Publishing Arif Dirlik in his native language

ABSTRACT

According to Dirlik, the postcolonial theory constructed in the last century and triumphed by trilingual third world academics in American and Western universities in the 1980s, with an emphasis on otherness, makes a well-intended complicity with neoliberal hegemony by treating culture as one of the main elements of capitalism. Melting the class relationships and resemblances into absolute otherness and differentness makes history a literal text of culturalism that has prepared an escape ground from the class. He adds that the West and East dilemma is a cultural difference, and the South and North dilemma is a political economic difference, and accenting on the first hides the second one.

KEYWORDS:

• Arif Dirlik
• history
• Turkish scholars
• modernity
• China

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali Şimşek

Ali Şimşek is a publisher of several books and periodicals in Istanbul. He worked in Birgün and Tele1. He is a writer on middle class sociology (New Middle Class, To Steal the Critique). He is also a very well-known art critic.