The end of the world as Arif showed us … 

ABSTRACT

Arif Dirlik was an independent critical intellectual who warned of the political and ecological catastrophes consequent upon the rise of the PRC under its current leadership and along the current path of development. He is an excellent example of the intellectual who accepts responsibilities larger than the ambitions of the academy and its iterative common sense.

KEYWORDS:

• Jameson
• imagination
• criticism
• responsibility
• intellectual function
• PRC
• catastrophe

Notes

1 Arif Dirlik, “The Rise of China and the End of the World as We Know It,” 27 February 2016: https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/12708/items/1.0348919.

2 Compare with the two sessions on Jameson at the MLA Convention, Thursday, 7 January 2021: “Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious—Forty Years On” and “Jameson’s Postmodernism at Thirty.” At URL: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2021/meetingapp.cgi/Subject/478.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul A. Bové

Paul A. Bové is the Editor of boundary 2 and most recently the author of Love’s Shadow (Harvard University Press, 2021). He is currently writing books on American politics and letters as well as on visual and literary portraiture. He has just edited “Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences,” a special issue of boundary 2.