Yang (2018), 231.

11 Hwang (2006).

12 Hwang (2006).

13 Dirlik, Random Notes, 38.

14 Dirlik, Random Notes, 47.

15 Dirlik, Random Notes, 234.

16 Dirlik, Random Notes, 43.

17 Dirlik, Random Notes, 61.

18 Dirlik, Random Notes, 44-45.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roxann Prazniak

Roxann Prazniak is historian of “China” and Eurasia and most recently the author of Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art (University of Hawaii Press: 2019).