Sinified academic Marxism and Arif Dirlik’s (self-)criticism of postcolonial studies

ABSTRACT

“The Postcolonial Aura,” first published in 1994, marks an abrupt shift of Dirlik’s research focus from Chinese revolutionary historiography to a critique of postcolonial studies. As the two fields are far apart, so far, few have noticed the continuities between his earlier and later works. This essay attempts to reconnect several motifs that undergird Dirlik’s oeuvre by reconnecting his Revolution and History (1978) and The Postcolonial Aura. I propose to focus on two specific points that recurred throughout Dirlik’s lifelong concerns: first, the institutionalization of given disciplines; and second, universalism and particularities in the establishment of the disciplines in question. While Dirlik valorized late-1920s and early-1930s academic Marxism, he did not equally commend the institutionalization of postcolonial studies in post-1990s North America. He argued that the latter was the product of Third World intellectuals’ entrance in the First World academia. The essay then discusses the relationship between postcolonialism and Marxism in Dirlik’s works. Although postcolonial studies repudiates the universalistic pretensions embedded in nineteenth-century Marxism, I note that Chinese Marxist intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s examined by Dirlik in fact championed the Marxian universalism. In sum, I suggest that a combined reading of Dirlik’s earlier works on academic Chinese Marxism and his later critique of postcolonialism may shed light on both fields.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic Chinese Marxism
• Arif Dirlik
• complicity
• globalization
• postcolonial studies
• revolution
• Third World intellectuals
• universalism

Acknowledgements

This article, written in memoriam of the late Professor Arif Dirlik, was initially presented under the title “Sinicized Marxism and Arif Dirlik’s Postcolonial Turn” at Crossroads in Cultural Studies on 12 August 2018. I would like to thank Chih-ming Wang for organizing the double panel Arif Dirlik and Cultural Studies and his kind invitation for submission—though, unlike other panelists, I was not under Professor Dirlik’s tutelage and never worked with him personally. Thus, I am also greatly indebted to all the other panelists: Professors Ana Maria Candela, Rebecca Karl, Ralph Litzinger, Rob Sean Wilson, and especially Roxann Prazniak for sharing their thoughts and firsthand experience with me. I am also grateful to Shu-mei Lin, Yi-hung Liu, Qiu Shijie, Junning Fu and Ted Keng-Liang Cheng for their invaluable opinions at different stages of my reading and writing.

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 On social media such as WeChat, it is retitled “德里克逝世：他用革命佐菜，历史下酒” [Dirlik Passes Away: He Had Dishes with Revolution and Wine with History], available at https://www.jiemian.com/article/1789458.html. My translation.

2 What I refer to as the “revolutionary trilogy,” i.e. Revolution and History, Origins of Chinese Communism, and Anarchism in Chinese Revolution, is, of course, not the most accurate term. According to Dirlik’s studies, Chinese socialism and anarchism are often at odds with one another; see Dirlik (1991, chapter 6).

3 For the most recent discussion of Guo Moruo, whom Dirlik also admired, see Pu Wang 2018.

4 One of the most representative studies on Marxian historiography, G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, curiously chooses to leave the Asiatic mode of production out of its discussion. See Cohen (2000 [1978], 199n1).

5 For Dirlik’s discussion of the Asiatic mode of production, see Dirlik (1978, 191–99). For more complete discussions on the Asiatic mode of production, see Wittfogel (1957); Karl (2017, 40–72); and so on. Notably, another possible means to configuring the Asiatic mode of production is through studying how the Asian corporality has been represented in Western capitalist discourse. See Hayot (2009, chapter 4).

6 Later compiled in Dirlik (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Po-hsi Chen

Po-hsi Chen is currently Post-Doctoral Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, he was Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taipei. He obtained his Ph.D degree in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University.