International Center for Cultural Studies

《Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements》Volume 22 Number 4 出版

2022-01-20

Introduction

Roxann PRAZNIAK^a and Rob WILSON^b

^a Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA

^b Literature Department, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA

Given the complicated, antagonistic, if not phobic geopolitical relationships (as well as geospatial international border concerns) that have become aggravated between the People’s Republic of China and the virus-scapegoating world of Covid-19, we need to ponder and critique what Arif Dirlik called (dialectically as ever) China in the world and the world in China. But this is a worlded People’s Republic of China that must be situated against the nationalist populism and anti-globalist USA as well as the migrant-hostile UK and a wobbling European Union all aggravated during the tariff-flinging Trump administration (2016-2020) as well as while confronting the global pandemic that these countries and social communities still face across 2020 and 2021. On the horizon of such theorizing stands the city-state of Hong Kong all but sublated as a legal or social form into the mainland surveillance state of the PRC, a postcolonial Taiwan still perilously surviving as an integral site, as well as the polycentric Chinese diasporas and the rise of a resurgent indigenous Oceania that all call out for justice and global recognition. In such precarious contexts, this special issue of IACS that would articulate and will forward such situated complexity, a range of evolving transnational and transdisciplinary commitments, and (at the core) the historical ethos of what Marxist and Asia/Pacific scholar Arif Dirlik stood for should prove timely, urgent and of border-crossing interest across the Pacific and the broader world of critical theory, geopolitics, and planetary ecology we face as the Anthropocene.

To say that this special issue on comrade, teacher, lover, mentor, and friend Arif Dirlik enters into an over-determined and prefigured set of geopolitical oppositions, social tensions, and historical antagonisms (as this first paragraph gestures to evoke) is to put the matter politely. This special issue of IACS (a “movements” journal and coalition that Dirlik had mentored and contributed too since its founding days in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore) aims to interrogate these longer durations and commitments of Dirlik’s whole historical-material as well as cultural-political approach and his scholarly ethos embodying what Roxann Prazniak calls (in the last interviews, passages, and polemics authorized from a self-reflective Dirlik as collected and reflected upon in her essay herein) history as epistemology. History, that is, as a way of knowing and critically reflecting upon China in the world and the world in China as Arif puts it in his essay. Such reflections extend and update those articulated in his compelling critical last book-length work warningly called (holding back no critical punches), Complicities (2017). Many in this special issue, from Ravi Palat to Neferti Tadiar and Christopher Leigh Connery (in his afterword to this special issue), will come to terms with and try to remember forward.

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements Vol. 22 No. 4 December 2021

Table of Contents

Special issue title: After Dirlik: history, world, and radical imagination

Introduction

Roxann PRAZNIAK and Rob WILSON

Section I: History and the World

The Voices of Those who Inhabit Places

Russell LEONG

“Everyday I am Çapuling”: Keeping Dirlik’s theoretical history in focus

Roxann PRAZNIAK

Indigenism as project: language politics and the hegemony of postcolonialism in Taiwan

Fang-chih Irene YANG and Sam L. M. MAK

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

Ana Maria CANDELA

Seven poetic constellations of Asia/Pacific world-making: reflections on the diasporic life and organic-intellectual work of Arif Dirlik

Rob WILSON

Duplicities: the false promise of Asian Studies

Ravi Arvind PALAT

Sinified academic Marxism and Arif Dirlik’s (self-)criticism of postcolonial studies

Po-hsi CHEN

Section II: Radical Departures and Reflections

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

Chih-ming WANG

Arif Dirlik in South Korea

Dongyoun HWANG

The Cultural Revolution and its significance in world history: an interview with Arif Dirlik

Dongyoun HWANG

The difficulties of having Arif Dirlik published in the French language, and why I felt compelled to do it

David BARTEL

Arif Hoca and Turkish scholars

Veysel BATMAZ

Publishing Arif Dirlik in his native language

Ali ŞIMŞEK

Khatuns to comrades to capitalists: domestic violence law in modern Mongolia

Morris ROSSABI

Yang Lian’s exilic poetry: ghost poetics and self-dramatization

Victor MAIR and Qing LIAO

Visual essay

Photos of Arif Dirlik

Roxann PRAZNIAK

Section III: Tributes to Memory

Tributes to memory

Shaobo XIE

Complicity and responsibility: after Arif Dirlik on the Asia-Pacific and China

Neferti TADIAR

Arif’s gift

Masturah ALATAS

The end of the world as Arif showed us…

Paul A. BOVÉ

Complicitous?

Christopher Leigh CONNERY

Section IV: Farewell

After sunset

Tsering Wangmo DHOMPA

A Siena black rose

Roxann PRAZNIAK