Arif’s gift

ABSTRACT

This memoir essay is an account of the author’s virtual acquaintance and exchanges with Arif Dirlik during the five years preceding his death. Never meeting Dirlik in real life, the author first heard of him when she was a college student in the United States in the late 1980s. Two decades later, when she was writing the biography of her own father, Dirlik becomes important again in her search for those scholars who best embody the non-Eurocentric, cosmopolitan spirit. Dirlik’s own writings about neoliberalism and neotraditionalism in Turkey help her rethink the “Asian values versus Westernization” debates in Malaysia and Singapore. And a map in Venice triggers parallels between the naming of China that Dirlik had written about and the author’s conjectures about the naming of Malaysia. At Dirlik’s request, his partner Roxann Prazniak and the author meet in Italy after his passing, leaving the author not just with the gift of knowledge but also the one of friendship.

KEYWORDS:

• Arif Dirlik
• Facebook
• cosmopolitanism
• Syed Hussein Alatas
• neoliberalism
• neotraditionalism
• China
• Malaysia
• Roxann Prazniak
• friendship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Incidently, it was Arif who introduced me to the writings of the network, Secularism Is A Women’s Issue.

2 Although Arif has never acknowledged or written about the term “Chinese Privilege,” (see Koh 2015), this essay on “China” as a construct and “the political significance of naming” might help us understand why Arif would have probably had little sympathy for the term.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Masturah Alatas

Masturah Alatas is a Singapore-born writer and teacher who lives in Italy. She is the author of The girl who made it snow in Singapore (2008) and The Life in the Writing (2010). She is one of several writers along with Naomi Klein and Amitav Ghosh to be published in the Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Climate Change (2017) anthology. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the Lingua Madre and Cambridge short story prizes. Masturah teaches English at the University of Macerata.