IACSIntroduction DIRLIKissue

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riac20 Introduction Roxann Prazniak & Rob Wilson To cite this article: Roxann Prazniak & Rob Wilson (2021) Introduction, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 22:4, 457-461, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2021.1995159 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2021.1995159 Published online: 12 Jan 2022. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riac20 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 2021, VOL. 22, NO. 4, 457–461 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2021.1995159 INTRODUCTION Introduction Roxann PRAZNIAKa and Rob WILSONb a Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA; bDepartment of Literature, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA Given the complicated, antagonistic, if not urgent and of border-crossing interest across phobic geopolitical relationships (as well as the Pacific and the broader world of critical geospatial international border concerns) that theory, geopolitics, and planetary ecology we have become aggravated between the People’s face as the Anthropocene. Republic of China and the virus-scapegoating To say that this special issue on comrade, world of Covid-19, we need to ponder and cri- teacher, lover, mentor, and friend Arif Dirlik tique what Arif Dirlik called (dialectically as enters into an over-determined and prefigured ever) China in the world and the world in set of geopolitical oppositions, social tensions, China. But this is a worlded People’s Republic and historical antagonisms (as this first para- of China that must be situated against the graph gestures to evoke) is to put the matter nationalist populism and anti-globalist USA politely. This special issue of IACS (a “move- as well as the migrant-hostile UK and a wob- ments” journal and coalition that Dirlik had bling European Union all aggravated during mentored and contributed too since its found- the tariff-flinging Trump administration ing days in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and (2016-2020) as well as while confronting the Singapore) aims to interrogate these longer global pandemic that these countries and social durations and commitments of Dirlik’s whole communities still face across 2020 and 2021. historical-material as well as cultural-political On the horizon of such theorizing stands the approach and his scholarly ethos embodying city–state of Hong Kong all but sublated as a what Roxann Prazniak calls (in the last inter- legal or social form into the mainland surveil- views, passages, and polemics authorized lance state of the PRC, a postcolonial Taiwan from a self-reflective Dirlik as collected and still perilously surviving as an integral site, as reflected upon in her essay herein) history as well as the polycentric Chinese diasporas and epistemology. History, that is, as a way of know- the rise of a resurgent indigenous Oceania ing and critically reflecting upon China in the that all call out for justice and global recog- world and the world in China as Arif puts it nition. In such precarious contexts, this special in his essay. Such reflections extend and update issue of IACS that would articulate and will for- those articulated in his compelling critical last ward such situated complexity, a range of evol- book-length work warningly called (holding ving transnational and transdisciplinary back no critical punches), Complicities commitments, and (at the core) the historical (2017).1 Many in this special issue, from Ravi ethos of what Marxist and Asia/Pacific scholar Palat to Neferti Tadiar and Christopher Leigh Arif Dirlik stood for should prove timely, Connery (in his afterword to this special CONTACT Rob Wilson rwilson@ucsc.edu Department of Literature, University of California Santa Cruz, Humanities 631, High Street, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA © 2022 Roxann Prazniak and Rob Wilson. All rights reserved. 458 R. PRAZNIAK AND R. WILSON issue), will come to terms with and try to Such is not the case here, wherein off-center remember forward. complexity of site, genre, affect, and situation is Emergent global or regional claims of this brought to bear on the makings of homeland, so-called “Chinese Century” or the era of “the place, people, and nation under the terms of a Chinese Dream” are being radically challenged border-crossing transnationalism and capital- from Vietnam and India to Washington DC ist-driven mores and modes. We all now live and London if not inside the People’s Republic in discrepant worlds of global/local and local/ of China itself which Dirlik ironically renamed global complexity and precarity, necessarily as the PRC of a “Post-Revolutionary China” including in this framework the re-indigeniz- that becomes more obvious from outlets like ing Oceania region and formations like Asian the BBC in London to KPFA radio in Berkeley America. Dirlik (1996) also wrote about and to the Washington Post and Foreign Affairs in questioned as he did the transnational rise of DC. This selective gathering of essays, poems, the Pacific Rim that is not just a PRC matter photographs, memory pieces, interviews, eulo- of occupancy then or now. Across diverse gies, and polemics—if they can prove critically sites, disciplines, interventions, and situations and self-critically adequate to these treacherous that Dirlik’s writings and teachings have long geopolitics and the global pandemic of Covid- been actively connected to across his career 19—should help to expose the rooted as well (as reflected upon here through various scho- as routed dreams of so-called Global China as lars, sites and generations), we would also well as so many inflated claims of national aim to expose and interrogate the strange supremacy and the centrality to the region new geospatial modes as well as the thickly his- and the globe from Fiji to Africa as this post- toricized contexts of collective belonging, Mao state enters turbo-charged and leap-frog- place-making, identity shifts, and world-mak- ging into the desiring-consumption era of ing. We need to theorize and create across uneven and if not sovereign globalization. these transpacific sites and emergent modes This means facing a PRC that some would cri- of border-crossing belonging to space, place, tique as seeking an expanding hegemony via home, community and life worlds, articulating military and technological might so as to chal- cultural-political identities in all their lenge the postwar US capitalist and “soft entangled subtlety, risk, threat, danger, and power” reign across the Pacific and Africa if global/local change. not across Asia and Europe as well. Perhaps In this introduction, in order to get us the most notorious instrument of this attempt started reading and theorizing what Arif Dirlik at Chinese soft power, transnational funny stood for in his life and work, we would like to money, censorship of crucial issues, and super- highlight three key issues as articulated in con- intending ideology is what Marshall Sahlins texts of coming to terms with the radical possi- (2014) has critiqued as the “academic malware” bility and organic embodiment of his project in of Confucian Institutes outsourcing the limits its “aftering” impact across worlds, disciplines, of pedagogy, subject materials, and academic situations, and the Anthropocene we share as freedom to the state-party sublimations of Beij- planetary horizon, confronting what Arif ing.2 Nationalized homelands (or diasporas as lamented was “the end of the world as we such) can themselves become resonant with know it.”3 Unpacking and rethinking the his- retrograde sentiments of bad-faith nostalgia torical concept of “China” was, in Arif’s view, or the politics of a fabricated nationalism and the single most important precondition for a fixed idealism of local roots amid global routes moving forward toward a more humane, rad- as Dirlik had warned against in essays early and ical future of possibility and change. His last late across the 1980s and the 1990s. writings accentuated the necessity of this  INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 459 historical correction and made clear that with- critical perspective Arif once again expresses out a full-scale effort to dismantle and recon- regarding the Chinese Cultural Revolution of struct the way we have come to understand the 1960s and the potentials for radical social the region we popularly but misleadingly call change in the PRC. Ravi Palat extends this dis- China, we cannot begin to negate our entangled cussion into the context of Asian Studies from complicities in the present state of the world or which Rob Wilson and Ana Candela take into inside the PRC. If there was any one key issue, specific regions and struggles of Asia-Pacific. this was it. He wrote, Part two of this special issue considers the lin- guistic and conceptual tensions involved in To leave no ambiguity, what I have proposed translating Dirlik’s work into specific and dis- in my original article and the addendum here crepant intellectual environments. Chih-ming is that the fields we know as “China Studies,” Wang examines translations into Mandarin “Chinese history,” etc., have been constructed upon a misrecognition of the terms that and reflects on questions of identity and define it, “China,” “Chinese,” “Zhongguo,” location raised by Fang-chih Yang on the Tai- etc., and the misleading equivalences that wan political environment. While debates have been attributed to them. While they have been more socially and intellectually have long histories, it is the complicitous engaged regarding Taiwan or Hong Kong and relationship between foreign orientalism and Chinese nationalism that from the late nine- the PRC, David Bartel, Veysel Batmaz, and teenth century has endowed it with the status Ali Şimşek compellingly locate translations of of historical and cultural reality—which is the Arif’s work into French and Turkish contexts reverse of what the field would claim or itself. respectively. French philosophical inclinations Awareness of this misrecognition is impor- and colonial policies as well as Turkish political tant not just for scholarly but even more so intimidation of intellectuals have created a less for its political implications.4 receptive ground for Arif’s work in the present. Two interrelated corollaries or issues can be Po-hsi Chen offers a heuristic periodization of derived from this primary historical project: Dirlik’s work into early and late. Senior scho- the need to reconsider and resituate historical lars and dear friends of Arif, Morris Rossabi concepts of universal human rights in the hor- and Victor Mair, present two previously izon of a radical present; and the democratic unpublished selections of their own work in tri- function of forging a place-based politics as bute to their scholarly comrade. situated in the process of social and ecological The last sections round out this special issue recalibrations. The latter two can function with an abundance of final honors and mem- equitably only once the entanglements and ories that ran beyond our page limited ability complicities of the first are sorted and come to include everyone. Christopher Leigh Conn- to terms with. ery’s Afterword frames materials and issues of This special issue of IACS begins the conver- this special issue in a subtle, deeply informed sation Arif envisioned as a path forward. Rus- historical and situational perspective. We sell Leong’s poem, “The Voices of Those Who need not end up in quietest despair, endless Inhabit Places” sets the tone for a tribute to rounds of critique and deconstruction, what Arif and his life work that is at once poetic was called in the 1980s so much cynical reason, and political, drawing our attention to place- or in the 1990s postcolonial wavering, and in based activism. Fang-chih Yang and Sam Mak the digitalized new millennium the rise of take up the topic of place in their discussion post-human and/or post-theory posturing and of indigenism and Taiwanese politics in so on across an ever-digitalizing profession. relationship to the PRC. Dongyoun Hwang’s Instead, as the energies and angles of vision 2006 interview is revealing for the hopeful yet in this special issue diversely reflect and refract, 460 R. PRAZNIAK AND R. WILSON we need to push forward towards what British the University of Chicago and McMaster left-socialist literary and cultural historian Ray- University in Canada where these Confu- mond Williams (1989 [1980]) memorably cian Institutes were exposed, defunded, and closed. called the praxis of “making hope practical, 3. On the whole idea of “aftering” considered in rather than despair convincing”: we can the before/after impact of fellow Asia and glo- achieve this by energizing the historical, social, bal studies scholar, Masao Miyoshi, see the and cultural will to “resume and change and special issue of boundary 2 coedited by Rob extend our campaigns” and continue working Wilson and Paul Bove (2019), especially Wil- son’s (2019) introduction. in support of nuclear disarmament (then) or 4. Arif Dirlik, “Lucky Baklava or Random against authoritarian democracy and one- Thoughts on the Way to the Exit” (23 Septem- party state hegemony (now) at home and ber 2017; unpublished manuscript, 62). Arif abroad.5 intriguingly referenced Kang Youwei for his- This means we still need to foment the cru- torical precedent. He wrote in the next line cial and life-enhancing difference (that makes a of this paragraph, “Interestingly, radical refor- mer Kang Youwei promoting radical change difference) between what Antonio Gramsci would justify his advocacy against orthodox (1989), in his Prison Notebooks, theorized as Confucius by arguing that what had been an “organic intellectual” vigilantly affiliated accepted for two millennia as the truth of and courageously oppositional versus the tam- Confucius had been based upon forged ing, sublimating, evading, and all but tired and classics.” 5. This is the key ethos and commitment driving defeated will of the “traditional intellectual” be the career of Raymond Williams. this Platonic or Confucian in origin and effect. Gramsci had theorized this crucial formation and dialectical distinction as articulated within Notes on contributors his own class-struggles across places and fac- Rob Sean Wilson is a professor of American litera- tories in subaltern Italy, the regional and global ture, creative writing, and poetics at the University South, and the rise of European fascism and of California at Santa Cruz. His books of poetry war across the twentieth century. This is the and cultural criticism include: Waking In Seoul; kind of work Arif Dirlik stood for by writing American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural against the rise of uncritical hybridity, the eva- Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, sion of human rights issues, professionalized Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagin- bad faith, neoliberal complacency, and an eva- ing the American Pacific: From “South Pacific” to sive unconcern with the death of minorities, Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Be Always Converting, indigenous peoples, places, and nature on a Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was daily basis across what we face as the de-world- selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic ing world of capitalist power. Publication in 2010. Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 and reissued on Kindle Notes Books in 2020. A dual-language poetry collection 1. Scholars in this collection will invoke, ponder, in English and Chinese called When the Nikita and critique from the overview essay by Chih- Moon Rose appears in the Transpacific Archipelagic Ming Wang to the field-positioning afterword Poetry Series at National Sun Yat-sen University in by Christopher Leigh Connery. fall 2021. 2. Sahlins has amplified this influential cri- Roxann Prazniak is historian of “China” and Eura- tique in Confucian Institutes: Academic sia and most recently the author of Sudden Appear- Malware (2014). Dirlik and Sahlins were ances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and aligned in these de-sublimating critical Art (University of Hawaii Press: 2019). She lives views as well as interventions at sites like in Eugene, Oregon and Céret, France. When the  INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 461 time is right, she hopes to attempt an intellectual translated by Quinton Hoare, and Geoffrey biography of Arif Dirlik. Nowell Smith, 5–14. New York: International Publishers. Sahlins, Marshall. 2014. “Confucian Institutes: References Academic Malware.” The Asia Pacific Journal 12 (46): 1–26. https://apjjf.org/2014/12/46/Marsh Dirlik, Arif. 1996. “The Global in the Local.” In all-Sahlins/4220.html Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Williams, Raymond. 1989 [1980]. “The Politics of Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson, Nuclear Disarmament.” In Resources of Hope: and Wimal Dissanayake, 21–45. Durham, NC: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by Robin Duke University Press. Gable, 189–209. London: Verso. Dirlik, Arif. 2017. Complicities: The People’s Wilson, Rob. 2019. “Introduction: Aftering.” bound- Republic of China in Global Capitalism. ary 2 46 (3): 1–3. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. Wilson, Rob, and Paul Bove, eds. 2019. Special issue: Gramsci, Antonio. 1989. “Formation of the “Aftering Masao Miyoshi: Critique and Cosmos.” Intellectuals.” In Selections from the Prison boundary 2 46 (3): 1–4. Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and