Introduction

Given the complicated, antagonistic, if not phobic geopolitical relationships (as well as geospatial international border concerns) that have become aggravated between the People’s Republic of China and the virus-scapegoating world of Covid-19, we need to ponder and critique what Arif Dirlik called (dialectically as ever) China in the world and the world in China. But this is a worlded People’s Republic of China that must be situated against the nationalist populism and anti-globalist USA as well as the migrant-hostile UK and a wobbling European Union all aggravated during the tariff-flinging Trump administration (2016-2020) as well as while confronting the global pandemic that these countries and social communities still face across 2020 and 2021. On the horizon of such theorizing stands the city–state of Hong Kong all but sublated as a legal or social form into the mainland surveillance state of the PRC, a postcolonial Taiwan still perilously surviving as an integral site, as well as the polycentric Chinese diasporas and the rise of a resurgent indigenous Oceania that all call out for justice and global recognition. In such precarious contexts, this special issue of IACS that would articulate and will forward such situated complexity, a range of evolving transnational and transdisciplinary commitments, and (at the core) the historical ethos of what Marxist and Asia/Pacific scholar Arif Dirlik stood for should prove timely, urgent and of border-crossing interest across the Pacific and the broader world of critical theory, geopolitics, and planetary ecology we face as the Anthropocene.

To say that this special issue on comrade, teacher, lover, mentor, and friend Arif Dirlik enters into an over-determined and prefigured set of geopolitical oppositions, social tensions, and historical antagonisms (as this first paragraph gestures to evoke) is to put the matter politely. This special issue of IACS (a “movements” journal and coalition that Dirlik had mentored and contributed too since its founding days in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore) aims to interrogate these longer durations and commitments of Dirlik’s whole historical-material as well as cultural-political approach and his scholarly ethos embodying what Roxann Prazniak calls (in the last interviews, passages, and polemics authorized from a self-reflective Dirlik as collected and reflected upon in her essay herein) history as epistemology. History, that is, as a way of knowing and critically reflecting upon China in the world and the world in China as Arif puts it in his essay. Such reflections extend and update those articulated in his compelling critical last book-length work warningly called (holding back no critical punches), Complicities (2017).¹ Many in this special issue, from Ravi Palat to Neferti Tadiar and Christopher Leigh Connery (in his afterword to this special issue), will come to terms with and try to remember forward.

Emergent global or regional claims of this so-called “Chinese Century” or the era of “the Chinese Dream” are being radically challenged from Vietnam and India to Washington DC and London if not inside the People’s Republic of China itself which Dirlik ironically renamed as the PRC of a “Post-Revolutionary China” that becomes more obvious from outlets like the BBC in London to KPFA radio in Berkeley to the Washington Post and Foreign Affairs in DC. This selective gathering of essays, poems, photographs, memory pieces, interviews, eulogies, and polemics—if they can prove critically and self-critically adequate to these treacherous geopolitics and the global pandemic of Covid-19—should help to expose the rooted as well as routed dreams of so-called Global China as well as so many inflated claims of national supremacy and the centrality to the region and the globe from Fiji to Africa as this post-Mao state enters turbo-charged and leap-frogging into the desiring-consumption era of uneven and if not sovereign globalization. This means facing a PRC that some would critique as seeking an expanding hegemony via military and technological might so as to challenge the postwar US capitalist and “soft power” reign across the Pacific and Africa if not across Asia and Europe as well. Perhaps the most notorious instrument of this attempt at Chinese soft power, transnational funny money, censorship of crucial issues, and superintending ideology is what Marshall Sahlins (2014) has critiqued as the “academic malware” of Confucian Institutes outsourcing the limits of pedagogy, subject materials, and academic freedom to the state-party sublimations of Beijing.² Nationalized homelands (or diasporas as such) can themselves become resonant with retrograde sentiments of bad-faith nostalgia or the politics of a fabricated nationalism and a fixed idealism of local roots amid global routes as Dirlik had warned against in essays early and late across the 1980s and the 1990s.

Such is not the case here, wherein off-center complexity of site, genre, affect, and situation is brought to bear on the makings of homeland, place, people, and nation under the terms of a border-crossing transnationalism and capitalist-driven mores and modes. We all now live in discrepant worlds of global/local and local/global complexity and precarity, necessarily including in this framework the re-indigenizing Oceania region and formations like Asian America. Dirlik (1996) also wrote about and questioned as he did the transnational rise of the Pacific Rim that is not just a PRC matter of occupancy then or now. Across diverse sites, disciplines, interventions, and situations that Dirlik’s writings and teachings have long been actively connected to across his career (as reflected upon here through various scholars, sites and generations), we would also aim to expose and interrogate the strange new geospatial modes as well as the thickly historicized contexts of collective belonging, place-making, identity shifts, and world-making. We need to theorize and create across these transpacific sites and emergent modes of border-crossing belonging to space, place, home, community and life worlds, articulating cultural-political identities in all their entangled subtlety, risk, threat, danger, and global/local change.

In this introduction, in order to get us started reading and theorizing what Arif Dirlik stood for in his life and work, we would like to highlight three key issues as articulated in contexts of coming to terms with the radical possibility and organic embodiment of his project in its “aftering” impact across worlds, disciplines, situations, and the Anthropocene we share as planetary horizon, confronting what Arif lamented was “the end of the world as we know it.”³ Unpacking and rethinking the historical concept of “China” was, in Arif’s view, the single most important precondition for moving forward toward a more humane, radical future of possibility and change. His last writings accentuated the necessity of this historical correction and made clear that without a full-scale effort to dismantle and reconstruct the way we have come to understand the region we popularly but misleadingly call China, we cannot begin to negate our entangled complicities in the present state of the world or inside the PRC. If there was any one key issue, this was it. He wrote,

To leave no ambiguity, what I have proposed in my original article and the addendum here is that the fields we know as “China Studies,” “Chinese history,” etc., have been constructed upon a misrecognition of the terms that define it, “China,” “Chinese,” “Zhongguo,” etc., and the misleading equivalences that have been attributed to them. While they have long histories, it is the complicitous relationship between foreign orientalism and Chinese nationalism that from the late nineteenth century has endowed it with the status of historical and cultural reality—which is the reverse of what the field would claim or itself. Awareness of this misrecognition is important not just for scholarly but even more so for its political implications.⁴

Two interrelated corollaries or issues can be derived from this primary historical project: the need to reconsider and resituate historical concepts of universal human rights in the horizon of a radical present; and the democratic function of forging a place-based politics as situated in the process of social and ecological recalibrations. The latter two can function equitably only once the entanglements and complicities of the first are sorted and come to terms with.

This special issue of IACS begins the conversation Arif envisioned as a path forward. Russell Leong’s poem, “The Voices of Those Who Inhabit Places” sets the tone for a tribute to Arif and his life work that is at once poetic and political, drawing our attention to place-based activism. Fang-chih Yang and Sam Mak take up the topic of place in their discussion of indigenism and Taiwanese politics in relationship to the PRC. Dongyoun Hwang’s 2006 interview is revealing for the hopeful yet critical perspective Arif once again expresses regarding the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the potentials for radical social change in the PRC. Ravi Palat extends this discussion into the context of Asian Studies from which Rob Wilson and Ana Candela take into specific regions and struggles of Asia-Pacific. Part two of this special issue considers the linguistic and conceptual tensions involved in translating Dirlik’s work into specific and discrepant intellectual environments. Chih-ming Wang examines translations into Mandarin and reflects on questions of identity and location raised by Fang-chih Yang on the Taiwan political environment. While debates have been more socially and intellectually engaged regarding Taiwan or Hong Kong and the PRC, David Bartel, Veysel Batmaz, and Ali Şimşek compellingly locate translations of Arif’s work into French and Turkish contexts respectively. French philosophical inclinations and colonial policies as well as Turkish political intimidation of intellectuals have created a less receptive ground for Arif’s work in the present. Po-hsi Chen offers a heuristic periodization of Dirlik’s work into early and late. Senior scholars and dear friends of Arif, Morris Rossabi and Victor Mair, present two previously unpublished selections of their own work in tribute to their scholarly comrade.

The last sections round out this special issue with an abundance of final honors and memories that ran beyond our page limited ability to include everyone. Christopher Leigh Connery’s Afterword frames materials and issues of this special issue in a subtle, deeply informed historical and situational perspective. We need not end up in quietest despair, endless rounds of critique and deconstruction, what was called in the 1980s so much cynical reason, or in the 1990s postcolonial wavering, and in the digitalized new millennium the rise of post-human and/or post-theory posturing and so on across an ever-digitalizing profession. Instead, as the energies and angles of vision in this special issue diversely reflect and refract, we need to push forward towards what British left-socialist literary and cultural historian Raymond Williams (1989 [1980]) memorably called the praxis of “making hope practical, rather than despair convincing”: we can achieve this by energizing the historical, social, and cultural will to “resume and change and extend our campaigns” and continue working in support of nuclear disarmament (then) or against authoritarian democracy and one-party state hegemony (now) at home and abroad.⁵

This means we still need to foment the crucial and life-enhancing difference (that makes a difference) between what Antonio Gramsci (1989), in his Prison Notebooks, theorized as an “organic intellectual” vigilantly affiliated and courageously oppositional versus the taming, sublimating, evading, and all but tired and defeated will of the “traditional intellectual” be this Platonic or Confucian in origin and effect. Gramsci had theorized this crucial formation and dialectical distinction as articulated within his own class-struggles across places and factories in subaltern Italy, the regional and global South, and the rise of European fascism and war across the twentieth century. This is the kind of work Arif Dirlik stood for by writing against the rise of uncritical hybridity, the evasion of human rights issues, professionalized bad faith, neoliberal complacency, and an evasive unconcern with the death of minorities, indigenous peoples, places, and nature on a daily basis across what we face as the de-worlding world of capitalist power.

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). She lives in Eugene, Oregon and Céret, France. When the time is right, she hopes to attempt an intellectual biography of Arif Dirlik.

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.

Notes

1 Scholars in this collection will invoke, ponder, and critique from the overview essay by Chih-Ming Wang to the field-positioning afterword by Christopher Leigh Connery.

2 Sahlins has amplified this influential critique in Confucian Institutes: Academic Malware (2014). Dirlik and Sahlins were aligned in these de-sublimating critical views as well as interventions at sites like the University of Chicago and McMaster University in Canada where these Confucian Institutes were exposed, defunded, and closed.

3 On the whole idea of “aftering” considered in the before/after impact of fellow Asia and global studies scholar, Masao Miyoshi, see the special issue of boundary 2 coedited by Rob Wilson and Paul Bove (2019), especially Wilson’s (2019) introduction.

4 Arif Dirlik, “Lucky Baklava or Random Thoughts on the Way to the Exit” (23 September 2017; unpublished manuscript, 62). Arif intriguingly referenced Kang Youwei for historical precedent. He wrote in the next line of this paragraph, “Interestingly, radical reformer Kang Youwei promoting radical change would justify his advocacy against orthodox Confucius by arguing that what had been accepted for two millennia as the truth of Confucius had been based upon forged classics.”

5 This is the key ethos and commitment driving the career of Raymond Williams.