Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China

In his latest work, Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity, Dirlik brings together a lifetime of research and academic conceptualization to articulate some of the most profound issues China faces in a modern, postcolonial world. The book itself is comprised of eight chapters or essays, each of which served as a lecture during the Liang Qichao Memorial Lectures in 2010. The earliest of these essays was published in 1995, though each essay was updated and revised and together offer a powerful and seamless thesis.

The central question of this work regarding the “deployment of culture and history in postrevolutionary Chinese thought,” (p. ix) is contingent, Dirlik argues, upon the central issue of modernity. Particularly important to the issue of modernity are the ways in which Chinese intellectuals have internalized a concept of modern, a concept brought into question by what Dirlik calls “globality” (p. 3), and which has ultimately brought into question broader concepts of history. It is in this vein that China has consistently sought to reassert its identity, first by rejecting a perceived ignominious history and culture of pre-western intervention, only to exchange those ideas for a plethora of others while still holding on to fantastic notions of ‘Chinese-ness’.

Throughout the book Dirlik traces this progression through Chinese political and intellectual history and paints a picture of a China romantically in search of its identity and place in a world very different from times past. In this process, a number of contradictions and paradoxes rise to the surface. Dirlik explicitly rejects the notion of multiple modernities, as embodied in concepts of nationalistic history, not on the premise of denying unique identities, but rather on the premise that such notions themselves are extensions of colonial teleology.

It is the global world, postcolonial, where the universalisms of old are being undone and modernity is brought onto center stage, open to interpretation and, arguably, misguided conceptualization. It is worth quoting Dirlik at length:

“The challenge, therefore, is not to take Europe out of the history of modernity, but rather to reformulate that history in such a way as to grasp modernity both as a product of processes that were ultimately global in scope, and to recognize, for better or worse, the centrality to the formations of modernity of Europe and Europeans.” (p. 21)

“In this perspective, the so-called ‘decolonization of the mind’ should undertake not an escape from Euro/American cultural hegemony into an imagined national or ethnic culture, but a radical repudiation of this unquestioning faith in development that goes against the evidence of increased marginalization and inequality worldwide that has accompanied the globalization of capital.” (p. 58)

Dirlik reflects on Capitalism and the idea that there is no “viable alternative” (p. 55), and how this has been a driving force behind Chinese conceptualizations of modernity and identity in the postrevolutionary period. He offers especially colorful analysis of this historical process by highlighting the ambivalent relationship between a ‘modern’ China and the teachings of the First Sage as embodied in Confucianism.

Overall, Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity, as in other works by Arif Dirlik, confronts the reader with both sharp and logical discourse that insists on fresh approaches to otherwise academically saturated topics. In this volume, Dirlik puts forth an argument that is dense, requiring thoughtful attention from the reader, but that engages a simplicity of logic that allows for deepened understandings.

Dirlik’s arguments are intellectually rehabilitative in that they are non-judgmental. One does not find unfair criticisms of China or ‘Chinese-ness’, nor does one find over dramatization of Euro/American centric paradigms as the root of all evil. Instead, Dirlik offers a balanced reflection on the current state of Chinese intellectual evolution. In doing so, he inevitably offers insightful reflections on the broader state of global intellectual evolution in a ‘modern’, postcolonial world. Ironically, Drilik effectively makes clear the struggles of the formerly colonized to cope and identify in a globalized world, are in fact the very same intellectual struggles that are taking place in Euro/American societies. It is for this reason he offers mild words of caution against a regression toward interpreting diversity as national differences, and in leveraging histories to create these narratives of ‘diversity’. Rather, the path toward a modern identity seems to necessitate some historical amalgamation of understandings.

The intellectual arguments offered by Dirlik would not only be useful to China scholars or academics, but anyone with an interest in an evolving modernity and globalizing world. The concepts he addresses (historical, sociological, anthropological) certainly would be welcomed additions within the disciplines of Social Science, with an adept ability to grapple with the unquantifiable, untethered to presupposed notions of how the world works.