Arif Dirlik in Mandarin: radical interventions in China, Taiwan, and global entanglements

ABSTRACT

This article examines Arif Dirlik’s works in Mandarin, specifically Revolutionary China (2015) and After Colonialism? (2018), to tease out the politics of translation in China and Taiwan. Reading Dirlik’s works against these contexts of translation, it argues that despite various appropriations in respective contexts, Dirlik’s works in Mandarin have presented a consistent position against global modernity and colonialism that cannot be separated from his critiques of the Chinese model, cultural nationalism, nationalist reifications of culture and inter-imperial complicity. These works in translation indicate the impact of Dirlik’s radical interventions in “Chinese” history and politics, for which he is sorely missed.

KEYWORDS:

• Mandarin
• Tai-gi
• settler colonialism
• postcolonialism
• cultural nationalism
• global modernity
• nativism
• postrevolutionary

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 All translation of texts published in Mandarin are mine, except those by Dirlik that can be traced back to original publications in English.

2 See Hongpo Wang (2015, 376).

3 In 2016, Dirlik published an essay called “The Mouse that Roared: The Democratic Movement in Hong Kong” to defend the Umbrella movement (Dirlik 2016).

4 Another candidate for the postcolonial turn in Dirlik’s work is After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Dirlik 1994). On the periodization of Dirlik’s work, see Po-his Chen’s essay in this special issue (2021).

5 Though I do not talk about Hong Kong here, it remains a critical piece in the Taiwan–China relations, as evident in the 2020 presidential campaign in Taiwan and Taiwan’s support of Hong Kong’s struggle since the Umbrella Movement in 2014.

6 This article was first published in the boundary 2 blog, posted on 29 July 2015. It was then included in the special issue on Masao Miyoshi (boundary 2 46 (3) [2019]: 121–152), and later translated into Mandarin and included in After Colonialism? (2018)

7 On critiques of Tianxia-ism and its link to the rise of neo-Confucianism in China, see Liang (2018).

8 Besides these five lectures delivered in National Cheng Kung University, Dirlik also gave another talk in National Chiao-Tung University on 24 May 2016 on the topic of “From the Three Worlds to Global Modernity (via the Global South/North): Capitalism, Colonialism, and Geopolitical Reconfigurations.”

9 The original order of the lecture series are as follows: 6 May: The Cultural and Political Predicament of Global Modernity; 17 May: Global Modernity and the Colonial; 18 May: Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made; 26 May: Cultural Trojan Horses: Confucius Institutes and the PRC’s Search for Hegemony.

10 My description here does not suggest that the publisher and the editor appropriated Dirlik for marketing and ideological purposes; I believe they stay truthful to Dirlik’s vision and belief, for the book indeed contains a staunch critique of PRC hegemony. But the emphasis on Taiwan’s predicament in the title does add an affective charge to the project unintended by Dirlik. Fang-chih Yang however contends that the publisher deliberately framed Dirlik’s book in postcolonialism for market calculations.

11 In particular, Yang regards the dominant discourse of “four major ethnicities”—born out of Taiwan’s multiculturalist self-remaking in the 1990s—as the evidence of how postcolonialism colluded with the Mandarin and Sino-centric cultural hegemony in suppressing the Taiwanese subjectivity for which Tai-gi is its linguistic expression. However, it must be noted that “Tai-gi” is essentially Hoklo based. Though it was widely spoken before the 1980s among benshengren (Han people who migrated to Taiwan before 1949), equating Hoklo with the Taiwanese language to replace Mandarin as the national language risks privileging Hoklo above other locally spoken languages, such as Hakka and the aboriginal languages, and thus Hoklo above other ethnic groups. Most interestingly, certain versions of Hoklo are also spoken in Fujian, China, and Southeast Asia. While there are differences, they are mutually intelligible.

12 One example is that such frontier islands as Kinmen and Matsu—constitutive of and critical to the political legitimacy of the Republic of China—are often left out in the imagined geo-body of Taiwanese nationalism that remains grounded in the denial of aboriginal sovereignty.

13 See Jacques (2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chih-ming Wang

Chih-ming Wang is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, and visiting scholar at Harvard Yenching Institute, 2021–2022. He is also the editor in chief of Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies and the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (2013). His monograph in Mandarin, Re-Articulations: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan is forthcoming in Linking Press, Taiwan.