The world(s) between places: Arif Dirlik and the fragile epistemologies of the Asia-Pacific-Americas

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Arif Dirlik’s work on the Asia-Pacific region’s transformation into a “model region of globalization.” Writing amidst the crisis of the Social Sciences, Dirlik analyzed how global capitalism’s drive to simultaneously homogenize and fragment the world, a condition he termed “global modernity,” had not only restructured the Asia-Pacific region so as to meet the demands of a new flexible mode of production, but also transformed knowledge production about the world, giving way to an endless splintering of knowledge that reinforced the logics of global capitalism and foreclosed any possibility for radical critique. Drawing on Asian American studies, Pacific Studies and Indigenous Studies, which emerged in the Asian-Pacific borderlands between social activism and the academy, Dirlik called attention to the local as the primary site of inquiry and advocated for radical scholarly and activist approaches grounded in a “critical localism” against the hegemony of global capitalism. This paper explores how Dirlik’s work on the Asia-Pacific region generates the possibility for crafting what the anarchist sociologist Philippe Corcuff describes as “fragile epistemologies” of the plural social global.

KEYWORDS:

• Arif Dirlik
• Asia-Pacific
• global capitalism
• global modernity
• Area Studies
• Asian American Studies
• Pacific Studies
• Indigenous Studies
• epistemology

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 My gratitude goes to Roxann Prazniak and Andy Wang for inviting me to participate in two panels focused on Arif Dirlik’s work held at the “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference in Shanghai on 12 August 2018 and “The Radicalism of Possibility: Remembering Arif Dirlik” workshop at Duke University on 1 December 2018. Fellowship support provided by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, along with a residency fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes made this article possible. I am grateful to my colleague Svetla Koleva at IAS Nantes for introducing me to the work of Philippe Corcuff.

2 Although the literal translation of Corcuff's concept is “epistemology of fragility,” for my deployment of it in this paper I find a more colloquial translation of “fragile epistemology” to work best.

3 Corcuff outlines several types of passages : “(1st) passages between the tools of the social sciences (methodological, theoretical and epistemological) and the objects it questions and constructs […]; (2nd) passages between experiences of engagement in the city and the domain of the scientific laboratory; (3rd) passages between problems posed to the social sciences and those thematized by other ‘language games’ (cinema, literature, songs in particular); and (4th) passages between the scientific register and the philosophical register (notably through moral and political philosophy)” (2003, 233–234).

4 In his earliest writings, Dirlik conceptualizes Pacific Islanders and the indigenous peoples of the Americas as part of the “Asian” peoples who constituted the region through their migrations and activities, but in examining the distinct activist and intellectual interventions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a distinction between the two grows clearer in his later writings on the Pacific (1992, 68). Thus, my interpretation is framed distinctly from Dirlik’s original conceptualization of the fundamental contradiction of the Pacific to account for his later work.

5 Dirlik continued to examine the history, legacies and significance of the Chinese revolution over the remainder of his career. See Dirlik (1978, 1989, 1992); Dirlik and Meisner (1989); Dirlik, Healy, and Knight (1997); Dirlik (2005c).

6 See also Woo-Cummings (1999); Deyo (1993).

7 As this paper demonstrates, Dirlik refined his analysis of this central contradiction of the Pacific over many years of writing. For his initial statement, see Dirlik (1992, 59).

8 For an exceptional native Hawaiian account of the destruction of native Hawaiian epistemologies and lifeways through the encounter with Euro-Americans, see Silva (2004).

9 See also: Dirlik (1996b); Prazniak and Dirlik (2001).

10 Dirlik drew on Mao Zedong to distinguish between primary, or “fundamental,” and secondary contradictions. The later he understood to be contained within or shaped by the former, which had global implications (1992, 59).

11 See also Veracini (2010); Lake and Reynolds (2008).

12 For hemispheric approaches to the study of Asians in the Americas, see: Erika Lee (2005). For global approaches see: McKeown (2008); Tchen and Yeats (2014). For works beyond Hsu (2000) and McKeown (2001) investigating the effects of migration on qiaoxiang communities or of qiaoxiang on Chinese communities abroad, see: Chen (2000); Shen (2012); Hoe (2013); Williams (2018).

13 “Moana Nui Statement.” http://moananui2011.org/?page_id=614#[object%20Object.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange [grant number GS011-A-17]; National Endowment for the Humanities [grant number FEL-257592-18]; Institut d'études avancées de Nantes [grant number N/].

Notes on contributors

Ana Maria Candela

Ana Maria Candela is a historian of Modern China and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University. Her research focuses on Chinese migrations to Latin America and on the global dimensions of Chinese history and China’s social transformations. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Chiang-ching Kuo Foundation Scholar Grant, as well as a former fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes. Her work has been published in Critical Asian Studies and the Journal of World-Systems Research.