![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The text is a continuation of a eulogy written in the memory of Professor Dirlik, made in Duke University, a year after his passing. It develops the three argument I perceived important in the difficulties I met to translate a part of Dirlik works in the French language: a complex relation to France’s colonial past, a related reserve regarding radical theories, comforting a burying of Enlightenment ideals between inaudible intersectional quarrels and more complacent postures of conservatism. I try to show how the reading of Dirlik works help to better understand the connections between the riches of (post)colonial theory and the globalization of capitalism, with China in it.
Notes
1 See on the subject, Sternhell (Citation2009).
2 Prosperity and Crises is the title of their first co-written article, published in Citation1984. In it, Jin and Liu used theoretical trends of the time—like cybernetics or information theory—to axiomatize the ups and downs pattern of dynastic history. In this scheme, they assert that the CCP and the Chinese Revolution are just the latest avatars of a longest authoritarian feudal model of Chinese history. The article gained for them instant public fame, and immediate political scrutiny. The couple found refuge in Hong Kong after 4 June where they launched an academic journal—21st Century—that became a reference in the post 1989 reconstruction of the Chinese intellectual arena. The journal still exists to this day. See Bartel (Citation2011).
3 The editing process was disturbed by the current global health crisis, but the first volume finally came out in June 2020: Dirlik (Citation2020). From the success of this volume depends the publication of the second one.
4 “Marxisme et histoire chinoise: la globalisation du discours historique et la question de l’hégémonie dans la référence marxiste à l’histoire,” Extrême Orient-Extrême Occident, 1986, number 9; “Le Guoxue et les études nationales à l’âge de la modernité,” Perspectives Chinoises, 2011 (1); “Mao Zedong dans l’historiographie et le discours officiel chinois aujourd’hui,” Perspectives Chinoises, 2012 (2).
5 Lecture available on the web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG32i8KIjAA (in French).
6 In the journal Monde Chinois/Nouvelle Asie, 2014, number 2–3: 38–39. Text originally published in International Journal of China Studies 2014, volume 5, number 2: 295–329. “June Fourth at 25: Forget Tiananmen, You Don’t Want to Hurt the Chinese People’s Feelings—and Miss Out on the Business of the New ‘New China’!” https://www.boundary2.org/2014/08/june-fourth-at-25-forget-tiananmen-you-dont-want-to-hurt-the-chinese-peoples-feelings-and-miss-out-on-the-business-of-the-new-new-china/.
7 When President Macron in 2017 declared that colonialism was a crime against humanity, he created a massive polemic. In July 2020, Algerian President Tebboune still argued that France needs to make official true apologies for the colonial period. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niV_lO3d3HE.
8 Ethnic statistics are forbidden in France in the name of Republican equality, certainly blurring some academic perspectives and research trends, and social and political realities.
9 This story is skillfully reviewed in Christofferson (Citation2004).
10 And the French obsession with the Muslim veil must also be understood in this perspective.
11 The difficulty is that any criticism of any kind may discard one as a rightist/far right supporter in a form of cancel culture and thus endanger political unity.
12 We must note that a few scholars ring the alarm of this situation and call to a return to the basics of social thought: classes, struggle, and equality. See Roza (Citation2020).
13 I must temper this statement in regard of the work of some who, like Anne Cheng, accomplish tremendous efforts to overcome disciplinary boundaries. Her inaugural lecture to the Collège de France in 2008 is a declaration of intention. https://books.openedition.org/cdf/2207 (in English).
14 Ma (Citation1986, 206).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David Bartel
David Bartel, after 1989, started questioning the fate of the Chinese Enlightenment in the peculiar environment of an authoritarian regime confronted to the liberal tendencies of a capitalist globalization. After years in China, and in Taiwan, he lives in Hong Kong since 2008, where he continues to follow the development of Greater China. He finished his PhD on the intricacies of Chinese Modern History writing at the end of the Mao era in 2017. He teaches Hong Kong Studies in a Hong Kong university.