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  • Pierre Joris – A Nomad Poetics Revisited: Poetry and Translation in a Global Age

    Pierre Joris – A Nomad Poetics Revisited: Poetry and Translation in a Global Age

    by Pierre Joris

    [presented as keynote address at the International Poetry Seminar

    Moving Back and Forth between Poetry as/and Translation:  Nomadic Travels and Travails with Alice Notley and Pierre Joris

    on 7-8 November 2013, Université Libre de Bruxelles, convened by Franca Bellarsi & Peter Cockelbergh.]

     

    1. “Who among us has not had his promised land, his day of ecstasy and his end in exile?” — signed: Amiel (with one “m” — the one with 2 “m”s will come in later). Thus begins or rather pre-begins Joseph Conrad’s novel Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895). The epigraph comes from Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s collection of poems & prose meditations Grains de Mil (Grains of Millet) (Paris 1854). This exergue stands at the head of, or, more accurately, stands before his first novel, thus before the vast oeuvre to come. Introïbo ad altarem Conradi.

    The world-weary and wandering sailor from Poland I often confuse with my own grandfather, Joseph Joris, also a sailor, though in the early parts of his life & of the 20C when Conrad had already abandoned ship to take up the pen. Joseph Joris’ writings — mainly a large correspondence with major scientists & politicians of his era, or so my father told me, and some notations of which only one 3 by 4 scrap of astrological calculations remains — went up in flames during the Rundstedt offensive when his house in Ettelbruck, Luxembourg — living quarters plus confiserie fine plus the ineptly, for its time, named Cinéma de la Paix — was shelled & burned out by advancing US troops liberating us from the Germans. Joseph didn’t live to see this: he had died 2 years earlier from an infected throat — but that is another story.

    So why do I begin here? Because this epigraph I came across a few days ago as I sat down to redact this “keynote” (more on that word in a minute) came into my mind — maybe because as I was thinking about what to say today I was looking out of my window, idly, and through the red & falling autumn leaves saw the flowing waters of the Narrows, where Hudson river and East river (tho not Conrad’s “Eastern River” — & yet?) mingle with the encroaching ocean in a daily tug-of-war, ebb & flood, riverrun riverrun — if I wanted to link elsewhere in modernism, but I don’t want to right now.

    So, Conrad’s epigraph was suddenly there & I saw it not as something that stands before one book, but as something that stands before, above, in front of a whole oeuvre, a life’s work. A door all of a sudden — a gate, as in Kafka’s story. (Though Kafka, remember, couldn’t go to sea as my two Josephs did, but maybe he didn’t need to do so, for as he puts it in his Journals, he had the experience of being “seasick on firm land.”) This door or gate is not one to be waited in front of, as it is open & indeed meant for who is in front of it, & thus meant to be walked, strode through, though the crossing of this door’s threshold is something fierce & fearsome because as Amiel points out, the promised land is in the past. (“n’a pas eu…:” in the original, even if Ian Watt in his excellent comment on the novel translates — or uses someone’s version who translates this as — “who among us does not have a promised land…” present tense. Even Conrad in the 1895 first edition misquoted the lines from memory as “Le quel de nous n’a sa terre de promission, son jour d’extase et sa fin dans l’exil,” though he corrected it for the 1914 edition).

    Thus: promised land in the past, while ecstasy may be back there too or in the present — let’s keep that ambiguity going & locate ecstasy also in the present day’s labor leading (after the promised land has long vanished) into the exilic future — through the gate, the door, the pre-text, that is the text — yes, I’ll own up to it — through writing, the act thereof. Writing is this exile, h.j.r, hejr, hejira, Hagar, she, me, wandering in desert or city, that nomadicity. I am certainly staying with that concept, or better, that process.

    And so I’m home again, in the present-future (thus not the future perfect or futur antérieur of the French), no, in the present-future that is the tense of writing, an ecstatic-exilic tense. I am formulating it this way now & wouldn’t mind leaving it at that, but this is a keynote, so let me go there now.

    1. A note on “keynote,” and then a look at 10 years after. A keynote, says my wikipedia, “is a talk that establishes the main underlying theme… (&) lays the framework for the following programme of events or convention agenda; frequently the role of keynote speaker will include the role of convention moderator. (No way, Josè!) It will also flag up a larger idea – a literary story, an individual musical piece or event.” Okay, I’ve already told a “literary story,” & the events I’d like to flag are the poetry readings, which is where the work comes most alive for me. As to “an individual musical piece,” well, my love for etymologies immediately drove me to locate the origin of “keynote” in the practice of a cappella, often barbershop singers, & the playing of a single note before singing, that determines the key in which the song will be performed. I know that Ornette Coleman wrote & once told me face to face that “there is no wrong note,” but as I do not like the concept of one note setting the agenda, I will not play any such note; happily Alice Notley will also give a keynote, which will thus already make it at least two notes, maybe already a chord, & then I’ll leave the singing of many notes arranged in what they call music up to Nicole Peyrafitte later on in the program.

    But I can’t resist to play a bit more with this notion of “key” — what does a key do, as it can do at least two things, something & its opposite, open or close? Of course at the beginning of an occasion the image will be of opening the proceedings, the door, maybe the gate mentioned earlier. And yet, a key does both open and close — maybe it does both at the same time! Who knows? My time is measured today, so let me just open-close this specific Pandora’s box via a poem by, you guessed it, Paul Celan:

    WITH A VARIABLE KEY

    With a variable key
    you unlock the house, in it
    drifts the snow of the unsaid.
    Depending on the blood that gushes
    from your eye or mouth or ear,
    your key varies.

    Varies your key so varies your word
    that’s allowed to drift with the flakes.
    Depending on the wind that pushes you away,
    the snow cakes around the word.

    So the word is there, variable, but needs to be spoken & I’ll take a further suggestion on how to go about this from Celan who writes:

    Speak —
    But do not separate the no from the yes.
    Give your saying also meaning:
    give it its shadow.

    Give it enough shadow,
    give it as much
    as you know to be parceled out between
    midnight and midday and midnight.

    Look around:
    see how alive it gets all around —
    At death! Alive!
    Speaks true, who speaks shadows.

    1. And so it is now “ten years after.” After what? One of the rock groups I liked in the 60s supposedly took that name from an event that had taken place ten years earlier, namely Elvis Presley’s breakthrough year of ’56. Lines from one of their songs still play in my mind from time to time: “Tax the rich, feed the poor / Till there are no rich no more.” And then the defeatist refrain: “I’d love to change the world / But I don’t know what to do / I’ll leave it up to you.” Has anything changed?

    Ten years ago I published a volume of essays under the title A Nomad Poetics, core to which was the piece of writing called “Notes Toward a Nomad Poetics,” which — though the central concern had been with me even longer, much longer — I had started giving expression to even before 1993 & which had been published in an earlier form as a chapbook called Towards a Nomad Poetics by Allen Fisher’s Spanner Books. Note the tentative titles: “towards a…” & for the final version even just “Notes towards a Nomadic Poetics.” I said “piece of writing” purposefully just now, because one of the small misunderstandings regarding A Nomad Poetics I have encountered from time to time is that this piece of writing has been called a “manifesto” — with all the stern-brow seriousness & raised fist ardor the term suggests. I would like, 10 years after, to nuance this take a bit.

    The manifesto, I’ve written elsewhere, is indeed one, if not the only new literary genre of the 20C, & I do draw on it to some extent — but I am very conscious of the fact that what I am trying to do is to write propositions for the 21C & to find a form that is both open & collaborative, that is culturally & politically critical, but not ideologically over-determined, as manifestos tend to be. It is neither an anonymous revolutionary pamphlet (as many of the Situationist manifestos were at a certain time), nor a synthetic piece with a number of signatures attached to it (from Marx & Engels, via the Surrealists, say, to the Manifeste des 120, for example, no matter how much I may like these). The proposition is different: it is a piece of writing I take full responsibility for, but to which I invite people to contribute — few have bothered to do so, though the 1993 text has at least the exemplary contribution of Brian Massumi, the excellent Deleuzian scholar & thinker.

    But — & I can only briefly mention it in this context — the idea of collaboration has opened up since then in a different manner & place,  namely as what Nicole Peyrafitte & I call “Domopoetics” & which finds its expression in performances that involve the two of us, in a combination of poetry, reflection (with it’s propositional moves, such as extensions of my rhizomatic moves & Nicole’s more “seepage” based processes), music & visuals, a project that also touches on something I will come to a bit later, ecology, be it as in Domopoetics, centered on the “household,” or in a wider in- & out-side sweep.

    Now, in that core essay I do make “manifestish” moves, like the über-title, THE MILLENNIUM WILL BE NOMADIC OR IT WILL NOT BE, a tournement of a well-known citation leading back to Foucault & Deleuze; then there are the various definitions of concepts & the oracular pronouncements… but if you take these together with the willed heteroclite manner of the piece that ends with the (possibly incongruous) inclusion and commentary on a translation of a pre-Islamic ode, you may also note the tongue-in-cheek, not to say cheekiness of the collage (more dada than surrealist manifesto, playfulness is meant to trump, no not trump, that’s wargame talk, — is meant to poke fun at and possibly deflate dour revolutionary literary ardor). What I wanted was in fact to create a new genre, post-manifesto, something I did then call the “manifessay.” I don’t know if I succeeded beyond giving expression to my own poetics, i.e., if it, the form, has become available or is of any possible use beyond me. I’ll return to the notion of a new genre or of post-genre writing toward the end of this talk.

    1. I now want to address two or three points that I opened up but probably not enough in the 2003 manifessay, & that, it seems to me, need either clarification or extension. The first one of these arises from a quote by Muriel Rukeyser who writes: “The relations of poetry are, for our period, very close to the relations of science. It is not a matter of using the results of science, but of seeing that there is a meeting place between all the kinds of imagination. Poetry can provide that meeting place.” So, this notion that science & poetry can, have to connect, that, in fact, “open-field” poetry may be the ground where those two discourses can enrich each other. Unhappily that was the only occasion “science” came up in the 2003 version to which I had given the version number 4.0. In a 4.1 version I would insert more reflections concerning this matter, as it seems to me to be getting more & more urgent (see the next section). To begin with I would quote Robert Kelly’s take of:

                                                 a scientist of the whole
    the Poet
              be aware from inside comes
                     the poet, scientist of totality,
                            specifically,
              to whom all data whatsoever are of use,
    world-scholar

    Which means that all data not only can but should enter the arena of the poem. Each poet can of course only bring her own knowledges & experiences into that field —  though the understanding that such a wide open field of possibilities does exist, right there in front of us, on the page or screen, with no restrictions imposed by pre-existing notions of form or content,  an understanding that has to function as a major incentive & goad.

    Scientific data as such, & in suspension with other information, would be central here as unhappily we have returned to an area where science is not only rightfully questioned for its excesses (in medicine, food-“science,” or its 19C underlying ideology of “progress,” etc.) but is also challenged in totally asinine but extremely dangerous ways by what may be the most disastrous unfolding event, namely the violent return of the religious (from the various US evangelical Christian fascisms to the Islamic totalitarianism of its Fundamentalist movements & beyond) & its denials of any scientific data, be that Darwinian evolution, the genetic egalitarianism of races, or what have you. This “return of the repressed” can however not be addressed by the same pious & self-righteous means used by positivist 19C determinism & traditional “atheistic” formulas.

    An investigative poetics (& that is one mode of a nomadic poetics) addressing this problem could well start with thinking through the rather odd but useful book by Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (note that the title is a quote from a poem!). For example, one may have to rethink certain poetic practices after reflecting on the following from early on in the book, where Sloterdijk has been talking about Rilke’s poem “Archaic torso of Apollo:”

    That this energized Apollo embodies a manifestation of Dionysus is indicated by the statement that the stone glistens ‘like wild beasts’ fur’: Rilke had read his Nietzsche. Here we encounter the second micro-religious or proto-musical module: the notorious ‘this stands for that,’ ‘the one appears in the other’ or ‘the deep layer is present in the surface‘ — figures without which no religious discourse would ever have come about. They tell us that religiosity is a form of hermeneutical flexibility and can be trained.

    Unhappily there have been rather few poets who have worked along those lines, i.e. bringing scientific discourse into the field of poetry to test & extend its possibilities. Of my generation, except for the use of scientific, mainly mathematical concepts in formal decisions, such as the great oeuvre of Jackson MacLow, or the OULIPO poets or, say, Inger Christensen or Ron Silliman using the Fibonacci series as formal compositional procedures,  I can only think of two poets deeply involved in that way & bringing actual scientific data into the work: Allen Fisher & Christopher Dewdney. The latter has put his relation to science very clearly. “My poetry,” he says, “is warped out of science. I think I’m a frustrated scientist in poetry and a frustrated poet in science. A lot of poets have an anti-science bias, a vision of themselves as romantics in a tower, but I don’t. I’m a naturalist, I believe that science and nature are one, that science is a perceptual tool which allows us to define nature more specifically. Science has to incorporate and mythologize as it happens. All poetry deals with information, finally.”

    Concerning Allen Fisher, I did say enough, I believe, in version 4.00, but let me re-quote a bit from his Introduction of Brixton Fractals::

    Imagination and action. My knowledge of the world exists validly only in the moment when I am transforming it. In this moment, in action, the imagination functions, unblocks passivity, refuses an overview. Discontinuities, wave breaks, cell divisions, collapsed structures, boundaries between tissue kinds: where inner workings are unknown, the only reliable participations are imaginative. The complex of state and control variables. The number of configurations depends on the latter: properties typical of cusp catastrophes: sudden jumps; hysteresis; divergence; inaccessibility. Boiling water’s phase change where the potential is the same as condensing steam. Random motion of particles in phase space allows a process to find a minimum potential. What is this all about? It’s a matter of rage and fear, where the moving grass or built suburbia frontier is a wave prison; where depth perception reverses; caged flight. With ambiguous vases it’s as if part of the brain is unable to reach a firm conclusion and passes alternatives along for a decision on other grounds. The goblet-and-face contour moves as it forms in your seeing.

    The result of which is a poetry of use, though the uses be not your usual aesthetic jouissance and/or socio-political alibis:

    Brixton Fractals provides a technique of memory and perception analysis. It can be used to sharpen out-of-focus photographs; to make maps of the radio sky; to generate images from human energy; to calculate spectra; to reconstruct densities; to provide probability factors from local depression climates. It becomes applicable to reading; to estimate a vector of survival from seriously incomplete or hidden data, and select the different structures needed. It can provide a participatory invention different from that which most persists.

    Among a younger generation, I fear I have not come across much work incorporating the discourse of science. This may be my own lack, the fact that I can no longer keep up with the incredible avalanche of poetry coming down on us. But I do want to mention at least one of the younger poets, namely James Belflower, who after a brilliant first book, Commuter, has just published a second book The Posture of Contour, rich in exactly those materials & thinking involving science & scientific discourse. This is excellent explorative work that is truly experimental without being gimmicky or surface “avant-gardist.” Belflower, by the way, is also presently at work on a translation of a book by our next presenter, Jan Baetens’s rewriting of a Jean-Luc Godard’s script, for which he has also corralled  Peter Cockelbergh help. But let me move on.

     

    1. The one word or concept I now see as most grievously underdeveloped is that of ecology. I do think of it as present in version 4.00, however, in that it is inherent if unspoken in the vision of a nomadic figure: the nomad’s life is based on a clear and sharp perception and discrimination of environmental factures. (I had first written “fractures” — which might be the right word). For the desert inhabitant it is of course a matter of survival. In the same way nomadic art is an eminently environment-conscious art: portable, spare, it clings to or arises from the everyday objects of perusal: embroidered & engraved saddles or bridles, painted portable utensils or inscribed, i.e. tattooed parts of the body; the core elements of the dwelling: rugs and carpets — all these are pure expressions of art, & the most formal and richest artifact is also the lightest as behoves a continuous traveler: the poem, no matter it’s size or weight, carried in mind or, as they say, by heart. A nomadic poetry was thus, for me, an obviously highly environment-conscious art.

    My own sense of the ecological question goes back to the late sixties  and, in poetry, the discovery of Gary Snyder’s work as poet and essayist.  It was clear back then already that environmental problems needed to be thought & written about, & indeed they were, even if as yet mainly or only  in the underground press, & entered into one’s daily practice in terms of food (first organic food movements, macrobiotic diets & restaurants, etc.) clothing, and as a political direction to be incorporated into any progressive ideology.

    But it is now clear, “ideology” or rather ideology-critique, though necessary, also became a hindrance later on. During those years (70s into 90s) of the “postmodern”, that stance entailed the deconstruction of what Jean-François Lyotard & others called the “grand narratives,” from Christianity to Communism, i.e. all single-centered soteriological utopian systems. The fervent yet cool-headed desire was: never again such eschatological, transcendental movements in the pursuance of whose aims all means are justified and thus all crimes permissible, from the grand medieval inquisitions to the Stalinist & Nazi exterminations. Politics, we now thought, have to become local, momentary, situationist, etc. What Félix Guattari & others called Micropolitics. Under this premise, one angle, one line of flight, one momentary territorialization of our space would be or could concern itself with the environmental problem.

    I’m putting all this very schematically as I don’t have the time to develop it in detail, but it now seems clear to me that the time has come to make ecology (oeco-logos, the logic of the house, of our house earth, of our earth-house-hold, to use Snyder’s term), to make ecology the engine of a new grand narrative. Such a grand narrative would differ from the old ones (& thus hopefully avoid the disasters provoked by human hubris that thought of this world as, or tried to force it into a scheme of the anthropocentric). It would not be anthropocentric, human-centered (as the Christian or Communist one were) but anchored, or come from, outside the human sphere, the earth, & thus restate, refocus,  the human in relation to the world it lives in. A world in a new age, an age that has come to be called the “anthropocene” to point to the overwhelming influence human actions now have on the earth. A non-transcendental, immanentist situation that does not have future perfection (paradise in heaven or on earth) as its aim but survival of life in all its rich & diverse forms (with the human only one such, and important only as the major danger to survival) in the contingent environment of this planet. Which also entails, despite the fact that the name of us, “anthropos” now glows radioactively in the age’s name, to start from the realization that homo sapiens (that misnomer!) is not outside, beyond creation; there is not a “nature” outside or surrounding us nature is us & the rest, the world with us included. “Nature” is everywhere, as Spinoza said of god.

     

    One way into this would be through a book I’d like to draw your attention to, namely Michel Deguy’s Écologiques, the quatrième de couverture of which states: “Geocide is in process; not “a” geocide, but “the geocide:” there will not be two. Ecology, a ‘logie’ [thought, word, saying] of the oikos [house, dwelling, terre des hommes] is not optional. If it is not radical, it is nothing.” This book, a series of small essays, notations, reflections, he himself calls it “a sort of witnessing,” is also formally fascinating in that the urgency & radicalness demanded eschew the scriptural “manifesto” form of the old grand narratives, but belongs exactly to the extrême contemporain in its assemblage form (& contains reflections on that form). Here are a few hints (in my translation):

    Another romantic leitmotiv, and thus to be transposed for us, come down to us from Hölderlin through Heidegerrian conduit — can it help — for a long time translated as “What remains is what the poets create.” [“Was bleibet aber stiften die Dichter”] and that our era (this mutation of “the crisis,” if you want) forces us to read thus: “the remains, art plays them again.” Even better to understand it thus: the remains we are left with, the relics, is it possible that the artists, those who work in language, philosophers and writers together with all those who work in other “arts,” including those that technique has added, will relaunch them. …Is a last chance called ecology?

    The poet Edward Dorn pointed out some few years back that one of our problems is that “we do not even yet / know what a crisis is.” Interestingly, Deguy in this books develops a notion of “crisis” that may answer Dorn’s slight, when he writes “this exercise in thinking (this ‘experience in thought’) has to rise to ‘its last consequences,’ in its hyperbolic paradoxical amplification,” where it will risk this: “…what is called the crisis offers the chance of a parabolic ‘rebroussement,’ a parabolic turning back. [Note that “rebroussement” is a term also used in geology where it means the ‘Torsion localisée des couches, due au frottement le long d’un contact anormal et montrant le sens du mouvement /torsion localized in the strata, caused by friction along an anormal contact and showing the direction of the movement/’ (Fouc.-Raoult Géol. 1980). Further in math it refers to the point where a curve changes direction; you also speak of an ‘Arête de rebroussement.’”

    How to translate this last phrase? “Arête” immediately rhymes for me with the Greek “arete” — & I’ll come to that soon enough. But interesting to note how problematic the translation from natural language to another, French to English here, a concept in mathematics, a so-called “universal” language can be. As a footnote on page 435 of Augustus de Morgan’s The Differential and Integral Calculus puts it:

    One sound writer on this subject (and perhaps more) has attempted to translate the words arête de rebroussement into English by edge of regression, which seems to me a closer imitation of the words than of the meaning. Many words might be suggested, such as the ligature of the normals, or their osculatrix, or their omnitangential curve. Also with reference to the developable surface, the arête, &c. might be called the generatrix, or the curve of greatest density, &c.

    Deguy concludes by defining it as “la ligne formée par les points d’intersection des génératrices rectilignes consécutives de la surface / the line formed by the intersection points of successive rectilinear generatrices of the surface.”

    So Deguy’s rebroussement is not a simple turning back on itself, not a return to the past, but another, a further, torque. He goes on: “A politician is someone who cannot understand, admit, that the crisis, from Hesiod to Husserl, from Sophocles to Valéry, names historicity itself. It is crisis forever. The ‘solution’ of the crisis is a new critical phase, of sharing — of the relation in general, of societies among themselves, of one society in relation to itself, of one subject to himself.”

    Deguy sees three movements in the overcoming, the coming out of the crisis: “an uprising, a revolution, reforms.” Which he then calls “by one of its great names, utopia.” And to suggest that “précisément l’utopie aujourd’hui, c’est l’écologie. / Utopia today is precisely ecology. There is no other one.” Fascinating too, how Deguy begins usefully to think through other rebarbative aspects of our relation to world. He thus suggests that “ecology does not concern the environment, literally what environs, what surrounds, (the “Umwelt” of the ethnologues) but the “world” (the “Welt” of the thinkers). It is the difference between those two that needs to be rethought from the bottom up, he suggests, because of the profound oblivion into which the world and its things (les choses), or “the oecumene” have fallen. Thus globalisation (in French la “mondialisation”) would be in truth an end of or to “le monde,” the world, a loss of world, because “the world worlds in things and its ‘worlding’ has to be entrusted not to technoscience, but to the philosophers and the artists — to all the humans in the arts (les hommes de l’art), and, specifically to the poetics of the works.”

    These formulations not only show the importance of Deguy’s writings in Ecologiques and thus the need for its translation — but also the difficulty this translation entails given the nomadicity between his philosophical logos & the poetics, which you can glimpse in the needed and relished neologisms above. And now, beginning to run out of time, let me turn to certain questions in regard to translation that have been haunting me since the publication of version 4.00 of the manifessay.

    1. And thus to the second Ammiel — but this one with two m’s — I mean Ammiel Alcalay and some parallel thinking we have been doing on the subject of translation. In the Nomad Poetics manifesto, the work of translation is only liminally mentioned when in fact it has been central to my endeavors from the beginning — though obviously it gets more thought & analysis in other essays in the Nomad Poetics volume. What I would like to add in a putative 4.1 version (why putative? — this is that version, probably) is an exploration of the limits of translation.

    Why limits? A strange term to use for someone who has always equated translation & writing itself, who has claimed (& stays with this claim) that all writing is translation & that therefore the traditional differences between the two have to be abolished as they are false “class” barriers. Over the last 10 years, I have been involved in two major but very different translation projects: first, the translation of the historico-critical edition of Paul Celan’s The Meridian, a volume that gathers all the various drafts, versions, notes, scraps, letters, even a radio-play, with all the (carefully reproduced) strike-outs, inserts, marginal marks & so on, that we have between the moment Celan was informed that he had been given the Georg Büchner prize and the date on which he had to give his acceptance speech.  The original editors, Bernard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull did an incredible job gathering these materials & devising a book structure to contain them. If I have one doubt about the book, it is this one: the book opens with the 18-page essay in its final, definite form, then proceeds backwards through the various drafts to the earliest scrap of paper. This makes for a very attractive book, though I now wonder if it wouldn’t have been more instructive to build the volume in the genetic sense, i.e. from the first idea to the final essay, so that a reader would be able to witness the creation of context & text in its / as a historical process. Be that as it may, the essential thing this translation taught me was the importance for a deeper textual understanding of involvement with and thus knowledge of its contexts, its process.

    During the years I put together Poems for Millennium vol 4: The UCP book of North African Literature, or Diwan Ifrikiya as I prefer to call it, the question of how to present over 2000 years of a literature to a major part unknown to Western readers (I first wrote “raiders” — which is also an accurate way of describing what the West did & still does to the Maghreb), that question came up, of course. Happily the “grand collage” format elaborated by Jerome Rothenberg & myself in the early volumes of the Poems for the Millennium series — chronological galleries, thematic “books,” individual commentaries, intros to all the sections, etc. — allowed for a presentation of actual contextual matters, from maps to alphabets, from images to amulets, that serve as a matrix for the poems. For example, the second diwan, El Adab or the invention of prose, endeavors to gather texts from historical literary treatises, history & geography manuals, philosophical meditations, erotic manuals etc.

    Despite what I think of as a rather successful if incomplete handling of these matters of context, I do agree with Ammiel Alcalay when he writes, after bringing up such different events as 9/11 & the ensuing sudden interest in Arab matters & translating from that language, followed by the Iraq war & the ‘official’ writing that has ensued from that catastrophe:

    How are those of us involved in transference and translation to respond to such circumstances? What is our role in the politics of imagination and transmission? Have we reached a point where NOT translating, providing access to, handing down works from the Arab world might be more legitimate? When we decide to participate, how do we insulate and protect such works and ourselves, not merely from assimilation, but from collaboration… Writers and translators often wind up playing someone else’s game, and become complicit, perpetuating the same rules with new players.

    Which leads Alcalay to conclude that no act of transmission is innocent and therefore demands utmost vigilance, a kind of vigilance, he goes on, “that recognizes, as the American poet Jack Spicer once put it, that ‘there are bosses in poetry as well as in the industrial empire.” As writers, translators, commentators in the area of what Michel Deguy called “le culturel,” — to be differentiated from “la culture,” but inescapable as the sphere in which we as ‘travailleurs du symbolique’ labor today — we have to be aware that, for example, translating a major novel by a third world author wrenches that work out of its natural habitat, plops it into an environment where it can only be read according to the latter’s rules (say, Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, in relation to William Faulkner’s narrative universe, etc.) Or, more viciously as in the case of my translation of Abdelwahab Meddeb’s essay THE MALDAY OF ISLAM which was nearly hijacked by DC rightwing think tank people when Daniel Pipes asked the NY publisher for first serialization rights and the right to “subedit” the extracts — I managed to fight this off after investigating who those people were.

    So, there is also a need, a duty to provide contextual materials, to try to change the very framework of the translation activity, so that the act of translating can be “an act, a way of erecting a picket line against the bosses,  to reclaim some part of our suppressed and isolated humanity and participate in it in new ways.” Alcalay concludes that “ to protect against assimilation and collaboration requires more than fitting newly introduced and revived texts into existing frameworks. Defining what information is for us, where it comes from, and where to find it becomes an essential survival kit.”

    Thus part of such a watchful & critical process of translation is also what I like to call an ‘investigative nomad poetics,’ because ideological cons can go so far as to actually corrupt the very language. Take the example of the so-called “Confucius Institutes” which are under the supervision of the Chinese Language Council International (known as Hanban). These Institutes teach Chinese language and culture after setting up shop in Universities in the West. I’m drawing on an excellent investigative article by Marshall Sahlins that appeared in this week’s Nation. Hanban is an instrument of the PRC’s party apparatus operating as an international pedagogical organization. This means that its agreements with the foreign, including many American, institutions of higher learning, include non-disclosure clauses, making the terms of the agreement secret. US universities sign on to this— which is most likely totally illegal under US law — eager as they are to get an all-paid for “Confucius Institute” & the ensuing prestige. Besides such basic no-nos as being prohibited to mention the Tiannamen Square massacre, or Tibet, the Dalai Lama, or human rights, etc. the actual core problem, if you look closer, are the language teaching methods, in fact the very language taught. This looks innocent enough according to the bylaws, which state: “The Confucius Institutes conduct Chinese language instructions in Mandarin using Standard Chinese characters.” But, as Sahlin details, this is the “simplified script officially promulgated by the PRC as a more easily learned alternative…” This means that what is available in this script & thus what the CI students are taught to read are only those texts or revised texts the PRC allows you to read & has prepared & altered, and thus for example no Chinese texts from other parts of the world, Taiwan, or even Hong-Kong can be deciphered by people trained in the CI’s! Totalitarian censorship effected via creating & imposing a new language allowing for the rewriting of all cultural documents… 

    1. Finally, I’d like to speak to my current practice: what I want to do from now on is continue to some extent with nomadizing my writing as much as nomadizing in my writing, while moving toward some new trajectories, other complex meandering orbitals. You see, when I sit down & let the process of writing happen, it tends to come out as a recognizable “poem,” & I am by now somewhat bored by this. Ah, I say to myself, here’s another poem — couldn’t it be some another critter, somealien, unknown form? I guess the familiarity of recognizing the poem under hand has some comforting sides (it is comforting to recognize your own face in the mirror when you get up in the morning), & I enjoy detecting a new move, or rhythm or color or line or sound in the poem-matrix, and yet, and yet. (Thinking here of a poet I admire tremendously, John Ashbery, whose production into old age — John is 86 — has gone unabated, but whose yearly new volume seems to me to have the same poem rearranged again & again, a tremendous life-long flow, flood, or maybe better ribbon of writing Ashbery snips off bits to make into books & cuts those into smaller bits to make poems — it’s tremendous & astounding & a true feat, but I have to confess that my pleasure in the work by now has become mainly aesthetic recognition rather than discovery of anything new, thought, rhythm, music, form — or maybe better, it is absolutely wonderful comfort food I can cuddle up with in my armchair when the umpteenth rerun of my fav TV series, Law & Order, is too boring. And comfort is something we absolutely need in our lives, for sure. But.)

    A more serious reason to escape “the poem” (between quotation marks) is something I have to plead guilty to, that Frankenstein monster called “creative writing” which for part of my life provided the income that permitted me to read & write. But in the US we now create something like 3 to 6000 professional diploma’ed “poets” a year who are turning out hundreds of thousand “poems” day in day out — there are now at rough glance something close to half a million published poets in the US. Now, I prefer that to be the case rather than those kids having wandered off & joined the military or the evangelical troops. At the risk of sounding elitist, I want to suggest however that most of this work does not have what my third grandfather of the day, grand-pa Ezra called the “arete,”  which he translated as “virtue”, though for the Greeks the word actually probably meant something closer to “being the best you can be”, or “reaching your highest human potential”, & which I like to mistranslate further as “arête,” as in a French fish, though not as a French stop sign, or, better even, as the arresting quality of something with spine.

    So, what do I want? In my notebooks I found this entry, as I was preparing to envisage the writing to be done now, after I stopped teaching, & with several major projects out of the way:

    “…write something that is unrecognizable as a poem, write ‘books’ [never a, one, book, always the plural] but so that they are not beholden to that late 19C form of the book so elegantly proclaimed by Mallarmé & taken up under various guises by the 20C avant-garde. This here now is the 21C. Everything — pace Mallarmé — is not meant to end up in a book, even if as we screw up the planet more & more everything that will be left of us may end up in a book if one as heat resistant as the new climate requires can be devised, once we have become extinct on this gone planet veering from blue to red. No. The books or the writing I envisage are open books that have their prolongations, their links, within the ever more tenuous world that surrounds us, but not a writing that mimetically reflects the outside (which would only increase the heat by mirror-effect & in the cave of this non-platonic book we cannot have fires heating up) but one that proposes a range of coolants —”

    To put it another way, work seems to leak — out of the book and into the world, and from the world into the book. Nicole Peyrafitte’s notion of “seepage” (see her recent writings in her book bi-valve ) enters here to play with & off & extend the rhizomes & lines of flight of my nomadics. What is at stake here is circulation: of reading that turns into writing and vice-versa, but also of people, of words, of love, of blood — printer’s bleed but also terrorists’ victims’ blood, terrorists everywhere, from the US Congress & my gun-crazed co-citoyens, to the mad mujahiddin of Daech & AQIM. These books of multiple narratives & troubled typographies, which “may be incompletely / confused” (as the young poet James Belflower puts it), asks you to be a (not so innocent) active performer as much as a reader. Take the risk —

    How to come to this writing beyond genre is of course the question I have been groping with for some time now. I can only start from what I know, i.e. from the grand-collage century I come from, some specific realizations of that century, those for example I have spent years gathering with Jerome Rothenberg & Habib Tengour in our Millennium anthologies, others too. Here is a 20C quote to go forth with into our already quite entamé (nicked, gouged out, gored, gashed, i.e. wounded) 21C. It is a quote you will know as it is well-known, often used, that I would like to put again at the head of any such new writings, thus as an epigraph here, to bring to a close the keynote that started with a 19C epigraph that led into our 20C. It comes from Robert Duncan’s HD Book, from the chapter “Rites of Participation,” a chapter that begins “The drama of our time is the coming of all men (and women) into one fate, ‘the dream of everyone, everywhere.’”  First published in Caterpillar # 1 in fall of 1967 (a month after I first set foot on the American continent) it was written a few years earlier, I believe, so dates from the mid-sixties. Half a century later it holds a more ominous, less optimistic note, given the ecologistic aspects of the new grand narrative of that “single fate.” But here is the quote I was thinking of exactly, which happens a page or so later in Duncan’s ‘book,’ after he has been talking about Plato’s Symposium:

    The Symposium of Plato was restricted to a community of Athenians, gathered in the common creation of an arete [ah, that word again!], an aristocracy of spirit, inspired by the homoEros, taking its stand against lower or foreign orders, not only of men but of nature itself. The intense yearning, the desire for something else, of which we too have only a dark and doubtful presentiment, remains, but our arete, our ideal of vital being [ah! there’s another good definition!], rises not in our identification in a hierarchy of higher forms but in our identification with the universe. To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure — all that had been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are.

    I would only like to add to Duncan’s list the orders of geology and water & air, and to amend ever so slightly the last sentence to read: “all that had been outcast and vagabond must be joined by us out there to help in the nomadic creation of what we consider we are.”

     

    SOURCES

    Conrad, Joseph. Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (T. Fisher Unwin, London 1895).

    Amiel, Henri-Frédéric. Grains de Mil (Joël Cherbuliez, libraire-éditeur, Paris 1854).

    Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 1, footnote #6 p.66 (University of California Press, 1979.

    Celan, Paul. “With a Variable Key” & “Speak, You Too,” in Paul Celan, Selections, edited by Pierre Joris, p. 51 & 54. (University of California Press, 2005.)

    _________. The Meridian. Final VersionDrafts—Materials. Translated by Pierre Joris. (Stanford University Press, 2011)

    Joris, Pierre. A Nomad Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003.)

    _________, editor (with Habib Tengour). The University of California Book of North African Literature (vol. 4 in the Poems for the Millennium series, UCP, November 2012)

    Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. p. XI (Ashfield, Mass.  Paris Press 1996.)

    Kelly, Robert. In Time, p. 25 (Frontier Press, 1971)

    Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life (Polity, 2014)

    Fisher, Allen. Brixton Fractals. (Aloes Books, London 1985)

    Belflower, James. The Posture of Contour. (Springgun Press, 2013)

    Deguy, Michel. Écologiques, p.23. (Hermann, Editeur, 2012)

    Dorn, Edward, Recollections of Gran Apachería, n.p. (Turtle island                      Foundation, 1974)

    De Morgan, Augustus. The Differential and Integral Calculus. (Baldwin and           Cradock, London, 1842)

    Alcalay, Ammiel. “Politics & Translation,” in: towards a foreign likeness bent : translation, durationpress.com e-books series. http://www.durationpress.com, n.d.

    Sahlins, Marshall. China U. Confucius Institutes censor political discussion and restrain the free exchange of ideas. The Nation, October 30, 2013  https://www.thenation.com/article/china-u/

    Snyder, Gary. Earth House Hold. (New Directions, 1969)

    Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (University Of Minnesota Press, 1984.)

    Guattari, Félix & Deleuze, Gilles.  Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (University of Minnesota Press, 1987)

    Meddeb, Abdelwahab. The Malady of Islam. Translated by Pierre Joris. ( Basic Books,2003.)

    Peyrafitte, Nicole. Bi-Valve: Vulvic Space / Vulvic Knowledge. (Stockport Flats, 2013).

    Duncan, Robert. The H.D. Book. (University of California Press, 2011.)

  • David Sweeney Coombs: Dickens’ Resonance

    David Sweeney Coombs: Dickens’ Resonance

    by David Sweeney Coombs

    This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

    Within the lexicon of contemporary criticism, “resonance” is a term that is often marshaled to designate a loose, heuristic sort of presentism. For an example, look no further than the critical blurbs promoting recent editions of Bleak House, where A. A. Gill declares the novel “one of the few [Dickens] stories that has modern resonance: the tale of a never-ending court case can be seen—if you squint—as the precursor of Kafka and Orwell.”[i] We don’t need to agree with this judgment to note how the acoustic register of resonance gives way to the visual here at just the moment that the sentence moves from the airy declaration that Bleak House is still relevant to the specification of a literary genealogy to substantiate that claim. The virtue of resonance is typically understood to lie in that airiness. We use the term to posit unspecified or as yet mostly speculative connections between apparently very different objects—like an 1853 novel and the legal black sites of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Resonance, that is, lets us say that we feel the reverberations when we still can’t say exactly why. Hence the term appears rarely in articles and monographs, which aspire to rigor and precision, but frequently in the more informal discussions at scholarly conferences. Despite its informality, resonance, I want to suggest, offers us a potentially precise way of thinking about the form of Bleak House and the way the novel and our readings of it fold together different temporalities.

    Bleak House famously combines antithetical narrative modes, most signally by alternating between third-person narration in the present tense and first-person narration in the past tense.[ii] One of the effects is a torsion between the formal boundedness of Esther’s first-person narrative, centered in a single character retrospectively relating the events that shaped her life’s development (and thus the process by which she came into being as narrator), and the open-endedness of the third-person narration, which jumps from place to place and character to character in a present tense filled with all the present’s sense of ongoing possibilities.[iii] With uncanny prescience, Bleak House in this way overlays two theories of the novel: the (then still soon-to-emerge) Victorian physiological novel theory described by Nicholas Dames, which conceived of the novel as a temporal unfolding akin to music; and the Jamesian novel theory of Percy Lubbock and the New Critics, which understood the novel instead as a sculptured, well-wrought whole. While Bleak House’s third-person narrator unfolds a stream of events, Esther’s task as narrator is to sort and arrange her own fugitive impressions retrospectively in a way that strikingly resembles the work of Lubbock’s critical reader, who, having finished reading a novel, must similarly put together a stable, clearly outlined form out of the “moving stream of impressions, paid out of the volume in a slender thread as we turn the pages” (1921: 14).

    Esther, Lubbock might say, has to turn music into sculpture, but Bleak House figures Esther’s activity and its own formal division using a different analogy: the acoustics of houses. Consider the description of Lady Dedlock’s reaction to the news that Esther, her secret illegitimate daughter taken away at birth, is still alive. Shouldn’t her anguished cry rock the foundations of the Dedlock estate, Chesney Wold, the novel melodramatically asks before concluding, “No. Words, sobs, and cries, are but air; and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town, that sounds need be uttered trumpet-tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber, to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester’s ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees” (1996: 433). Here, aerial waves carry Lady Dedlock’s words, but the wave-form carries Dickens’ words too. Published and read in installments, the form of Dickens’ novel is, like a wave, defined by sequence and periodicity.[iv] In Bleak House, however, the wave-form’s diffusive circulation also takes on a more ominous quality, operating as a pattern of dispersal in the disclosure of Lady Dedlock’s secret and the confusion and entropic disorder propagated by Chancery, including the miasmic spread of disease (likewise through the air). Houses, on the other hand, can shut in and shut out waves more or less artfully, and the novel’s canniest household artist is its signature domestic woman, Esther, who is not only an angel but also an actual housekeeper. As her jingling keys continually remind us, Esther the housekeeper regulates flows within Bleak House like a veritable Maxwell’s Demon. What if we understood Esther’s narration in a similar way, not as transforming a music-like sequence of events into a static visual form, but as a kind of acoustic sorting that amplifies and silences (shutting in and shutting out) by turns?

    Among other things, we might then pick up on the ways that Bleak House resonates with a major scientific reassessment of the nature of musical tones then underway, one that complicates Dames’ (2007: 10-11) suggestion that physiological criticism understood the novel exclusively in terms of musical sequence, of melody or rhythm as opposed to harmony. In the early 1830s, Gustav Hällstrom began experiments with a siren, a new instrument emitting pulses of air through a series of holes on a rotating disk. While each pulse is separately audible when the disk is rotating slowly, at increased speeds the pulsations run together into a continuous tone. Hällstrom’s work led scientists to reduce tones to pure periodicity—pure sequence—but by the time Bleak House appeared, this theory was on the verge of being demolished by Hermann von Helmholtz in the single most influential scientific text on music in the nineteenth century, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Helmholtz was convinced that the particular quality of a tone (its timbre) is determined by the superposition of several soundwaves with different frequencies. Starting in 1855, he had devised a series of special resonators that vibrated with just one frequency of a tone, prolonging that one particular wave in a compound wave-form while silencing the others. In this way, Helmholtz’s resonators made it possible for him to perform a fine-grained analysis of sound. “Resonance,” Stephan Vogel (1993:281) notes, “became the fundamental concept in Helmholtz’s research program.”[v] His experiments with resonators, including, evocatively, the human mouth as a resonant cavity, led him to his famous resonance theory of hearing, which conceived of hearing as the result of thousands of platelets in the ear each vibrating in response to one frequency across the spectrum of audible sound. Both an experimental method and an explanatory theory, resonance shifted the science of acoustics from melody to harmony, from a theory of music as periodic succession—one damn pulse after another—towards a theory of music as constituted by the layering of different temporalities.

    Bleak House layers temporalities in a way that is attuned with the temporal complexity of resonance. Helmholtz’s resonators revealed the complexity of tones by isolating one part of it, extending that one wave while letting the rest fall silent. His resonators thus functioned very much like the musical technique of suspension, where one note in a chord is prolonged into the next chord of a piece’s harmonic development. The resonance of Bleak House asks us to do something similar—to mark through our own reverberations the continuity as well as the discontinuity between past and present. Dickens’ resonance, that is to say, invites us to read as strategic presentists.

    References

    Agathocleous, Tanya. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel. 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1996. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. 2015. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. 1921. London: Jonathan Cape.

    MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. 2014. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. 2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Vogel, Stephen. 1993. “Sensations of Tone, Perceptions of Sound, and Empiricism.” In Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, edited by David Cahan, 259-287. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Von Helmholtz, Hermann. 1954. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Translated by Alexander J. Ellis. New York: Dover.

    Notes

    [i] Gill’s blurb appears in several different online iterations of promotional materials for the novel. For one example, see “Bleak House Editorial Reviews.” Random House Books Australia. http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/charles-dickens/bleak-house-9780099511458.aspx (accessed February 10, 2016).

    [ii] But this is not the only way it does so. Tanya Agathocleous, for instance, observes that the novel combines the techniques of the panorama with those of the sketch to present a “kind of time-elapsed panorama,” an overview of Victorian London accumulated through momentary glimpses rather than seen instantaneously (2011: 111).

    [iii] This torsion goes some way towards explaining the divided critical opinions on the coherence of Bleak House, which tend to see the novel as either ultimately formally bounded and enclosed or impossibly diffusive. In a recent instance, we can see readings of the novel by Caroline Levine and Allen MacDuffie fall out on this question even as both conceptualize the novel as a network. Levine (2015: 130) reads Bleak House as embodying all the radical open-endedness of the network-form while MacDuffie, reading the eventual emergence of the network-form over the course of the novel as a conservative retreat from the scathing environmental critique that opens it, remarks disappointedly that “what initially looked like an overwhelming sea of people turns out to be a large, but manageable network” (2014: 112).

    [iv] Further, Dickens had a lifelong interest in Charles Babbage’s theories of sound waves as circulating endlessly through the air, which, John Picker (2003: 15-40) suggests, promised Dickens a kind of indefinite circulation for his own authorial voice.

     

    CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

    David Sweeney Coombs is assistant professor of English at Clemson University. He is currently at work on a book examining the Victorian literary response to the distinction drawn between sensation and perception by the nineteenth-century human sciences. 

     

     

  • Ending the World as We Know It: Alexander R. Galloway in Conversation with Andrew Culp

    Ending the World as We Know It: Alexander R. Galloway in Conversation with Andrew Culp

    by Alexander R. Galloway and Andrew Culp
    ~

    Alexander R. Galloway: You have a new book called Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I particularly like the expression “canon of joy” that guides your investigation. Can you explain what canon of joy means and why it makes sense to use it when talking about Deleuze?

    Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

    Andrew Culp: My opening is cribbed from a letter Gilles Deleuze wrote to philosopher and literary critic Arnaud Villani in the early 1980s. Deleuze suggests that any worthwhile book must have three things: a polemic against an error, a recovery of something forgotten, and an innovation. Proceeding along those three lines, I first argue against those who worship Deleuze as the patron saint of affirmation, second I rehabilitate the negative that already saturates his work, and third I propose something he himself was not capable of proposing, a “hatred for this world.” So in an odd twist of Marx on history, I begin with those who hold up Deleuze as an eternal optimist, yet not to stand on their shoulders but to topple the church of affirmation.

    The canon portion of “canon of joy” is not unimportant. Perhaps more than any other recent thinker, Deleuze queered philosophy’s line of succession. A large portion of his books were commentaries on outcast thinkers that he brought back from exile. Deleuze was unwilling to discard Nietzsche as a fascist, Bergson as a spiritualist, or Spinoza as a rationalist. Apparently this led to lots of teasing by fellow agrégation students at the Sorbonne in the late ’40s. Further showing his strange journey through the history of philosophy, his only published monograph for nearly a decade was an anti-transcendental reading of Hume at a time in France when phenomenology reigned. Such an itinerant path made it easy to take Deleuze at his word as a self-professed practitioner of “minor philosophy.” Yet look at Deleuze’s outcasts now! His initiation into the pantheon even bought admission for relatively forgotten figures such as sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Deleuze’s popularity thus raises a thorny question for us today: how do we continue the minor Deleuzian line when Deleuze has become a “major thinker”? For me, the first step is to separate Deleuze (and Guattari) from his commentators.

    I see two popular joyous interpretations of Deleuze in the canon: unreconstructed Deleuzians committed to liberating flows, and realists committed to belief in this world. The first position repeats the language of molecular revolution, becoming, schizos, transversality, and the like. Some even use the terms without transforming them! The resulting monotony seals Deleuze and Guattari’s fate as a wooden tongue used by people still living in the ’80s. Such calcification of their concepts is an especially grave injustice because Deleuze quite consciously shifted terminology from book to book to avoid this very outcome. Don’t get me wrong, I am deeply indebted to the early work on Deleuze! I take my insistence on the Marxo-Freudian core of Deleuze and Guattari from one of their earliest Anglophone commentators, Eugene Holland, who I sought out to direct my dissertation. But for me, the Tiqqun line “the revolution was molecular, and so was the counter-revolution” perfectly depicts the problem of advocating molecular politics. Why? Today’s techniques of control are now molecular. The result is that control societies have emptied the molecular thinker’s only bag of tricks (Bifo is a good test case here), which leaves us with a revolution that only goes one direction: backward.

    I am equally dissatisfied by realist Deleuzians who delve deep into the early strata of A Thousand Plateaus and away from the “infinite speed of thought” that motivates What is Philosophy? I’m thinking of the early incorporations of dynamical systems theory, the ’90s astonishment over everything serendipitously looking like a rhizome, the mid-00s emergence of Speculative Realism, and the ongoing “ontological” turn. Anyone who has read Manuel DeLanda will know this exact dilemma of materiality versus thought. He uses examples that slow down Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to something easily graspable. In his first book, he narrates history as a “robot historian,” and in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, he literally traces the last thousand years of economics, biology, and language back to clearly identifiable technological inventions. Such accounts are dangerously compelling due to their lucidity, but they come at a steep cost: android realism dispenses with Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring subject, which is necessary for a theory of revolution by way of the psychoanalytic insistence on the human ability to overcome biological instincts (e.g. Freud’s Instincts and their Vicissitudes and Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Realist interpretations of Deleuze conceive of the subject as fully of this world. And with it, thought all but evaporates under the weight of this world. Deleuze’s Hume book is an early version of this criticism, but the realists have not taken heed. Whether emergent, entangled, or actant, strong realists ignore Deleuze and Guattari’s point in What is Philosophy? that thought always comes from the outside at a moment when we are confronted by something so intolerable that the only thing remaining is to think.

    Galloway: The left has always been ambivalent about media and technology, sometimes decrying its corrosive influence (Frankfurt School), sometimes embracing its revolutionary potential (hippy cyberculture). Still, you ditch technical “acceleration” in favor of “escape.” Can you expand your position on media and technology, by way of Deleuze’s notion of the machinic?

    Culp: Foucault says that an episteme can be grasped as we are leaving it. Maybe we can finally catalogue all of the contemporary positions on technology? The romantic (computer will never capture my soul), the paranoiac (there is an unknown force pulling the strings), the fascist-pessimist (computers will control everything)…

    Deleuze and Guattari are certainly not allergic to technology. My favorite quote actually comes from the Foucault book in which Deleuze says that “technology is social before it is technical” (6). The lesson we can draw from this is that every social formation draws out different capacities from any given technology. An easy example is from the nomads Deleuze loved so much. Anarcho-primitivists speculate that humans learn oppression with the domestication of animals and settled agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. Diverging from the narrative, Deleuze celebrates the horse people of the Eurasian steppe described by Arnold Toynbee. Threatened by forces that would require them to change their habitat, Toynbee says, they instead chose to change their habits. The subsequent domestication of the horse did not sew the seeds of the state, which was actually done by those who migrated from the steppes after the last Ice Age to begin wet rice cultivation in alluvial valleys (for more, see James C Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed). On the contrary, the new relationship between men and horses allowed nomadism to achieve a higher speed, which was necessary to evade the raiding-and-trading used by padi-states to secure the massive foreign labor needed for rice farming. This is why the nomad is “he who does not move” and not a migrant (A Thousand Plateaus, 381).

    Accelerationism attempts to overcome the capitalist opposition of human and machine through the demand for full automation. As such, it peddles in technological Proudhonism that believes one can select what is good about technology and just delete what is bad. The Marxist retort is that development proceeds by its bad side. So instead of flashy things like self-driving cars, the real dot-communist question is: how will Amazon automate the tedious, low-paying jobs that computers are no good at? What happens to the data entry clerks, abusive-content managers, or help desk technicians? Until it figures out who will empty the recycle bin, accelerationism is only a socialism of the creative class.

    The machinic is more than just machines–it approaches technology as a question of organization. The term is first used by Guattari in a 1968 paper titled “Machine and Structure” that he presented to Lacan’s Freudian School of Paris, a paper that would jumpstart his collaboration with Deleuze. He argues for favoring machine to structure. Structures transform parts of a whole by exchanging or substituting particularities so that every part shares in a general form (in other words, the production of isomorphism). An easy political example is the Leninist Party, which mediates the particularized private interests to form them into the general will of a class. Machines instead treat the relationship between things as a problem of communication. The result is the “control and communication” of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which connects distinct things in a circuit instead of implanting a general logic. The word “machine” never really caught on but the concept has made inroads in the social sciences, where actor-network theory, game theory, behaviorism, systems theory, and other cybernetic approaches have gained acceptance.

    Structure or machine, each engenders a different type of subjectivity, and each realizes a different model of communication. The two are found in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari note two different types of state subject formation: social subjection and machinic enslavement (456-460). While it only takes up a few short pages, the distinction is essential to Bernard Stiegler’s work and has been expertly elaborated by Maurizio Lazzarato in the book Signs and Machines. We are all familiar with molar social subjection synonymous with “agency”–it is the power that results from individuals bridging the gap between themselves and broader structures of representation, social roles, and institutional demands. This subjectivity is well outlined by Lacanians and other theorists of the linguistic turn (Virno, Rancière, Butler, Agamben). Missing from their accounts is machinic enslavement, which treats people as simply cogs in the machine. Such subjectivity is largely overlooked because it bypasses existential questions of recognition or self-identity. This is because machinic enslavement operates at the level of the infra-social or pre-individual through the molecular operators of unindividuated affects, sensations, desires not assigned to a subject. Offering a concrete example, Deleuze and Guattari reference Mumford’s megamachines of surplus societies that create huge landworks by treating humans as mere constituent parts. Capitalism revived the megamachine in the sixteenth century, and more recently, we have entered the “third age” of enslavement marked by the development of cybernetic and informational machines. In place of the pyramids are technical machines that use humans at places in technical circuits where computers are incapable or too costly, e.g. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

    I should also clarify that not all machines are bad. Rather, Dark Deleuze only trusts one kind of machine, the war machine. And war machines follow a single trajectory–a line of flight out of this world. A major task of the war machine conveniently aligns with my politics of techno-anarchism: to blow apart the networks of communication created by the state.

    Galloway: I can’t resist a silly pun, cannon of joy. Part of your project is about resisting a certain masculinist tendency. Is that a fair assessment? How do feminism and queer theory influence your project?

    Culp: Feminism is hardwired into the tagline for Dark Deleuze through a critique of emotional labor and the exhibition of bodies–“A revolutionary Deleuze for today’s digital world of compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure.” The major thread I pull through the book is a materialist feminist one: something intolerable about this world is that it demands we participate in its accumulation and reproduction. So how about a different play on words: Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, who refuses the sexual contract that requires women to appear outwardly grateful and agreeable? Or better yet, Joy Division? The name would associate the project with post-punk, its conceptual attack on the mainstream, and the band’s nod to the sexual labor depicted in the novella House of Dolls.

    My critique of accumulation is also a media argument about connection. The most popular critics of ‘net culture are worried that we are losing ourselves. So on the one hand, we have Sherry Turkle who is worried that humans are becoming isolated in a state of being “alone-together”; and on the other, there is Bernard Stiegler, who thinks that the network supplants important parts of what it means to be human. I find this kind of critique socially conservative. It also victim-blames those who use social media the most. Recall the countless articles attacking women who take selfies as part of self-care regimen or teens who creatively evade parental authority. I’m more interested in the critique of early ’90s ‘net culture and its enthusiasm for the network. In general, I argue that network-centric approaches are now the dominant form of power. As such, I am much more interested in how the rhizome prefigures the digitally-coordinated networks of exploitation that have made Apple, Amazon, and Google into the world’s most powerful corporations. While not a feminist issue on its face, it’s easy to see feminism’s relevance when we consider the gendered division of labor that usually makes women the employees of choice for low-paying jobs in electronics manufacturing, call centers, and other digital industries.

    Lastly, feminism and queer theory explicitly meet in my critique of reproduction. A key argument of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus is the auto-production of the real, which is to say, we already live in a “world without us.” My argument is that we need to learn how to hate some of the things it produces. Of course, this is a reworked critique of capitalist alienation and exploitation, which is a system that gives to us (goods and the wage) only because it already stole them behind our back (restriction from the means of subsistence and surplus value). Such ambivalence is the everyday reality of the maquiladora worker who needs her job but may secretly hope that all the factories burn to the ground. Such degrading feelings are the result of the compromises we make to reproduce ourselves. In the book, I give voice to them by fusing together David Halperin and Valerie Traub’s notion of gay shame acting as a solvent to whatever binds us to identity and Deleuze’s shame at not being able to prevent the intolerable. But feeling shame is not enough. To complete the argument, we need to draw out the queer feminist critique of reproduction latent in Marx and Freud. Détourning an old phrase: direct action begins at the point of reproduction. My first impulse is to rely on the punk rock attitude of Lee Edelman and Paul Preciado’s indictment of reproduction. But you are right that they have their masculinist moments, so what we need is something more post-punk–a little less aggressive and a lot more experimental. Hopefully Dark Deleuze is that.

    Galloway: Edelman’s “fuck Annie” is one of the best lines in recent theory. “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” (No Future, 29). Your book claims, in essence, that the Fuck Annies are more interesting than the Aleatory Materialists. But how can we escape the long arm of Lucretius?

    Culp: My feeling is that the politics of aleatory materialism remains ambiguous. Beyond the literal meaning of “joy,” there are important feminist takes on the materialist Spinoza of the encounter that deserve our attention. Isabelle Stengers’s work is among the most comprehensive, though the two most famous are probably Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and Karen Barad’s agential realism. Curiously, while New Materialism has been quite a boon for the art and design world, its socio-political stakes have never been more uncertain. One would hope that appeals to matter would lend philosophical credence to topical events such as #blacklivesmatter. Yet for many, New Materialism has simply led to a new formalism focused on material forms or realist accounts of physical systems meant to eclipse the “epistemological excesses” of post-structuralism. This divergence was not lost on commentators in the most recent issue of of October, which functioned as a sort of referendum on New Materialism. On the hand, the issue included a generous accounting of the many avenues artists have taken in exploring various “new materialist” directions. Of those, I most appreciated Mel Chen’s reminder that materialism cannot serve as a “get out of jail free card” on the history of racism, sexism, ablism, and speciesism. While on the other, it included the first sustained attack on New Materialism by fellow travelers. Certainly the New Materialist stance of seeing the world from the perspective of “real objects” can be valuable, but only if it does not exclude old materialism’s politics of labor. I draw from Deleuzian New Materialist feminists in my critique of accumulation and reproduction, but only after short-circuiting their world-building. This is a move I learned from Sue Ruddick, whose Theory, Culture & Society article on the affect of the philosopher’s scream is an absolute tour de force. And then there is Graham Burnett’s remark that recent materialisms are like “Etsy kissed by philosophy.” The phrase perfectly crystallizes the controversy, but it might be too hot to touch for at least a decade…

    Galloway: Let’s focus more on the theme of affirmation and negation, since the tide seems to be changing. In recent years, a number of theorists have turned away from affirmation toward a different set of vectors such as negation, eclipse, extinction, or pessimism. Have we reached peak affirmation?

    Culp: We should first nail down what affirmation means in this context. There is the metaphysical version of affirmation, such as Foucault’s proud title as a “happy positivist.” In this declaration in Archaeology of Knowledge and “The Order of Discourse,” he is not claiming to be a logical positivist. Rather, Foucault is distinguishing his approach from Sartrean totality, transcendentalism, and genetic origins (his secondary target being the reading-between-the-lines method of Althusserian symptomatic reading). He goes on to formalize this disagreement in his famous statement on the genealogical method, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Despite being an admirer of Sartre, Deleuze shares this affirmative metaphysics with Foucault, which commentators usually describe as an alternative to the Hegelian system of identity, contradiction, determinate negation, and sublation. Nothing about this “happily positivist” system forces us to be optimists. In fact, it only raises the stakes for locating how all the non-metaphysical senses of the negative persist.

    Affirmation could be taken to imply a simple “more is better” logic as seen in Assemblage Theory and Latourian Compositionalism. Behind this logic is a principle of accumulation that lacks a theory of exploitation and fails to consider the power of disconnection. The Spinozist definition of joy does little to dispel this myth, but it is not like either project has revolutionary political aspirations. I think we would be better served to follow the currents of radical political developments over the last twenty years, which have been following an increasingly negative path. One part of the story is a history of failure. The February 15, 2003 global demonstration against the Iraq War was the largest protest in history but had no effect on the course of the war. More recently, the election of democratic socialist governments in Europe has done little to stave off austerity, even as economists publicly describe it as a bankrupt model destined to deepen the crisis. I actually find hope in the current circuit of struggle and think that its lack of alter-globalization world-building aspirations might be a plus. My cues come from the anarchist black bloc and those of the post-Occupy generation who would rather not pose any demands. This is why I return to the late Deleuze of the “control societies” essay and his advice to scramble the codes, to seek out spaces where nothing needs to be said, and to establish vacuoles of non-communication. Those actions feed the subterranean source of Dark Deleuze‘s darkness and the well from which comes hatred, cruelty, interruption, un-becoming, escape, cataclysm, and the destruction of worlds.

    Galloway: Does hatred for the world do a similar work for you that judgment or moralism does in other writers? How do we avoid the more violent and corrosive forms of hate?

    Culp: Writer Antonin Artaud’s attempt “to have done with the judgment of God” plays a crucial role in Dark Deleuze. Not just any specific authority but whatever gods are left. The easiest way to summarize this is “the three deaths.” Deleuze already makes note of these deaths in the preface to Difference and Repetition, but it only became clear to me after I read Gregg Flaxman’s Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy. We all know of Nietzsche’s Death of God. With it, Nietzsche notes that God no longer serves as the central organizing principle for us moderns. Important to Dark Deleuze is Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche, who is part of a conspiracy against all of humanity. Why? Because even as God is dead, humanity has replaced him with itself. Next comes the Death of Man, which we can lay at the feet of Foucault. More than any other text, The Order of Things demonstrates how the birth of modern man was an invention doomed to fail. So if that death is already written in sand about to be washed away, then what comes next? Here I turn to the world, worlding, and world-building. It seems obvious when looking at the problems that plague our world: global climate change, integrated world capitalism, and other planet-scale catastrophes. We could try to deal with each problem one by one. But why not pose an even more radical proposition? What if we gave up on trying to save this world? We are already awash in sci-fi that tries to do this, though most of it is incredibly socially conservative. Perhaps now is the time for thinkers like us to catch up. Fragments of Deleuze already lay out the terms of the project. He ends the preface to Different and Repetition by assigning philosophy the task of writing apocalyptic science fiction. Deleuze’s book opens with lightning across the black sky and ends with the world swelling into a single ocean of excess. Dark Deleuze collects those moments and names it the Death of This World.

    Galloway: Speaking of climate change, I’m reminded how ecological thinkers can be very religious, if not in word then in deed. Ecologists like to critique “nature” and tout their anti-essentialist credentials, while at the same time promulgating tellurian “change” as necessary, even beneficial. Have they simply replaced one irresistible force with another? But your “hatred of the world” follows a different logic…

    Culp: Irresistible indeed! Yet it is very dangerous to let the earth have the final say. Not only does psychoanalysis teach us that it is necessary to buck the judgment of nature, the is/ought distinction at the philosophical core of most ethical thought refuses to let natural fact define the good. I introduce hatred to develop a critical distance from what is, and, as such, hatred is also a reclamation of the future in that it is a refusal to allow what-is to prevail over what-could-be. Such an orientation to the future is already in Deleuze and Guattari. What else is de-territorialization? I just give it a name. They have another name for what I call hatred: utopia.

    Speaking of utopia, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of utopia in What is Philosophy? as simultaneously now-here and no-where is often used by commentators to justify odd compromise positions with the present state of affairs. The immediate reference is Samuel Butler’s 1872 book Erewhon, a backward spelling of nowhere, which Deleuze also references across his other work. I would imagine most people would assume it is a utopian novel in the vein of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. And Erewhon does borrow from the conventions of utopian literature, but only to skewer them with satire. A closer examination reveals that the book is really a jab at religion, Victorian values, and the British colonization of New Zealand! So if there is anything that the now-here of Erewhon has to contribute to utopia, it is that the present deserves our ruthless criticism. So instead of being a simultaneous now-here and no-where, hatred follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion in A Thousand Plateaus to “overthrow ontology” (25). Therefore, utopia is only found in Erewhon by taking leave of the now-here to get to no-where.

    Galloway: In Dark Deleuze you talk about avoiding “the liberal trap of tolerance, compassion, and respect.” And you conclude by saying that the “greatest crime of joyousness is tolerance.” Can you explain what you mean, particularly for those who might value tolerance as a virtue?

    Culp: Among the many followers of Deleuze today, there are a number of liberal Deleuzians. Perhaps the biggest stronghold is in political science, where there is a committed group of self-professed radical liberals. Another strain bridges Deleuze with the liberalism of John Rawls. I was a bit shocked to discover both of these approaches, but I suppose it was inevitable given liberalism’s ability to assimilate nearly any form of thought.

    Herbert Marcuse recognized “repressive tolerance” as the incredible power of liberalism to justify the violence of positions clothed as neutral. The examples Marcuse cites are governments who say they respect democratic liberties because they allow political protest although they ignore protesters by labeling them a special interest group. For those of us who have seen university administrations calmly collect student demands, set up dead-end committees, and slap pictures of protestors on promotional materials as a badge of diversity, it should be no surprise that Marcuse dedicated the essay to his students. An important elaboration on repressive tolerance is Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion. She argues that imperialist US foreign policy drapes itself in tolerance discourse. This helps diagnose why liberal feminist groups lined up behind the US invasion of Afghanistan (the Taliban is patriarchal) and explains how a mere utterance of ISIS inspires even the most progressive liberals to support outrageous war budgets.

    Because of their commitment to democracy, Brown and Marcuse can only qualify liberalism’s universal procedures for an ethical subject. Each criticizes certain uses of tolerance but does not want to dispense with it completely. Deleuze’s hatred of democracy makes it much easier for me. Instead, I embrace the perspective of a communist partisan because communists fight from a different structural position than that of the capitalist.

    Galloway: Speaking of structure and position, you have a section in the book on asymmetry. Most authors avoid asymmetry, instead favoring concepts like exchange or reciprocity. I’m thinking of texts on “the encounter” or “the gift,” not to mention dialectics itself as a system of exchange. Still you want to embrace irreversibility, incommensurability, and formal inoperability–why?

    Culp: There are a lot of reasons to prefer asymmetry, but for me, it comes down to a question of political strategy.

    First, a little background. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of exchange is important to Anti-Oedipus, which was staged through a challenge to Claude Lévi-Strauss. This is why they shift from the traditional Marxist analysis of mode of production to an anthropological study of anti-production, for which they use the work of Pierre Clastres and Georges Bataille to outline non-economic forms of power that prevented the emergence of capitalism. Contemporary anthropologists have renewed this line of inquiry, for instance, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who argues in Cannibal Metaphysics that cosmologies differ radically enough between peoples that they essentially live in different worlds. The cannibal, he shows, is not the subject of a mode of production but a mode of predation.

    Those are not the stakes that interest me the most. Consider instead the consequence of ethical systems built on the gift and political systems of incommensurability. The ethical approach is exemplified by Derrida, whose responsibility to the other draws from the liberal theological tradition of accepting the stranger. While there is distance between self and other, it is a difference that is bridged through the democratic project of radical inclusion, even if such incorporation can only be aporetically described as a necessary-impossibility. In contrast, the politics of asymmetry uses incommensurability to widen the chasm opened by difference. It offers a strategy for generating antagonism without the formal equivalence of dialectics and provides an image of revolution based on fundamental transformation. The former can be seen in the inherent difference between the perspective of labor and the perspective of capital, whereas the latter is a way out of what Guy Debord calls “a perpetual present.”

    Galloway: You are exploring a “dark” Deleuze, and I’m reminded how the concepts of darkness and blackness have expanded and interwoven in recent years in everything from afro-pessimism to black metal theory (which we know is frighteningly white). How do you differentiate between darkness and blackness? Or perhaps that’s not the point?

    Culp: The writing on Deleuze and race is uneven. A lot of it can be blamed on the imprecise definition of becoming. The most vulgar version of becoming is embodied by neoliberal subjects who undergo an always-incomplete process of coming more into being (finding themselves, identifying their capacities, commanding their abilities). The molecular version is a bit better in that it theorizes subjectivity as developing outside of or in tension with identity. Yet the prominent uses of becoming and race rarely escaped the postmodern orbit of hybridity, difference, and inclusive disjunction–the White Man’s face as master signifier, miscegenation as anti-racist practice, “I am all the names of history.” You are right to mention afro-pessimism, as it cuts a new way through the problem. As I’ve written elsewhere, Frantz Fanon describes being caught between “infinity and nothingness” in his famous chapter on the fact of blackness in Black Skin White Masks. The position of infinity is best championed by Fred Moten, whose black fugitive is the effect of an excessive vitality that has survived five hundred years of captivity. He catches fleeting moments of it in performances of jazz, art, and poetry. This position fits well with the familiar figures of Deleuzo-Guattarian politics: the itinerant nomad, the foreigner speaking in a minor tongue, the virtuoso trapped in-between lands. In short: the bastard combination of two or more distinct worlds. In contrast, afro-pessimism is not the opposite of the black radical tradition but its outside. According to afro-pessimism, the definition of blackness is nothing but the social death of captivity. Remember the scene of subjection mentioned by Fanon? During that nauseating moment he is assailed by a whole series of cultural associations attached to him by strangers on the street. “I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin”” (112). The lesson that afro-pessimism draws from this scene is that cultural representations of blackness only reflect back the interior of white civil society. The conclusion is that combining social death with a culture of resistance, such as the one embodied by Fanon’s mentor Aimé Césaire, is a trap that leads only back to whiteness. Afro-pessimism thus follows the alternate route of darkness. It casts a line to the outside through an un-becoming that dissolves the identity we are give as a token for the shame of being a survivor.

    Galloway: In a recent interview the filmmaker Haile Gerima spoke about whiteness as “realization.” By this he meant both realization as such–self-realization, the realization of the self, the ability to realize the self–but also the more nefarious version as “realization through the other.” What’s astounding is that one can replace “through” with almost any other preposition–for, against, with, without, etc.–and the dynamic still holds. Whiteness is the thing that turns everything else, including black bodies, into fodder for its own realization. Is this why you turn away from realization toward something like profanation? And is darkness just another kind of whiteness?

    Culp: Perhaps blackness is to the profane as darkness is to the outside. What is black metal if not a project of political-aesthetic profanation? But as other commentators have pointed out, the politics of black metal is ultimately telluric (e.g. Benjamin Noys’s “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal”). The left wing of black metal is anarchist anti-civ and the right is fascist-nativist. Both trace authority back to the earth that they treat as an ultimate judge usurped by false idols.

    The process follows what Badiou calls “the passion for the real,” his diagnosis of the Twentieth Century’s obsession with true identity, false copies, and inauthentic fakes. His critique equally applies to Deleuzian realists. This is why I think it is essential to return to Deleuze’s work on cinema and the powers of the false. One key example is Orson Welles’s F for Fake. Yet my favorite is the noir novel, which he praises in “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” The noir protagonist never follows in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes or other classical detectives’s search for the real, which happens by sniffing out the truth through a scientific attunement of the senses. Rather, the dirty streets lead the detective down enough dead ends that he proceeds by way of a series of errors. What noir reveals is that crime and the police have “nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for truth” (82). The truth is rarely decisive in noir because breakthroughs only come by way of “the great trinity of falsehood”: informant-corruption-torture. The ultimate gift of noir is a new vision of the world whereby honest people are just dupes of the police because society is fueled by falsehood all the way down.

    To specify the descent to darkness, I use darkness to signify the outside. The outside has many names: the contingent, the void, the unexpected, the accidental, the crack-up, the catastrophe. The dominant affects associated with it are anticipation, foreboding, and terror. To give a few examples, H. P. Lovecraft’s scariest monsters are those so alien that characters cannot describe them with any clarity, Maurice Blanchot’s disaster is the Holocaust as well as any other event so terrible that it interrupts thinking, and Don DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event” is an incident so foreign that it can only be described in the most banal terms. Of Deleuze and Guattari’s many different bodies without organs, one of the conservative varieties comes from a Freudian model of the psyche as a shell meant to protect the ego from outside perturbations. We all have these protective barriers made up of habits that help us navigate an uncertain world–that is the purpose of Guattari’s ritornello, that little ditty we whistle to remind us of the familiar even when we travel to strange lands. There are two parts that work together, the refrain and the strange land. The refrains have only grown yet the journeys seem to have ended.

    I’ll end with an example close to my own heart. Deleuze and Guattari are being used to support new anarchist “pre-figurative politics,” which is defined as seeking to build a new society within the constraints of the now. The consequence is that the political horizon of the future gets collapsed into the present. This is frustrating for someone like me, who holds out hope for a revolutionary future that ceases the million tiny humiliations that make up everyday life. I like J. K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of political economy, but community currencies, labor time banks, and worker’s coops are not my image of communism. This is why I have drawn on the gothic for inspiration. A revolution that emerges from the darkness holds the apocalyptic potential of ending the world as we know it.

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    • Klossowski, Pierre. “Circulus Vitiosus.” Translated by Joseph Kuzma. The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal 2, no. 1 (2009): 31-47.
    • ———. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. 1969. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
    • Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines. 2010. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014.
    • Marcuse, Herbert. “Repressive Tolerance.” In A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 81-117. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.
    • Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. 1950. Translated by W. D. Hallis. New York: Routledge, 1990.
    • Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
    • Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Human Development. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967.
    • Noys, Benjamin. “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal.” In: Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1 (2010): 105-128.
    • Preciado, Paul. Testo-Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Phamacopornographic Era. 2008. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press, 2013.
    • Ruddick, Susan. “The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the Work of Negri and Deleuze.” Theory, Culture, Society 27, no. 4 (2010): 21-45.
    • Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
    • Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” In Rhizomes 29 (2016). http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/sexton.html.
    • ———. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts.” In Lateral 1 (2012). http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue1/content/sexton.html.
    • ———. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” In Intensions 5 (2011). http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php.
    • Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.
    • ———. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. 1994. Translated by George Collins and Richard Beardsworth. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
    • Tiqqun. “How Is It to Be Done?” 2001. In Introduction to Civil War. 2001. Translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2010.
    • Toynbee, Arnold. A Study of History. Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell. London, Oxford University Press, 1946.
    • Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
    • Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-structural Anthropology. 2009. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2014.
    • Villani, Arnaud. La guêpe et l’orchidée. Essai sur Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Éditions de Belin, 1999.
    • Welles, Orson, dir. F for Fake. 1974. New York: Criterion Collection, 2005.
    • Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948; second revised edition.
    • Williams, Alex, and Nick Srincek. “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.” Critical Legal Thinking. 2013. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/.

    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

    Andrew Culp is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman College. He specializes in cultural-communicative theories of power, the politics of emerging media, and gendered responses to urbanization. His work has appeared in Radical Philosophy, Angelaki, Affinities, and other venues. He previously pre-reviewed Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital for The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

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  • Data and Desire in Academic Life

    Data and Desire in Academic Life

    a review of Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture (Riverhead Books, reprint edition, 2014)
    by Benjamin Haber
    ~

    On a recent visit to San Francisco, I found myself trying to purchase groceries when my credit card was declined. As the cashier is telling me this news, and before I really had time to feel any particular way about it, my leg vibrates. I’ve received a text: “Chase Fraud-Did you use card ending in 1234 for $100.40 at a grocery store on 07/01/2015? If YES reply 1, NO reply 2.” After replying “yes” (which was recognized even though I failed to follow instructions), I swiped my card again and was out the door with my food. Many have probably had a similar experience: most if not all credit card companies automatically track purchases for a variety of reasons, including fraud prevention, the tracking of illegal activity, and to offer tailored financial products and services. As I walked out of the store, for a moment, I felt the power of “big data,” how real-time consumer information can be read as be a predictor of a stolen card in less time than I had to consider why my card had been declined. It was a too rare moment of reflection on those networks of activity that modulate our life chances and capacities, mostly below and above our conscious awareness.

    And then I remembered: didn’t I buy my plane ticket with the points from that very credit card? And in fact, hadn’t I used that card on multiple occasions in San Francisco for purchases not much less than the amount my groceries cost. While the near-instantaneous text provided reassurance before I could consciously recognize my anxiety, the automatic card decline was likely not a sophisticated real-time data-enabled prescience, but a rather blunt instrument, flagging the transaction on the basis of two data points: distance from home and amount of purchase. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the gap between data collection and processing, between metadata and content and between current reality of data and its speculative future is still quite large. While Target’s pregnancy predicting algorithm was a journalistic sensation, the more mundane computational confusion that has Gmail constantly serving me advertisements for trade and business schools shows the striking gap between the possibilities of what is collected and the current landscape of computationally prodded behavior. The text from Chase, your Klout score, the vibration of your FitBit, or the probabilistic genetic information from 23 and me are all primarily affective investments in mobilizing a desire for data’s future promise. These companies and others are opening of new ground for discourse via affect, creating networked infrastructures for modulating the body and social life.

    I was thinking about this while reading Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, a love letter to the power and utility of algorithmic processing of the words in books. Though ostensibly about the Google Ngram Viewer, a neat if one-dimensional tool to visualize the word frequency of a portion of the books scanned by Google, Uncharted is also unquestionably involved in the mobilization of desire for quantification. Though about the academy rather than financialization, medicine, sports or any other field being “revolutionized” by big data, its breathless boosterism and obligatory cautions are emblematic of the emergent datafied spirit of capitalism, a celebratory “coming out” of the quantifying systems that constitute the emergent infrastructures of sociality.

    While published fairly recently, in 2013, Uncharted already feels dated in its strangely muted engagement with the variety of serious objections to sprawling corporate and state run data systems in the post-Snowden, post-Target, post-Ashley Madison era (a list that will always be in need of update). There is still the dazzlement about the sheer magnificent size of this potential new suitor—“If you wrote out all five zettabytes that humans produce every year by hand, you would reach the core of the Milky Way” (11)—all the more impressive when explicitly compared to the dusty old technologies of ink and paper. Authors Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel are floating in a world of “simple and beautiful” formulas (45), “strange, fascinating and addictive” methods (22), producing “intriguing, perplexing and even fun” conclusions (119) in their drive to colonize the “uncharted continent” (76) that is the English language. The almost erotic desire for this bounty is made more explicit in their tongue-in-cheek characterization of their meetings with Google employees as an “irresistible… mating dance” (22):

    Scholars and scientists approach engineers, product managers, and even high-level executives about getting access to their companies’ data. Sometimes the initial conversation goes well. They go out for coffee. One thing leads to another, and a year later, a brand-new person enters the picture. Unfortunately this person is usually a lawyer. (22)

    There is a lot to unpack in these metaphors, the recasting of academic dependence on data systems designed and controlled by corporate entities as a sexy new opportunity for scholars and scientists. There are important conversations to be had about these circulations of quantified desire; about who gets access to this kind of data, the ethics of working with companies who have an existential interest in profit and shareholder return and the cultural significance of wrapping business transactions in the language of heterosexual coupling. Here however I am mostly interested in the real allure that this passage and others speaks to, and the attendant fear that mostly whispers, at least in a book written by Harvard PhDs with Ted talks to give.

    For most academics in the social sciences and the humanities “big data” is a term more likely to get caught in the throat than inspire butterflies in the stomach. While Aiden and Michel certainly acknowledge that old-fashion textual analysis (50) and theory (20) will have a place in this brave new world of charts and numbers, they provide a number of contrasts to suggest the relative poverty of even the most brilliant scholar in the face of big data. One hypothetical in particular, that is not directly answered but is strongly implied, spoke to my discipline specifically:

    Consider the following question: Which would help you more if your quest was to learn about contemporary human society—unfettered access to a leading university’s department of sociology, packed with experts on how societies function, or unfettered access to Facebook, a company whose goal is to help mediate human social relationships online? (12)

    The existential threat at the heart of this question was catalyzed for many people in Roger Burrows and Mike Savage’s 2007 “The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology,” an early canary singing the worry of what Nigel Thrift has called “knowing capitalism” (2005). Knowing capitalism speaks to the ways that capitalism has begun to take seriously the task of “thinking the everyday” (1) by embedding information technologies within “circuits of practice” (5). For Burrows and Savage these practices can and should be seen as a largely unrecognized world of sophisticated and profit-minded sociology that makes the quantitative tools of academics look like “a very poor instrument” in comparison (2007: 891).

    Indeed, as Burrows and Savage note, the now ubiquitous social survey is a technology invented by social scientists, folks who were once seen as strikingly innovative methodologists (888). Despite ever more sophisticated statistical treatments however, the now over 40 year old social survey remains the heart of social scientific quantitative methodology in a radically changed context. And while declining response rates, a constraining nation-based framing and competition from privately-funded surveys have all decreased the efficacy of academic survey research (890), nothing has threatened the discipline like the embedded and “passive” collecting technologies that fuel big data. And with these methodological changes come profound epistemological ones: questions of how, when, why and what we know of the world. These methods are inspiring changing ideas of generalizability and new expectations around the temporality of research. Does it matter, for example, that studies have questioned the accuracy of the FitBit? The growing popularity of these devices suggests at the very least that sociologists should not count on empirical rigor to save them from irrelevance.

    As academia reorganizes around the speculative potential of digital technologies, there is an increasing pile of capital available to those academics able to translate between the discourses of data capitalism and a variety of disciplinary traditions. And the lure of this capital is perhaps strongest in the humanities, whose scholars have been disproportionately affected by state economic retrenchment on education spending that has increasingly prioritized quantitative, instrumental, and skill-based majors. The increasing urgency in the humanities to use bigger and faster tools is reflected in the surprisingly minimal hand wringing over the politics of working with companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google. If there is trepidation in the N-grams project recounted in Uncharted, it is mostly coming from Google, whose lawyers and engineers have little incentive to bother themselves with the politically fraught, theory-driven, Institutional Review Board slow lane of academic production. The power imbalance of this courtship leaves those academics who decide to partner with these companies at the mercy of their epistemological priorities and, as Uncharted demonstrates, the cultural aesthetics of corporate tech.

    This is a vision of the public humanities refracted through the language of public relations and the “measurable outcomes” culture of the American technology industry. Uncharted has taken to heart the power of (re)branding to change the valence of your work: Aiden and Michel would like you to call their big data inflected historical research “culturomics” (22). In addition to a hopeful attempt to coin a buzzy new work about the digital, culturomics linguistically brings the humanities closer to the supposed precision, determination and quantifiability of economics. And lest you think this multivalent bringing of culture to capital—or rather the renegotiation of “the relationship between commerce and the ivory tower” (8)—is unseemly, Aiden and Michel provide an origin story to show how futile this separation has been.

    But the desire for written records has always accompanied economic activity, since transactions are meaningless unless you can clearly keep track of who owns what. As such, early human writing is dominated by wheeling and dealing: a menagerie of bets, chits, and contracts. Long before we had the writings of prophets, we had the writing of profits. (9)

    And no doubt this is true: culture is always already bound up with economy. But the full-throated embrace of culturomics is not a vision of interrogating and reimagining the relationship between economic systems, culture and everyday life; [1] rather it signals the acceptance of the idea of culture as transactional business model. While Google has long imagined itself as a company with a social mission, they are a publicly held company who will be punished by investors if they neglect their bottom line of increasing the engagement of eyeballs on advertisements. The N-gram Viewer does not make Google money, but it perhaps increases public support for their larger book-scanning initiative, which Google clearly sees as a valuable enough project to invest many years of labor and millions of dollars to defend in court.

    This vision of the humanities is transactionary in another way as well. While much of Uncharted is an attempt to demonstrate the profound, game-changing implications of the N-gram viewer, there is a distinctly small-questions, cocktail-party-conversation feel to this type of inquiry that seems ironically most useful in preparing ABD humanities and social science PhDs for jobs in the service industry than in training them for the future of academia. It might be more precise to say that the N-gram viewer is architecturally designed for small answers rather than small questions. All is resolved through linear projection, a winner and a loser or stasis. This is a vision of research where the precise nature of the mediation (what books have been excluded? what is the effect of treating all books as equally revealing of human culture? what about those humans whose voices have been systematically excluded from the written record?) is ignored, and where the actual analysis of books, and indeed the books themselves, are black-boxed from the researcher.

    Uncharted speaks to perils of doing research under the cloud of existential erasure and to the failure of academics to lead with a different vision of the possibilities of quantification. Collaborating with the wealthy corporate titans of data collection requires an acceptance of these companies own existential mandate: make tons of money by monetizing a dizzying array of human activities while speculatively reimagining the future to attempt to maintain that cash flow. For Google, this is a vision where all activities, not just “googling” are collected and analyzed in a seamlessly updating centralized system. Cars, thermostats, video games, photos, businesses are integrated not for the public benefit but because of the power of scale to sell or rent or advertise products. Data is promised as a deterministic balm for the unknowability of life and Google’s participation in academic research gives them the credibility to be your corporate (sen.se) mother. What, might we imagine, are the speculative possibilities of networked data not beholden to shareholder value?
    _____

    Benjamin Haber is a PhD candidate in Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center and a Digital Fellow at The Center for the Humanities. His current research is a cultural and material exploration of emergent infrastructures of corporeal data through a queer theoretical framework. He is organizing a conference called “Queer Circuits in Archival Times: Experimentation and Critique of Networked Data” to be held in New York City in May 2016.

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    _____

    Notes

    [1] A project desperately needed in academia, where terms like “neoliberalism,” “biopolitics” and “late capitalism” more often than not are used briefly at end of a short section on implications rather than being given the critical attention and nuanced intentionality that they deserve.

    Works Cited

    Savage, Mike, and Roger Burrows. 2007. “The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology.” Sociology 41 (5): 885–99.

    Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. London: SAGE.

  • Empson’s “Sacred Mountain”: Poetry, Criticism, and Love

    By Q.S. Tong ~

    Empson (second row, right of center) with colleagues and guests at Peking University

    William Empson (second row, right of center) with colleagues and guests at Peking University. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    We do not fly when we are clay. We hope to fly when we are dust.

    William Empson, “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 91.

    When he is free he knows that he is free, that rebirth is at an end, that virtue is accomplished, that duty is done, and that there is no more returning to this world; thus he knows.

    William Empson, “The Fire Sermon,” The Complete Poems, 3.

    “Inertia and apathy,” says Raymond Williams, “have always been employed by the governed as a comparatively safe weapon against their governors.”1 Following the loss of confidence in one’s formative society and in the possibility of meaningful and productive human relationship in it, escape enacts a personal decision that one must take after a sustained period of inertia and apathy in order to imagine a radical change and to live a different life. Escape is thus “an honest substitute for revolution,” “a drastic change without external compulsion to make it.”2 Unless there is a willingness to see the self and others differently, to see one’s own country and the world differently, it would be difficult to imagine any real social and moral progress. “To become morally independent of one’s formative society,” asserts William Empson, “is the grandest theme of all literature, because it is the only means of moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept.”3 It’s difficult to know whether Empson had himself in mind when he made this grand statement about the ethical aspiration of literature. Empson was not a revolutionary, nor was he committed to any radical political doctrine; but he was a rebel in his own way, a dissenting mind, and an idiosyncratic presence in twentieth century literature and criticism.

    This essay does not intend to reassess Empson.4 Rather, it offers a critical narrative of how the new realities of his time affected his life and how he reacted to them through work in wartime China. Empson manifests his intellectual qualities in his relation to China. His visits to China were not initially motivated by an explicit political agenda or an ideological program, but by the necessities of life. Although he had already achieved considerable critical reputation with the publication of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), he did not have a fulltime teaching position in England until he was offered the Chair of English at the University of Sheffield in 1955. It had been more than two decades since he graduated from Cambridge. For Empson, understanding and dealing with difficulties and failures of life was both a practical challenge and an intellectual question. In the face of growing influence and power of the institutionalized life, it seemed necessary to devise his own method of resistance and technique of self-care. To seek a new community, a new modality of life, would make it possible to envision the desired change in life and to create the possibilities of self-renewal. China in the 1930s was still able to offer the opportunities of escape from home and a new communal life in which Empson could hope to develop an understanding of the profession of literature and to turn that understanding into a positive and productive force of life.

    “Courage means Running”5

    From 1937 to 1938 and again from 1947 to 1953, Empson lived and worked in China, straddling the crucial historical moment of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” (1940), the longest and most biographical of his poems recording his experience of teaching English in China, Empson admits that China is his chosen place of exile: “it is true I flew, I fled” (19).6 He explains the poem’s pre-occupation with the imagery of “flying” thus: “‘Flying’ … is being used here for escaping ordinary troubles as well as other things.”7 It’s not just life-threatening dangers that would compel one into exile from one’s native land; ordinary troubles are the manifestation of a routine hostility against thinking, freedom, and life. “I ran about on hope, on trust,” declares Empson (“Nan-Yűeh,” 20). “Flying,” as a method by which the self seeks possibilities of protection, preservation, and survival, is not only a recurrent topos in Empson’s poetical and critical writings, but also a defining character of his early professional life. Empson flew and ran, literally and figuratively, from forms of vulgarity and snobbery permeating academic society where life was reduced to a protracted process of endurance. To be away from one’s formative society would be like leaving behind a whole system of constraints and prohibitions and trying to achieve a degree of freedom, however incomplete it might be.

    Good life is self-sustainment through endurance. Central to Empson’s concern is the development of an understanding of the human capacity “to take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one,” and “one must do this with all life, because the normal is itself limited.”8 This is an Empsonian paradox that resonates with his favorite critical concept: ambiguity. Writing for him is perhaps also a form of escape – from its normative mode of articulation, its accepted procedure, and its shared methodology. Escape may well be understood to be a critical posture adopted in response to the radical inadequacies and hostilities of life by disengaging from them through self-displacement. This posture requires courage, partly because it is an act of self-denial and renunciation of what one has had in terms of one’s social formation, and partly because it entails isolation and solitude. The inescapable loneliness presents itself as a consequence of the uncompromising alienation one has to endure, but it is a necessary condition of life and experience for the restoration of a limited degree of self-respect and self-esteem. “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” begins with the memorable poetic epigraph from W.B. Yeats:

    The soul remembering its loneliness Shudders in many cradles …
    … soldier, honest wife by turns,
    Cradle within cradle, and all in flight, and all Deformed because there is no deformity
    But saves us from a dream.9

    Empson composed the poem while the Faculty of Arts of Peking National University was taking temporary shelter in the Sacred Mountain, Nan-Yűeh (the Southern Mountain) in Hunan Province.10 The inaccuracies in the citation from Yeats, understandable due to the unavailability of library resources, are uncannily potent and suggestive for its unintended amplification of loneliness into a shared quality of life.

    The holy mountain where I live
    Has got some bearing on the Yeats.
    Sacred to Buddha, and a god
    Itself, it straddles the two fates…. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 27–30)

    To be sacred, it is necessary to accept isolation and loneliness. “The rule for a sacred mountain,” Empson explains, is that “it must be isolated so that people from all round can see the home town.”11 The dialectic of the two fates would be another example of Empsonian paradox: “the opposed ideals of personal immortality and of extinguishing yourself or merging into a world soul.”12 But these ideals are nearly impossible to realize in reality. One must “fly” in order to merge into a “world soul,” and one could only achieve eternity after one’s death. Empson accepted the challenge to understand this radical ambiguity of life, thus transforming the lived loneliness, in the figure of the Sacred Mountain, Nan-Yűeh, into an experience of the emotional and intellectual sublime in wartime China.

    Ambiguity and the Politics of Tact

    Empson’s critical reputation rests on the development of the concept of “ambiguity” in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Based on his observation of insufficiently studied textual behaviour, Empson defines ambiguity as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”13 Though primarily concerned with literary language, “ambiguity” is understood and used by Empson in an extended and slightly metaphorical sense. The term is, he explains, “descriptive,” and it suggests “the analytical mode of approach” (Ambiguity 1). The idea of ambiguity espouses no critical principle and proposes no theory about itself, but it presents an inescapable experience of poetry, language, and life as multifaceted, inconsistent, contradictory, and unstable. For “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” and of social and intellectual life with which Empson was concerned, despite his apparent formalistic tendency (Ambiguity 3). It couldn’t be farther from the truth to subscribe his critical work to the practice of the New Criticism, which Empson once described as a “self-blinding theory,” a “print-centred or tea-tasting outlook,” and an “ugly movement.”14

    Never meant to be just a work of literary criticism, therefore, the book is a shrewd and controlled development of the author’s worldview. The classification of ambiguity into seven types allows him to construct a critical nexus and to demonstrate inherent semantic indeterminacies in poetic expression as well as in human experience. There are “social ambiguities” that yield less readily to analysis but throb on the page (Ambiguity 2). As far as Empson is concerned, the need to recognize and accept ambiguity as the essential quality of language and poetry is the only intelligent point of departure for serious intellectual work. Literature is an immense complex of language, as life must necessarily be an experience of radical ambiguities. It would be only honest to recognize and deal with that complex and those ambiguities. Empson’s elaborations, meditations, reflections, amplifications, or seemingly wilful digressions, mingled with interpretative textual examples, are beyond the accepted scope of interpretative responsibilities and established protocols of academic criticism. This is, however, what Empson intended to do. Criticism must break free from the singularity of meaning; “the writer is at root the critic” and should be “at odds with his society, and with official doctrine.”15 Seven Types of Ambiguity is a critical record of the pain and joy in understanding what Empson calls “the logical disorder” inherent in language and life.16 Paradoxes and contradictions characterize life and literature; disorder is a necessary other to life’s order, logic, and end. What Empson seeks to understand is a whole range of possibilities that radical ambiguity would create for the expansion of analytical freedom and interpretive agency.

    Life is paradoxical, not just because it is punctuated with endless moments of contradiction and ambiguity, but because it will need to encounter life’s ultimate other: death. Criticism and poetry, the two most important literary genres of self-expression for Empson, offer a unique form in which to engage with life’s other: death, and the fear of death, which is constitutive of the knowledge and experience of life itself. At the time he was working on the book, Empson was an undergraduate student at Cambridge and had no real connection with China. Nevertheless, his employment of the Chinese sources in the book offers an interesting example of Empsonian ambiguity that would reveal the classical Chinese poetic view on life and death. Quoting Arthur Waley’s translation of the fifth century poet Tao Qian, Empson ruminates on the paradox of the two human scales of time measurement:

    Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
    Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.

    The observation of the ambiguity revealed in these two lines: the rapid receding and disappearing of a life-long span and the permanence of “a spot of time,”17 radiates into a set of reflections on the dialectic of life and death:

    The repose and self-command given by the use of the first are contrasted with the speed at which it shows the years to be passing from you, and therefore with the fear of death; the fever and multiplicity of life, as known by the use of the second, are contrasted with the calm of the external space of which it gives consciousness, with the absolute or extra-temporal value attached to the brief moments of self-knowledge with which it is concerned, and with a sense of security in that it makes death so far off. (Ambiguity 24)

    These musings triggered off by the two lines from Waley’s translation of the Chinese poem are not just a textual commentary; they are, as Roger Sale notes, a critique of “the whole dramatic idea of life” in Western literature that “[w]hen life must be seen from a peaceable and fatalistic point of view it is not dramatic.”18 Again, Empson misquotes the Waley translation of the poem: “fair morning” in the original is silently transformed into “spring morning.”19 But this would be another example of“intelligent and illuminating”20 misquotation that enables interpretation to foray into a moment of splendid optimism to overcome the fear of death:

    Contradictory as they stand, critics almost must conceive them in different ways; we are enabled, therefore, to meet the open skies with an answering stability of self-knowledge; to meet the brevity of human life with an ironical sense that it is morning and springtime, that there is a whole summer before winter, a whole day before night. (Ambiguity 24)

    Despite that unavoidable eventuality of human life, there is a whole summer we can, and should, enjoy before winter. Such insistence on the contradictions of life and their value for an understanding and interpretation of the mysteries of life and inevitability of death would be an effective method of self-protection, for “life involves,” says Empson, “maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.”21 Developed in terms of inescapable contradiction, opposition, and inconsistency, therefore, the conceptualization of ambiguity presents a distillation of Empson’s philosophy about the predicament of life, or rather life as predicament. Seven Types of Ambiguity, in documenting literary and historical responses to various types of ambiguity, may thus be appropriately considered to be a book about the history of human efforts to understand irresolvable contradictions in language and life.22 John Haffenden draws attention to a constellation of keywords in Empson’s writing that have shaped and defined his critical language: “clash, conflict, contradiction, subplot, outsider, scapegoat, resistance, hidden, secret, dissent, isolation.” These keywords begin to outline a critical history of digression, disruption, non-conformity, resistance, and “flight” which Empson narrates through a rich array of poetic examples in the book.

    In the Preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson spells out his intention in writing the book thus: “My attitude in writing it was that an honest man erected the ignoring of ‘tact’ into a point of honour” (Ambiguity vii). In this admission of the critical impulse to reject academic tact, Empson defines the book in terms of its intended challenge to some of the most commonly held critical positions in the academy. The book, therefore, is an attack on different types of authority: sanctified and fetishized literary meaning and academic masters. His refusal to accept tact in the practice of criticism is considered to be a distinctive mark of the Empsonian style of articulation.23 Empson could be difficult or even rude especially when “argufying,” a word he used to describe the mode of engagement he preferred,24 but, as Paul A. Bové reminds us, in discussion of Empson’s critical practice, there is the need to understand “what it was about Empson that made him intolerant and sometimes intolerable.”25

    The practice of tact is already a social irony, a situational paradox. Representing what is lost, missing, or fragmented, tact, Adorno says, “lives on only parody of forms,” and it is “an arbitrarily devised or recollected etiquette for the ignorant.” It is, he continues, a modern invention and a bourgeois norm:

    For tact, we know now, has its precise historical hour. It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid himself of absolutist compulsion. Free and solitary, he answers for himself, while the forms of hierarchical respect and consideration developed by absolutism, divested of their economic basis and their menacing power, are still just sufficiently present to make living together within privileged groups bearable.26

    As a modern social ethic, tact at once serves the bourgeois notion of individualism and destabilizes that individualism by its discrimination and exclusion of the different. In proposing a new social order in place of that of absolutism, it “mimicked traditional courtesy, manners – modes of honouring others – without formalism,”27 and as such it continued its regulatory authority in governing local relationships. In academic criticism, tact – what a communal majority considered and accepted to be good manners of speaking, writing, and thinking – quickly becomes a substitute for genuine human relationship, social or intellectual. “[A] certain kind of politeness,” notes Adorno, “gives [individuals] less the feeling of being addressed as human beings, than an inkling of their inhuman conditions.”28 But the abolition of tact would make “existence” “still more unbearable;” and the necessity of tact shows only “how impossible [existence] has become for people to co-exist under present conditions.”29

    Empson dislikes tact. Good manners are, he claims in Some Versions of Pastoral, “an absurd confession of human limitations.”30 In a brisk analytical leap, Empson makes a significant connection between tact and snobbery. Like tact, literary snobbery is an expression of the common and standard; in the context of social relations, it’s an attitude taken to hide human limitations. Empson cites Aldous Huxley who has written substantially about “snob interest” in literature and art. The common form of academic snobbery that Huxley singles out is the dilettantish exhibition of literary knowledge – “that delicious thing old Uncle Virgil said, you remember” – and “puzzle interest” as a branch of “snob interest.” Literary snobbery of this kind, Empson notes, is the product of the historical practice of “general knowledge” required for an educated person. One consequence of specialization of criticism is the rapid reduction of “the field of ‘general knowledge’ that old Uncle Virgil used to inhabit, because there are now more interesting things to know than anybody (or any poet) knows. There is no longer therefore a justification for snob treatment of them.”31 Huxley provides a catalogue of common literary snobberies, including “hostesses [hunting] literary lions” and “enriched button manufacturers … [collecting] pictures and first editions.”32 The pervasiveness of such literary snobbery, which is part of general social snobbery, replenishes the academic profession of literature with snobs. “It is the snobbery which renders it absolutely necessary for a large class of people to have read all the latest books…, to have seen the latest exhibitions and plays, heard the latest music.” In essence, “snobbery is a tribute paid by inferiority to superiority…. In the world of the spirit, snobbery is the tribute which philistinism pays to art, ignorance to learning, and stupidity to talent.”33

    It begins to make sense that Seven Types of Ambiguity takes pride in its contempt for the practice of tact in the academy. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the study of “Eng. Lit.,” especially at his alma mater, the University of Cambridge, was in effect the study and practice of Eng. Lit. Crit.34 Nothing would be more damaging to the vital force of criticism than its total institutionalization, which would entail not only expert knowledge, but also prejudice and snobbery, protected by what Empson has contemptuously called “the Lit. Crit. Establishment.”35 To reduce criticism to a routinized procedure or to ascribe it to an understanding of literary studies as a privileged site of professional exhibition and performance is to alienate it from its historical soil and social intention. Nothing is more important than the acceptance of criticism’s main task: to engage with what truly matters in literature and life. Looking back at his work in 1978, Empson could be reasonably satisfied with his practice of that understanding of the function of criticism. Since his undergraduate work on ambiguity, he had not “even felt a change in [his] line of interest” and “continued to try to handle the most important work that came to hand.”36

    It’s perhaps easier to write against tact and forms of vulgarity by setting a distance between oneself and the institutional establishment. In China, outside that establishment of “Eng. Lit.,” Empson seemed to have had a positional advantage in thinking and writing about the academic profession of literary criticism. He could easily ignore“the sound of contended munching from a field of academic critics, and the perpetual swish-swish of their white-wash brush.”37 This is probably why Empson would find it hard to adjust to the academic life of Britain after his extended stay in China. He noted the revival of Christianity in the academy to which he was to respond with Milton’s God.38 He would have to “attend to the opinion in Eng. Lit. Crit., if only because of its effects upon the students,”39 and he was unable to persuade his colleagues that critical work required no standardization of writing and thinking. He began his famous essay “Volpone” (1968) with these remarks:

    A good deal of standardization of opinion and critical method became necessary when Eng. Lit. became a large profession, and I think the results are often mistaken; but it is naturally hard to make my colleagues agree with any such judgment.40

    Academic parochialism, reinforced by the insistence on the unquestioned sense of disciplinary identity, adoption of received methodology, and compliance with professional tact must be rejected before criticism could become a meaningful exercise of mind and an act of public intervention. Beginning his university education as a student of mathematics, Empson developed a special interest in the impact of new scientific discoveries on literature and in “the world-picture of the scientists” he believed the poet had much to learn from. Disciplinary formations in the literary studies blinded many to the creativity of the scientific world. “I have always found the worldpicture of the scientists much more stimulating and useable than that of any ‘literary influence,’” Empson said to a Chinese colleague. In this admission of literature’s limitations, there was a quiet turning-away from the kind of academic politics that had reduced critical thinking to snobbery: “it seems to me trivial to say that scientific thought isn’t real thought; it only suggests a quarrel between different faculties in a university about which should get more money and better buildings.”41

    Empson’s intellectual idiosyncrasy constituted a professional anomaly. His critics have accused him of being unprofessional in his critical approach and mode of expression, in his carelessness in the use of sources and references. Yet, he “flew” to a place where such professionalism was not only practically impossible, but also quite absurd. Empson enjoyed himself in the convenience of finding regulations, critical schemas, or academic tact inconvenient. To quote from memory, for instance, was an organic act of writing, and “this idea of checking your quotations as an absolute duty,” writes Empson, “is fairly recent, and not always relevant.” He invokes the example of Hazlitt “who habitually quoted from memory, and commonly a bit wrong, but he was writing very good criticism.”42 There had been Coleridge before Hazlitt who had been criticized for non-identification of German sources and references he cited and used liberally.43 His defense of misquotation was manifestly not so much about intellectual integrity or honesty as about what position one should take in face of the disabling effect of professionalization and standardization in thinking and writing.

    Community of sympathy

    To ignore academic protocols would be Empson’s statement on the function of criticism as a committed form of engagement with ambiguities in literature and life. Physical immobility, like linguistic non-ambiguity, reflects a state of intellectual status quoism. Empson’s choice of escape was consistent with such forms of resistance as Charles Baudelaire’s dandyism and Victor Segalen’s exoticism. Harootunian notes the similarities between these apparently unrelated responses to a common aesthetic and poetic enemy. Dandyism, Baudelaire contends, is the “best element in human pride” and an effective weapon in “combat[ing] and destroy[ing] triviality” “in the struggle with a social conformism that threatened to install homogeneity everywhere that industrial capitalism has established its regime in the nineteenth century.” 44 And Segalen viewed exoticism “as the candidate best suited to protect contemporary life from the relentless banality wrought by the transformation of capitalism into mass-society imperialism and colonialism.”45 Two decades before Empson took up his teaching position in China, Segalen had lived in China for an extended period of time, from 1909 to 1914, and again in 1917. Empson and Segalen might have gone to China for different reasons, but for each the country offered the possibilities of self-renewal and liberation from the banalities of “an everyday life landlocked in repetitive routine.”46

    One may hope to live a “self-centred emotional life imposed by the detached intelligence””47 through a voluntary relinquishing of one’s formative society. Satire, cynicism, or political activism were not Empson’s measures of self-help and self-protection. He could not accept “the comforts of Christianity accepted by T.S. Eliot, or later by Auden and preferred “the special loneliness of the atheistic rationalist who places no particular trust even in the mind.”48 Virtue and intelligence, two qualities essential for honest and meaningful critical work, “are alike lonely,”49 rare, and unaccepted. Escape was both reaction and action: “‘Thank God I left’” (“Nan-Yűeh,” 60). Empson’s allusion to Peter Walsh in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a textual act of self-affirmation. Walsh departed for India, leaving behind his formative society with all its trivialities: “the snobbery, stuffiness and gossip of little England.”50

    I felt I had escaped from They
    Who sat on pedestals and fussed. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 21-22)

    Empson understood and sympathized with this feeling of relief. China for him, like British India for Peter Walsh, provided the opportunity to reject the metropolitan life. Empson’s political commitment was non-commitment, and his political involvement was the choice of disengagement. Once he had decided to leave, his emotional relief was palpable. Appropriately about flight, escape, courage, and commitment, “The Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” records the joy derived from the sense of liberation and freedom in its “relaxed and conversational phrases of his later style” and in its “unhurried comment on his thoughts and experiences in wartime China.”51

    Before he decided to work and live in China, Empson knew only that he “should want to get away from the English.”52 I. A. Richards, who had already been in China since the late 1920s, inspired Empson. In January 1931, Empson wrote to Richards: “I want to travel, and, as you see, it is now fixed in my mind that I want to go to China.”53 In the 1930s, serious graduates of literature considered it a rewarding job to teach English, and an attractive alternative to unimaginative office work, not just because “jobs are rare,” but because teaching provided the young minds the possibilities of continuing to be “Clever young men of liberal opinions.”54

    What was awaiting Empson in China in the autumn of 1937, however, was a massive evacuation of the universities from Beijing to the country’s inland for shelter from Japanese brutalities. He joined the faculty of Peking National University in Changsha, Hunan Province in central China, which, together with Tsinghua and Nankai Universities, had just formed the wartime Temporary University, which would move to Kunming, Yunnan Province and be renamed the National Southwest Associated Universities, abbreviated in Chinese as Lianda. The nine-year history of Lianda spanned the entire period of the Resistance War (1937–1945). In Hunan, the Faculty of Arts of the Temporary University was housed in a missionary school on the Nan-Yűeh Mountain and stayed there for one semester from November 1937 to February 1938. Empson had escaped England only to run again from the immediate dangers of the war in China.

    The journey from Changsha to Kunming was a heroic odyssey. In his Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution, John Israel wrote: “The official overland distance …was 1,033.7 miles (1,663.6 kilometers), of which more than 800 miles were covered on foot, an average in excess of twenty miles a day for forty days of walking. Much of the trek was over rugged terrain in bad weather.”55 It was an epic journey many Lianda faculty members and students remembered, perhaps not without nostalgia, as an enduring modern academic romance. Those who participated in the long march were acutely aware of its historical significance, and started to circulate their memoirs as soon as the journey was completed.56 Empson, too, realized the historical significance of this remarkable experience and produced a sizeable amount of writings about it. “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” is a poetic memoir of his reflections on life and literature, politics and war, fear and loneliness, courage and heroism during his time of teaching in China. His short essay “Chinese Bandits” (1938-39) records the danger, and excitement, in his encountering with the bandits who remained active and operative in the mountainous recesses outside Mengzi, Kunming.57 “A Chinese University” (1940) pays tribute to Lianda as a symbol of courage, confidence, and optimism in enduring and confronting the brutality and barbarism of Japanese aggression. This experience of teaching in China would become the centerpiece of his inaugural speech “Teaching English in the Far East” at the University of Sheffield.58

    In the midst of the war, with unstable student populations, limited supplies of classroom materials, and Japanese air raids, academic work could not remain normal; teaching and learning had to be practiced differently. Teachers had to invent syllabus materials as they went along; sometimes they taught classes without textbooks. But teaching never stopped: “The lectures went on sturdily from memory.”59 Some of Empson’s Chinese colleagues found it hard to teach from memory, but Empson enjoyed it. legendary and has become part of the history of Lianda:

    The abandoned libraries entomb
    What all the lectures still go through,
    And men get curiously non-plussed
    Searching the memory for a clue.
    ……
    Remembering prose is quite a trouble
    His phenomenal memory was
    But of Mrs. Woolf one tatter
    Many years have failed to smother.
    As a piece of classroom patter
    It would not repay me double.
    Empire-builder reads the yatter
    In one monthly, then another. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 43 – 59)

    Empson taught English literature and later a course on modern English poetry at Lianda. Teaching was meaningful and rewarding and became part of life:

    The proper Pegasi to groom
    Are those your mind is willing to. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 49–50).

    Poetry must be experimented and experienced, and it began to develop an organic link with the realities of life: “We teach a poem as it grew” (“Nan-Yűeh,” 52). The young minds, too, grew with the growth of poetry. Empson’s influence on his Chinese students was immense, especially on those young poetic minds who were to become the first generation of modernist poets in China, including, notably, Mu Dan (1918–1977).60 Many of them were to recall emotionally those exciting and happy days with their poet-teacher Empson at Lianda.61

    Empson was admired by his Chinese students as an “abstract” and “modernist” poet, but he had a special understanding of himself as a poet.62 Poetry is not life’s decoration, nor is it a means of intellectual narcissism and self-indulgence; it is a procedure through which to develop self-knowledge and to strengthen and solidify emotional life.63 Poetry is insincere unless it’s capable of resolving the conflicts in the poet and thus preventing him or her from sinking into total despair and irremediable insanity.64 Poetry, in other words, becomes a laboratory for the development of self-knowledge, and like Empson’s critical writing, it should ideally capture, understand, and interpret life’s ambiguities. Some of his best poems are “complicated in the way that life really is.”65 In face of the immense complexities and radical ambiguities of life, especially when poetry proves inadequate for the lived feelings of loneliness, waste, and loss during the time of war, one could only become poetic by stopping writing poetry. Starting to see other possibilities that life might offer, Empson was keen on exploring his intellectual life in different spheres of experience. In a letter to I. A. Richards in early 1933, Empson wrote: “I am stopping trying to do literary work; it seems too hollow for some reason.”66 His poem “Let It Go” (1949) is “about stopping writing poetry”:

    It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
    The more things happen to you the more you can’t
    Tell or remember even what they were.

    The contradictions cover such a range.
    The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
    You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.67

    If this is partly about his decision to write no more poetry, we must understand that the dangers of the “madhouse and the whole thing there” lie in the direction of poetry, and writing more poetry might lead to things going “so far aslant.”68

    The mode of teaching and the physical environment on Nan-Yűeh suited Empson’s temperament. Teaching at Lianda at the time of war could not possibly be a model of professionalized and specialized literary studies. In a community of scholars and students like Lianda, tact would be out of place, and teaching could not be the performance of a professional task, a repetition of “[t]hat pernicious hubble-bubble,” or “classroom patter” which dominated, and continues to dominate, the academic platform of “Eng. Lit.” There would be no condition to standardize teaching at Lianda; teaching was literally fieldwork carried out away from the institutionalized space of academy, on the mountains and later in the rural area of Kunming. It was a profoundly personal experience.

    Empson reported that his time at Lianda was a period of remarkable intellectual fecundity, productivity, and creativity, despite, or rather because of, the difficult circumstances. The perils of war and shortage of daily supplies, for example, imposed on Empson and his colleagues an extraordinary sense of responsibility, and at the same time helped to create a community of sympathy that would render the profession of teaching and practice of literature purposeful and rewarding. The refugee universities, Empson says, “really are universities,” and Lianda was “not a bad place for an inquisitive mind to live.”69 During this period of exile, Empson was working with an exceptional array of minds engaged in writing some of their most important works. On Nan-Yűeh, Empson began The Structure of Complex Words; Jin Yűe Lin completed his seminal book On the Tao; Tang Yongtong drafted the first part of the History of Chinese Buddhism; and Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-Lan) finished Neo-Confucianism (Xin lixue).70 “Those few months at Nan-Yűeh,” recalls Feng, “were the most intellectual. We devoted all of our daytime to writing, except the time for teaching and eating. … We might seem to be detached from the national calamity and have hidden in our ivory tower. But this is so only because we didn’t know how to express and let out our anger and grief, and we had to concentrate on our work.”71 Many of Empson’s colleagues were educated in Europe and the US and returned to serve, defend, or reform their country. Just as they were “intellectually cosmopolitans and politically nationalists,” they, like Empson, were perhaps all “elitists.”72 “I felt I was in very good company,” Empson recalls.73 Empson’s life with the refugee universities, first on Nan-Yűeh and then in Mengzi, Kunming was characterized by confidence, optimism, and gaiety, and these sentiments, vividly manifest in “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh,” define a remarkable community of intellectual sympathy formed and consolidated by a shared sense of commitment, a community that was bound by “a noble heritage and common mandate”:74

    The souls aren’t lonely now; this room
    Beds four and as I write holds two. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 41-2)

    Isolated, aloof, and sacred, Nan-Yűeh was the sanctuary of intellectual integrity and a symbol of the intellectual sublime. Empson “would always think of the mountain as his ideal of the academic community.”75 Lianda was where he ended his exile.

    If “the idea of solidarity is potentially the real basis of a society” in times of peace,76 the idea of community must be even more firmly grounded in the development of solidarity in times of war. Empson endured the hardships of the journey across the rough terrains with Lianda and survived the perils of war. His students and colleagues respected him because of his unwavering dedication to his work in China and his solidarity with colleagues and students in defiance of aggression and oppression. This is perhaps where Empson differed from his mentor Richards. The difference between them lies in their practice of criticism and in their understanding of intellectual commitment and communal solidarity at the time of war and hardship. While China, for Empson, was a place of exile and serious intellectual work, it was, for Richards, a site of linguistic experiment with Basic English. Empson considered Richards’s departure for the U.S. at the outbreak of the war as an act of betrayal, and he would not forgive Richards for deserting not only his Chinese friends but also his project of Basic English in China, which he had promoted with evangelical zeal before the Sino-Japanese war. “You had let the Chinese down,” he told Richards bluntly.77 Empson was especially contemptuous of those orientalist Westerners, those “beastly little Lovers of the Far East,” who thought it “dignified to be in China,” but “have slunk off leaving only man namely me” in China.78

    “Chinese Ballad”: Love and Continuity

    In 1952 when he was about to leave China for his position at the University of Sheffield, Empson published his last poetic work “Chinese Ballad.” In his Inaugural speech at Sheffield, Empson used his experience of teaching in wartime China in the 1930s to outline his understanding of intellectual work and teaching. His experience of China contributed substantially to his understanding of the use and value of literature and of the role of the critical intellectual. “Chinese Ballad” is a poetic fragment extracted from a long revolutionary narrative poem by the Communist poet Li Ji (Li Chi), Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang (Hsiang- Hsiang) (1946). Empson made an effort to be close to the original in translating the poem into English. He says: “The translation is word for word, so far as I can know from simply being given the meanings of the characters.”79 Of course, the “translation” of the Chinese poem had to be in the tradition of Ezra Pound – Empson had little Chinese.

    The poem depicts the pathos of two lovers who must part each other by the imperatives of the revolutionary task. Setting off to the frontline fighting the Japanese, Wang Gui encounters a rare moment of tender love and restrained emotional torrent with his lover Hsiang-Hsiang, who could not imagine herself being separate from her soldier-lover. Standing by the stream in the valley, where they must bid final farewell to each other, Hsiang-Hsiang points at the “deep” and “thick” mud beneath their feet and beseeches Wang Gui to perform an extraordinary symbolic act of human union:

    Make me two models out of this,
    That clutches as it yearns.

    Make one of me and one of you,
    And both shall be alive.
    Were there no magic in the dolls
    The children could not thrive.

    When you have made them smash them back:
    They yet shall live again.
    Again make dolls of you and me
    But mix them grain by grain.

    So your flesh shall be part of mine
    And part of mine be yours.
    Brother and sister we shall be
    Whose unity endures.80

    The poem records the emotional turbulence characterizing love in the time of war and the poignancy of the need for self-sacrifice. What is moving about the poem is its “respect for courage and for decision,”81 its understanding of the need to accept the conditions of the present, and its optimistic longing for an imagined future of reunion. The poem rehearses the Empsonian question about life as an experience of possibilities and impossibilities. At the heart of the poem lies the symbol of a more radical paradox of the desire for physical inseparability and the pathos that follows the realization of its impossibility. In the process of creating the doll-couple, Hsiang-Hsiang performs a symbolic marriage and thereby expresses her unreserved love for her soldier-lover, which is disrupted by the painful realization of the need to part. The poem’s internal rhymes and repetitions create the effect that “the lines seem to circle around themselves in a way that eerily suggests their futility.”82 The utopian quality of human love is vividly figured in the fusion of the dolls, an image which reminds one of what Roland Barthes calls “engulfment” as love’s necessary illusion: “we die together: an open death, by dilution into the either, a closed death of the shared grave.”83

    The final stanza of the poem crystallizes Hsiang-Hsiang’s difficulties to come to terms with the necessity of her lover’s departure for the frontline:

    Always the sister doll will cry,
    Made in these careful ways,
    Cry on and on, Come back to me,
    Come back, in a few days.

    These lines are not in the original; they are Empson’s addition.84 With this poetic coda, the “fullness of the poem’s respect for what it contemplates,” says Christopher Ricks, “is achieved because the subject so fully reconciles so much in Empson’s thinking and feeling.”85

    As much attracted to the poem’s celebration of love, Empson was intrigued by its balladic form, which, he notes, “had been used in classical style.”86 The poetic fragment is intertextually derived from a poem by the thirteenth-century woman poet Guan Daosheng (1262–1319), who made this poetic effort to hold back her husband’s departing passion. Li Ji’s ballad successfully “transposed or restored” the classical theme “into popular style.”87 The original is richly suggestive of a total physical union and a willingness to renounce the self for the achievement of that union. In Li Ji’s appropriation of the classical poem, the implied sexuality of love is transformed, enlarged, and elevated into a political form of human relationship in the revolutionary class of peasant-soldiers, and a shared idealism, as embodied by the Chinese Communist Party’s wartime capital Yan’an, which looms large in the background of Li Ji’s poetic narrative.

    It’s difficult to ascertain whether Empson was fully aware of the political implications of the poem, and I’m not aware of any personal relationship between Li Ji and Empson. But it was perhaps unnecessary for him to know Li Ji or that much about the poem. If there is anything in common between them, it is this understanding of literature as organically connected with life and reality. Empson’s sympathy with the Chinese revolution is well known. His decision to stay on teaching in Peking after the Communist victory in 1949 was evidence of his solidarity with this new nation. On October 1, 1949, Empson witnessed the founding of the PRC in Peking. He was moved by the spectacle of the military parade and civilian processions, which he described as a symbolic act of people’s will:

    I did not expect to be more than bored, but found myself extremely moved almost at once. You may believe that what is being celebrated will turn out a delusion, but history is full of gloomy afterthoughts. Here you have celebrated victory of revolt against tyrants, supported by the countryside alone, practically their bare hands, against a government drawing on the full terrors of modern equipment with medieval or fascist police methods into the bargain. If anything in history is impressive you are bound to feel that is.88

    Unlike his wife Hetta, who accompanied him throughout the period of his appointment at Peking, Empson was not formally a member of the British Communist Party. His leftist political sympathy was not just a political ideology, but also a critical and aesthetic response to the realities in China that fell far short of the minimum standard of human decency. Prior to his translation of “Chinese Ballad,” his sympathy with the Chinese revolution had already shown itself in his special interest in Chinese revolutionary art.

    In late 1948, Empson went to see the performance of the “Yellow River Cantata” on the campus of Peking University. The Cantata, composed by the French-educated artist Xian Xinghai who traveled to Yan’an in 1938, the same year as Li Ji did, was thematically related to Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang. Its performance at the Square of Democracy of the University was “a bold step,” because, Empson explains, it “was forbidden in Chiang Kai- shek’s Peking, and could only happen within the barbed wire”:

    [The Cantata] is about guerilla resistance to the Japanese in North China, using a lot of indigenous folk-tunes, and using Western instruments. The peasant singing is faintly like Russian singing, and very unlike the strained voice of the Chinese ruling- class music, popular in the cities through opera. Basing the revolution on the peasants thus gave a fair case for letting in European techniques; but even so the Cantata … always keeps voice and orchestra separate…. I thought it hauntingly beautiful, all the more in the late dusk in the great square with a tense audience waiting for the liberation of the city.89

    Empson’s sympathy with the CCP’s revolutionary literature is both political and aesthetic. He was drawn to the egalitarian harmony and organic love in “Chinese Ballad”; for the poem, or the translation of it, was “an assurance that though life may be essentially inadequate to the human spirit, the human spirit is essentially adequate to life.”90 The poem’s “simple dignity, clear-sighted and touching,” and its “particular kind of conclusive triumph,” which is realized in love, serve as a suitable poetic conclusion to Empson’s reflections on ambiguity as the condition of life.91

    From his first book on ambiguity to his last poetic composition “Chinese Ballad,” there seems to be a consistent pattern in Empson’s thinking and writing. The concept of ambiguity recognizes the potentialities of diversity and multiplicity in language and the value of literature as knowledge of possibilities and impossibilities in life, and in practice, it makes possible a democratic form of criticism in analysis and interpretation. Empson’s decision to teach in China was a choice of disengagement from things and people he had decided not to engage at home. Escape is not exactly a struggle against a specific government policy, a particular ideology, a political authority, or even an identifiable external object, but neither is it non- action, passivity, or non-resistance. One has to be outside one’s formative society in order to be a critic of it. Empson’s “Sacred Mountain,” intended to be a substitute for his formative society, may well be an idealized community in which he was able to imagine a new type of human relationship and “interpersonal fusion in love”92 against alienation, pessimism, and despair.

    1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 – 1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 304. Back to essay

    2.  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), vol. i, 368, 370. Back to essay

    3. William Empson, “Volpone,” in Essays on Renaissance Literature, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), v. 2, 72. Back to essay

    4. Biographical and critical studies of Empson are copious. John Haffenden’s William Empson: Among the Mandarins and William Empson: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) are indispensable biographical studies of Empson. Critical studies which have particularly helped me in thinking about the significance of Empson’s work in China include: Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), Paul H. Frye, William Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991), Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Athlone Press, 1978). Critical Essays on William Empson, edited by John Constable (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1993), is a useful collection of critical essays and reviews of Empson’s works. Back to essay

    5. This is the title of a poem by Empson published in 1936: “Courage Means Running,” collected in William Empson, The Complete Poems, edited with Introduction and Notes by John Haffenden (London: Penguin Press, 2000). Back to essay

    6. William Empson, “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” in The Complete Poems, 91. Hereafter this work is cited parenthetically as “Nan‐ Yűeh.” Back to essay

    7.  Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐ Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 380. Back to essay

    8.  William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986), 114‐5. Back to essay

    9.  W. B. Yeats’s “The Phase of the Moon” reads:

    The soul remembering its loneliness
    Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,
    ….
    Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,

    Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all
    Deformed, because there is no deformity
    But saves us from a dream. (88‐102)

    W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1983), 165‐6. Back to essay

    10.  Empson notes:

    Nan‐yueh is a sacred mountain about seventy miles southwest of Changsha; the Arts Departments of the Combined Universities were housed on it for a term in 1937, and then we moved further back to Yunnan.
    Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 379. 

    Back to essay

    11.  John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 456. Back to essay

    12.  Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 379. Back to essay

    13.  William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 1; hereafter this work is cited parenthetically as Ambiguity. Back to essay

    14.  William Empson, Letter to Philip Hobsbaum, 2 August 1969, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 477, 481, 480. For Empson, the acceptance of intention is the beginning of responsible criticism, and “the effects of renouncing it … produces dirty nonsense all the time, with a sort of tireless unconscious inventiveness for new kinds of nonsense.” Empson, Letter to Philip Hobsbaum, 2 August 1969, Selected Letters of William Empson, 477. Back to essay

    15.  Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 5. Back to essay

    16.  The seven types of ambiguity, Empson explains, are “intended as stages of advancing logical disorder” (Ambiguity 48). For a reading of the ambiguity of this formulation, see Paul H. Fry, Chapter 3, “Advancing Logical Disorder: Empson on Method,” William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991). Back to essay

    17. William Wordsworth, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, OUP, 1970), xi:258, 213. Back to essay

    18. Roger Sale, Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J.R.R Tolkien (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973), 122. Back to essay

    19. The poem by Tao Qian, in the Waley translation, is as follows:

    Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
    Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.
    I will clothe myself in spring‐clothing
    And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
    By the mountain‐stream a mist hovers,
    Hovers a moment, then scatters.
    There comes a wind blowing from the south
    That brushes the fields of new corn.

    Tao Qian (372‐427), “New Corn.”
    A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), 116. Back to essay

    20. These are Empson’s words for a misprint that occurred in the eleventh edition of Philip Sidney’s “You Gote‐heard Gods” that the original “morning” is replaced with “mourning”:

    At whose approach the sun rose in the evening,
    Who where she went bore in her forehead mourning,
    Is gone, is gone, from these our spoiled forests,
    Turning to deserts our best pastor’d mountains.

    See Seven Types of Ambiguity, 38. Back to essay

    21.  Empson, Note to “Bacchus,” The Complete Poems, 290. Back to essay

    22.  See Sale, Modern Heroism, 117. Back to essay

    23.  Matthew Creasy, “Empson’s Tact,” in Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Clarendon). Back to essay

    24. Empson explains his use of the word thus: “Argufying is the kind of arguing we do in ordinary life, usually to get our own way; I do not mean nagging by it, but just a not especially dignified sort of arguing. This has always been one of the things people enjoy in poems; and it can be found in every period of English literature.” See William Empson, “Argufying in Poetry,” in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffendon (London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), 167. Back to essay

    25.  Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2008), 118. Back to essay

    26.  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 36. Back to essay

    27.  J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 64. Back to essay

    28.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, 37. Back to essay

    29.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, 37. Back to essay

    30.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 293. Back to essay

    31.  Empson, “Note on Notes”, Empson, The Complete Poems, 113. Back to essay

    32.  Aldous Huxley, “Snobs,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 7 (2007), 88. Back to essay

    33.  Aldous Huxley, “Snobs,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 7(2007), 87. Back to essay

    34.  For critical reflections on the academic genealogy of Cambridge English, see Raymond Williams, “Cambridge English, Past and Present” and “Crisis in English Studies,” in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1991). Back to essay

    35. William Empson, “Postscript” to Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: The Athlone Press, 1978), 206. Back to essay

    36. Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205. Back to essay

    37.  Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205. Back to essay

    38.  Empson explains in the book how his experience of teaching at government universities in the Far East made it harder for him to adjust to the revival of Christianity in the British academy: “Having had ten years teaching in Japan and China, and having been interested only in propaganda during the war, halfway through them, I am still rather ill‐adjusted to the change of atmosphere. Lecturing at the Government universities in the Far East, which means firmly non‐missionary ones, was not likely to prepare me for it; I gathered that those of my students who became interested in Paradise Lost, though too polite to express their opinion to me quite directly, thought ‘Well, if they worship such a monstrously wicked God as all that, no wonder that they themselves are so monstrously wicked as we have traditionally found them.’” Empson, Milton’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 10. Back to essay

    39.  Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205 – 6. Back to essay

    40.  Empson, “Volpone,” Essays on Renaissance Literature, v. 2, 66. Back to essay

    41.  Empson, Letter to Chien Hsueh‐hsi, 7 September 1947, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 151. Back to essay

    42. See John Constable, “Preface,” Critical Essays on William Empson, ed. John Constable (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 4. Back to essay

    43. Coleridge considered plagiarism to be “intentional imitation.” Simple similarities between authors should not be held as proof of plagiarism, and true plagiarism did not typically show itself in textual parallelism, but was often covered by textual dissimilitude. Referring to an unidentified volume of poetry “completely made up of gross plagiarisms from Akenside, Thomson, Bowles, Southey, and Lyrical Ballads,” Coleridge noted a range of “artifices” the poet employed to “disguise the theft, – transpositions, dilutions, substitutions of synonyms, etc. etc. – and yet not the least resemblance to any one of the poets whom he pillaged.” An “intentional plagiarist,” wrote Coleridge, “would have translated, not transcribed.” What was important for Coleridge was whether or not the mind in the text was (or intended to be) original. Coleridge called for the need to judge by “the original spirit.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Letter on Plagiarism (December 15, 1811), in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London: Dent, 1960), vol. 2, 184 – 191. Back to essay

    44. Harry Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” Foreword to Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002), vii. Back to essay

    45.  Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” vii. Back to essay

    46.  Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” viii. Back to essay

    47.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 273. Back to essay

    48.  Willis, William Empson (New York and London: Columbia University press, 1969), 44. Back to essay

    49.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 293. Back to essay

    50.  Haffenden, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐ Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 388.  Back to essay

    51.  Willis, William Empson, 44. Back to essay

    52.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards [early December 1929], Selected Letters of William Empson, 13. Back to essay

    53.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards, 29th January [? 1930], Selected Letters of William Empson,16. The letter is inaccurately dated. In the letter Empson reported to Richards that he had met Wu Mi, Dean of Tsinghua University, and expressed to him his interesting in teaching in China. Wu Mi recorded the meeting in his diary on January 25 1931. Empson’s letter should be dated 29th January 1931. See Wu Mi, Wu Mi riji (Wu Mi’s diaries), vol. 5 (1930 – 1933), ed. Wu Xuezhao (Beijing: Joint Publications, 1998), 176. Back to essay

    54. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden, Collected Poems, 99. Neal Wood notes that a whole group of graduates joined the teaching profession in the 1930s: “Some of the most promising university graduates turned to teaching and tutoring for want of better opportunity. W.H. Auden, Arthur Calder‐Marshall, G. Day Lewis, Michael Redgrave, Edward Upward, and Christopher Isherwood are but a few. Positions in foreign colleges were taken by Rex Warner, Malcom Muggeridge, Jullian Bell, William Empson, and William Plomer.” Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia UP, 1959), 38. Back to essay

    55.  John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford: SUP, 1998), 56 ‐7. Back to essay

    56.  Qian Nengxin, for example, published in 1939 his Xinan sanqianwubai li (Three thousand and five hundred lis through south‐west China) with the Commercial Press. Recently, there has been a spate of publications about Lianda in China, including memoirs, historical and academic studies, and archival records. Back to essay

    57. Mengzi was a rural county not yet touched by the advance of modernity, a frontier region that, though providing shelter from the cruelty and brutality of the war, had its pre‐modern dangers and risks. “Even by day, it was risky to walk in the countryside, for widespread possession of arms reflected the prevalence of banditry in a frontier region. The young English poet William Empson … was robbed several times during rural strolls. The library in the customs compound was open after dark, but every hour a bell rang to alert students who had finished their studies that an armed escort was ready to accompany them back to their dormitories.” Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution, 67. Back to essay

    58. Empson’s memoirs of teaching in wartime China are collected in his The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Back to essay

    59.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” in The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 190. Back to essay

    60.  Mu Dan emerged as a leading modernist poet in the 1940s. He entered the Department of Foreign Languages, Tsinghua University in 1935 and after the outbreak of the Sino‐Japanese war, travelled to Hunan and Kunming with Lianda. In the course on modern English poetry, Mu Dan read with Empson contemporary Anglo‐American poets including some of Empson’s friends such as T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Mu Dan was profoundly influenced by Auden, who had just been to China to report on the war. In 1942, Mu Dan joined the China Expeditionary Force fighting the Japanese in the mountainous terrain between Berman and Yunnan. Some of his best known poems such as “The Demon of the Forest” (1945) record the wrenching grief, pain, despair, and anguish in response to the unbelievable brutalities of war he had experienced. He left China for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1948. Back to essay

    61. Wang Zuoliang, who studied with Empson at Lianda in those two “mobile years,” writes: Empson “traveled with the Universities, and us, by way of Hong Kong and Hanoi, to Mengzi and finally to Kunming. As if cheered up by the city’s beauty and its breezes, he mounted a course on Modern English Poetry. What was unique about this course was that the teacher himself was a modern English poet. …And it was also a course taught by a literary critic famous for his quick and agile mind. … The fact that we had a modernist poet teach us was more attractive than any readings we did. As a result, a new literary trend was being formed among his students and his students’ students.” Wang Zuoliang, “Remembering Empson,” Waiguo wenxue (Foreign literature), no 1, 1980, 3. See also Zhao Ruihong’s essay: “Remembering the Modernist English Poet Mr. Empson,” in Zhao Ruihong, Linuan xiange yi jiuyou (Fragments about old friends in the time of war) (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2000), 25‐45. Back to essay

    62. Empson’s two poetic collections Poems (1935) and The Gathering Storm (1940) were published symmetrically before and after his first stint of teaching in China between 1937 and 38. “The first volume … was mainly ‘love poems about boy being too afraid of girl to tell her anything,’ whereas the second…. was more political, written in the midst of a war which he could see was going to become global.” See Paul Dean, “The Critic as Poet: Empson’s Contradictions,” The New Criterion, October 2001, 25. Back to essay

    63. Empson, “A London Letter,” Poetry 49 (January 1937), quoted in Haffenden, “Introduction” to The Complete Poems, xi. Back to essay

    64.  See Adam Phillips, “No Reason for Not Asking,” London Review of Books, 28:15 (Aug. 26, 2006). Back to essay

    65.  See Haffenden, Introduction to The Complete Poems, xxxix. Back to essay

    66.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards, February 18, 1933, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 55. Back to essay

    67.  Empson, The Complete Poems, 99. Back to essay

    68.  See Ian Tromp, “A Poet Duly Noted,” The Nation, December 31 2001, 37. Back to essay

    69.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 191. Back to essay

    70.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 190. Back to essay

    71.  Fong Youlan, “Huailian Jin Yuelin xiansheng” (Remembering Mr. Jin Yuelin), Lianda jiaoshou (Lianda’s Professors) (Beijing: New Star Press, 2010), 91. Back to essay

    72.  Israel, Lianda, 84. Back to essay

    73.  Empson, Note to The Complete Poems, 380. One of his roommates was the U.S. educated flamboyant George Ye who proposed Empson’s elegant Chinese name 燕卜荪. See Fu Guoyong (傅国涌), Ye Gongchao zhuan (Ye Gongchao: a biography) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2004). Back to essay

    74.  Israel, Lianda, 2. Back to essay

    75.  Haffenden, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 382. Back to essay

    76.  Williams, Culture and Society, 318. Back to essay

    77.  Quoted in Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 504. Back to essay

    78.  See Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 502. Back to essay

    79.  Empson, Note to “Chinese Ballad,” The Complete Poems, 400. Back to essay

    80.  Empson, “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 103. Back to essay

    81.  Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 206 – 7. Back to essay

    82. Lewin, Review of The Complete Poems of William Empson, ANQ, 15:4 (Fall 2002), 49. Back to essay

    83.  Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, 1990), 11. Back to essay

    84.  Empson said: “I added the bit about children, but I understand that is only like working a footnote into the text, because the term specifically means dolls for children.” Note to “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 400. Back to essay

    85. Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 207. Back to essay

    86.  Empson’s note to the poem. Back to essay

    87.  Empson, Note to “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 400. The original poem in Chinese reads:

    《我侬词》元·管道
    昇你侬我侬,忒煞情多。
    情多处,热如火。
    把一块泥,捻一个你,塑一个我
    将咱两个,一齐打破,用水调和。
    再捻一个你,再塑一个我。
    我泥中有你,你泥中有我。
    与你生同一个衾,死同一个椁。

    The Kungfu film star Bruce Lee had a rendering of the poem in English under the title “Parting”:

    Who knows when meeting shall ever be.
    It might be for years or
    It might be forever.

    Let us then take a lump of clay,
    Wet it, pat it,
    And make an image of you
    And an image of me.
    Then smash them, crash them,
    And, with a little water,
    Knead them together.

    And out of the clay we’ll remake
    An image of you, and an image of me.
    Thus in my clay,
    there’s a little of you,
    And in your clay,
    there’s a little of me.

    And nothing will ever set us apart.
    Living, we’ll be forever in each other’s heart,
    And dead, we’ll be buried together.

    Bruce Lee, Artist of Life, ed. John Little (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001), 116. Back to essay

    88. Empson, “Red on Red: William Empson Witness the Inauguration of the People’s Republic of China,” London Review of Books, 30th September 1999. Back to essay

    89. Empson, “Pei‐Ta before the Siege,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 198. Back to essay

    90.  Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, 207. Back to essay

    91. Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” 206 – 7. Back to essay

    92.  Erich Fromm defines love as “interpersonal fusion.” See his The Art of Loving (Penguin Classics, 2000), 17. Back to essay

  • Born in Translation: "China" in the Making of "Zhongguo"

    Born in Translation: “China” in the Making of “Zhongguo”

    An essay by Arif Dirlik

    The unwillingness to confront tough questions about history and heritage in China cuts into the core of cultural identity”  Han Song
    _

     The_Great_Wall_of_China_at_JinshanlingFrom the perspective of nationalist historiography and Orientalist mystification alike, it might seem objectionable if not shocking to suggest that China/Zhongguo as we know it today owes not only its name but its self-identification to “the Western” notion of “China.” For good historical reasons, as each has informed the other, the development of China/Zhongguo appears in these perspectives as a sui generis process from mythical origins to contemporary realization. Nationalist historians see the PRC’s developmental success as proof of a cultural exceptionalism with its roots in the distant past. The perception derives confirmation from and in turn re-affirms Orientalist discourses that long have upheld the cultural exceptionality of the so-called “Middle Kingdom.”

    The problematic relationship of China/Zhongguo to its imperial and even more distant pasts is most eloquently evident, however, in the ongoing efforts of nationalist historians in the People’s Republic of China(PRC) to reconnect the present to a past from which it has been driven apart by more than a century of revolutionary transformation. That transformation began in the last years of the Qing Dynasty(1644-1911), when late Qing thinkers settled on an ancient term, Zhongguo, as an appropriate name for the nation-form to supplant the Empire that had run its course. The renaming was directly inspired by the “Western” idea of “China,” that called for radical re-signification of the idea of Zhongguo, the political and cultural space it presupposed, and the identification it demanded of its constituencies. Crucial to its realization was the re-imagination of the past and the present’s relationship to it.

    I will discuss briefly below why late Qing intellectuals felt it necessary to rename the country, the inspiration they drew upon, and the spatial and temporal presuppositions of the new idea of China/Zhongguo. Their reasoning reveals the modern origins of historical claims that nationalist historiography has endowed with timeless longevity. I will conclude with some thoughts on the implications of such a deconstructive reading for raising questions about the political assumptions justified by the historical claims of China/ Zhongguo—especially a resurgent Sino-centrism that has been nourished by the economic and political success of the so-called “China Model.” This Sino-centrism feeds cultural parochialism, as well as spatial claims that are imperial if only because they call upon imperial precedents for their justification. 1

    Naming China/Zhongguo

    My concern with the question of naming began with an increasing sense of discomfort I have felt for some time now with the words “China” and “Chinese” that not only define a field of study, but are also commonplaces of everyday language of communication. The fundamental question these terms throw up is: if, as we well know, the region has been the site for ongoing conflicts over power and control between peoples of different origins, and varied over time in geographical scope and demographic composition, which also left their mark on the many differences within, what does it mean to speak of China(or Zhongguo) or Chinese(Zhongguo ren or huaren), or write the history of the region as “Chinese” history (Zhongguo lishi)?

    The discomfort is not idiosyncratic. These terms and the translingual exchanges in their signification have been the subject of considerable scholarly scrutiny in recent years. 2 “China,” a term of obscure origins traced to ancient Persian and Sanskrit sources, since the 16th century has been the most widely used name for the region among foreigners, due possibly to the pervasive influence of the Jesuits who “manufactured” “China” as they did much else about it. 3 The term refers variously to the region(geography), the state ruling the region(politics), and the civilization occupying it(society and culture), which in their bundling abolish the spatial, temporal and social complexity of the region. Similarly, “Chinese” as either noun or predicate suggests demographic and cultural homogeneity among the inhabitants of the region, their politics, society, language, culture and religion. It refers sometimes to all who dwell in the region or hail from it, and at other times to a particular ethnic group, as in “Chinese” and “Tibetans,” both of whom are technically parts of one nation called “China” and, therefore, “Chinese” in a political sense. The term is identified tacitly in most usage with the majority Han, who themselves are homogenized in the process in the erasure of significant intra-Han local differences that have all the marks of ethnic difference. 4 Homogenization easily slips into racialization when the term is applied to populations—as with “Chinese Overseas”– who may have no more in common than origins in the region, where local differences matter a great deal, and their phenotypical attributes, which are themselves subject to variation across the population so named. 5 Equally pernicious is the identification of “China” with the state in daily reporting in headlines that proclaim “China” doing or being all kinds of things, anthropomorphizing “China” into a historical subject abstracted from the social and political relations that constitute it.

    The reification of “China” and “Chinese” has temporal implications as well. 6 “Chinese” history constructed around these ideas recognizes the ethnic and demographic complexity in the making of the region, but still assumes history in “China” to be the same as history of “Chinese,” which in a retroactive teleology is extended back to Paleolithic origins. Others appear in the story only to disappear from it without a trace. The paradigm of “sinicization”(Hanhua, tonghua) serves as alibi to evolutionary fictions of “5000-year old” “Chinese” civilization, and even more egregiously, a “Chinese” nation, identified with the Han nationality descended from mythical emperors of old of whom the most familiar to Euro/Americans would be the Yellow Emperor.

    One of the most important consequences of the reification of “China” and “Chineseness” was its impact on the identification of the region and the self-identification of its dominant Han nationality. Until the twentieth century, these terms did not have native equivalents. The area was identified with successive ruling dynasties, which also determined the self-identification of its people(as well as identification by neighboring peoples). Available trans-dynastic appellations referred to ethnic, political, and cultural legacies that had shaped the civilizational process in the region but suggested little by way of the national consciousness that subsequently has been read into them. As Lydia Liu has observed, “the English terms `China’ and `Chinese’ do not translate the indigenous terms hua, xia, han, or even zhongguo now or at any given point in history.” 7

    Contemporary names for “China,” Zhongguo or Zhonghua have a history of over 2000 years, but they were neither used consistently, nor had the same referents at all times. During the Warring States Period(ca 5th-3rd centuries BC), the terms referred to the states that occupied the central plains of the Yellow River basin that one historian/philologist has described as the “East Asian Heartland.” 8 During the 8th to the 15th centuries, according to Peter Bol, Zhong guo was a vehicle for both a spatial claim—that there was a spatial area that had a continuous history going back to the `central states’(the zhong guo of the central plain during the Estern Zhou)—and a cultural claim—that there was a continuous culture that had emerged in that place that its inhabitant ought to, but might not, continue, and should be translated preferably as “the Central Country.” 9

    Bol’s statement is confirmed by contemporaries of the Ming and the Qing in neighboring states. Even the “centrality” of the Central Country was not necessarily accepted at all times. The Choson Dynasty in Korea, which ruled for almost 500 years(equaling the Ming and Qing put together), long has been viewed as the state most clearly modeled on Confucian principles (and the closest tributary state of the Ming and the Qing). It is worth quoting at some length from a recent study which writes with reference to 17th century Choson Confucian Song Si-yol, resentful of the Qing conquest of the Ming, that,

    For Song, disrecognition of Qing China was fundamentally linked to the question of civilization, and as adamant a Ming loyalist as he was, he also made it quite clear that civilization was not permanently tied to place or people. Both Confucius and Mencius, for example, were born in states where previously the region and its people had been considered foreign, or barbaric(tongyi), and Song argued vigorously that it was the duty of learned men in Choson Korea to continue the civilizational legacy that began with the sage kings Yao and Shun, a precious legacy that had been cultivated and transmitted by Confucius, Mencius and Zhu Xi, and taken up by Yi Hwang(Toegye) and Yi I(Yulgok) of Choson Korea. …To reclaim its authority over rituals and discourse on the state of Choson Korea’s civilization, and even as it performed rituals of submission to the Qing, the Choson court took the dramatic step of also establishing a shrine to the Ming…This high-stakes politics over ritual practice helped establish a potent narrative of Choson Korea as so Chunghwa, a lesser civilization compared to Ming China, but after the Manchu conquest of China, the last bastion of civilization. 10

    I will say more below on the idea of “Under Heaven”(tianxia) in the ordering of state relations in Eastern Asia. Suffice it to say here that these relations were based not on fealty to “China”(or Zhongguo understood as “China”), but to a civilizational ideal embedded in Zhou Dynasty classics. Even Zhonghua, one of the names for “China” in the 20th century, was portable. It should be evident also that where Choson Confucians were concerned, the sages who laid the foundations for civilization were not “Chinese” but Zhou Dynasty sages whose legacies could be claimed by others against the “central country” itself. Indeed, both the Choson in Korea and the Nguyen Dynasty in Vietnam claimed those legacies even as they fought “central country” dominion. 11

    The term Zhongguo(or Zhonghua) assumed its modern meaning as the name for the nation in the late 19th century (used in international treaties, beginning with the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia in 1689). Its use “presupposed the existence of a translingual signified `China’ and the fabulation of a super-sign Zhongguo/China.” 12 As Bol puts it more directly,

    …in the twentieth century “China/Zhongguo” has become an officially mandated
    term for this country as a continuous historical entity from antiquity to the present.
    ….this modern term, which I shall transcribe as Zhongguo, was deployed in new
    ways, as the equivalent of the Western term “China.” In other words the use of
    “China” and “Chinese” began as a Western usage; they were then adopted by the
    government of the people the West called the “Chinese” to identify their own
    country, its culture, language, and population. This took place in the context of
    establishing the equality of the country in international relations and creating a
    Western-style nation-state, a “China” to which the “Chinese” could be loyal. 13

    The idea of Zhongguo as a fiction based on a “Western” invention obviously goes against the claims of a positivist nationalist historiography which would extend it, anachronistically, to the origins of human habitation in the region, and claim both the region’s territory and history as its own. 14 Properly speaking, Zhongguo(or Zhonghua) as the name of the country should be restricted to the political formation(s) that succeeded the last imperial dynasty, the Qing. Even if the modern sense of the term could be read into its historical antecedents, it does not follow that the sense was universally shared in the past, or was transmitted through generations to render it into a political or ideological tradition, or part of popular political consciousness. A recent study by Shi Aidong offers an illuminating(and amusing) account of the translingual and transcultural ironies in the deployment of terms such as “China,” “Chinese,” or Zhongguo. The author writes with reference to the early 16th century Portuguese soldier-merchant Galeoto Pereira, who had the privilege of doing time in a Ming jail, and subsequently related his experiences in one of the earliest seminal accounts of southern China:

    Pereira found strangest that Chinese[Zhongguoren] did not know that they were Chinese[Zhongguoren].He says: “We are accustomed to calling this county China and its inhabitants Chins, but when you ask Chinese[Zhongguoren] why they are called this, they say “[We] don’t have this name, never had.” Pereira was very intrigued, and asked again: “What is your entire country called? When someone from another nation asks you what country you are from, what do you answer?”  The Chinese[Zhongguoren] thought this a very odd question. In the end, they answered: “In earlier times there were many kingdoms. By now there is only one ruler. But each state still uses its ancient name. These states are the present-day provinces(sheng).The state as a whole is called the Great Ming(Da Ming), its inhabitants are called Great Ming people(Da Ming ren). 15(highlights in the original)

    Nearly four centuries later, a late Qing official objected to the use of terms such as “China,” in the process offering a revealing use of “Zhongguo” as little more than a location. The official, Zhang Deyi, complained about the names for China used by Euro/Americans, “who, after decades of East and West diplomatic and commercial interactions, know very well that Zhongguo is called Da Qing Guo[literally, the Great Qing State] or Zhonghua [the Central Efflorescent States]but insist on calling it Zhaina(China), Qina(China), Shiyin(La Chine), Zhina (Shina), Qita(Cathay), etc. Zhongguo has not been called by such a name over four-thousand years of history. I do not know on what basis Westerners call it by these names?” 16

    The official, Zhang Deyi, was right on the mark concerning the discrepancy between the names used by foreigners and Qing subjects. Even more striking is his juxtaposition of Qing and Zhongguo. Only a few years later, the distinguished Hakka scholar-diplomat Huang Zunxian would write that, “if we examine the countries(or states, guo) of the globe, such as England or France, we find that they all have names for the whole country. Only Zhongguo does not.” 17Liang Qichao added two decades later( in 1900) that “hundreds of millions of people have maintained this country in the world for several thousand years, and yet to this day they have not got a name for their country.” 18 Zhongguo was not a name of the country, it waited itself to be named.

    What then was Zhongguo? A mere “geographical expression,” as Japanese imperialism would claim in the 1930s to justify its invasion of the country? And how would it come to be the name of the country only a decade after Liang wrote of the nameless country where the people’s preference for dynastic affiliation over identification with the country was a fatal weakness that followed from an inability to name where they lived?

    By the time late Qing intellectuals took up the issue around the turn of the twentieth-century, diplomatic practice already had established modern notions of China and Chinese, with Zhongguo and Zhongguoren as Chinese-language equivalents. More research is necessary before it is possible to say why Zhongguo had come to be used as the equivalent of China in these practices, and how Qing officials conceived of its relationship to the name of the dynasty. It is quite conceivable that there should have been some slippage over the centuries between Zhong guo as Central State and Zhong guo as the name for the realm, which would also explain earlier instances scholars have discovered of the use of the term in the latter sense. There is evidence of such slippage in Jesuit maps dating back to the early seventeenth century. It does not necessarily follow that the practice of using Zhongguo or Zhonghua alongside dynastic names originated with the Jesuits, or that their practice was adopted by Ming and Qing cartographers. There is tantalizing evidence nevertheless that however hesitant initially, the equivalence between “China” and Zhongguo suggested in Jesuit cartographic practice was directly responsible for the dyadic relationship these terms assumed in subsequent years, beginning with the treaties between the Qing and various Euro/American powers. 19

    Matteo Ricci’s famous Map of the World(Imago Mundi) in Chinese from 1602 provides an interesting and perplexing example. The map designates the area south of the Great Wall (“China proper”) as “the Unified Realm of the Great Ming”(Da Ming yitong). 20At the same time, the annotation on Chaoxian(Korea) written into the map notes that during the Han and the Tang, the country has been “a prefecture of Zhongguo,” which could refer to either the state or the realm as a whole–or both as an administrative abstraction—which is likely as the realm as such is named after the dynasty. 21It is also not clear if Ricci owed a debt to his Ming collaborators for the annotation where he stated that the historical predecessors of the contemporary Joseon State had been part of Zhongguo, which explained the close tributary relationship between the Ming and the Joseon. 22 Four centuries later, PRC historical claims to the Goguryeo Kingdom, situated on the present-day borderlands between the two countries for six centuries from the Han to the Tang, would trigger controversy between PRC and South Korean historians over national ownership both of territory and history.

    Jesuits who followed in Ricci’s footsteps were even more direct in applying Zhongguo or Zhonghua to dynastic territories. According to a study of Francesco Sambiasi, who arrived in the Ming in shortly after Ricci’s death in 1610, on his own map of the world,

    Sambiasi calls China Zhonghua 中華, which is what [Giulio]Aleni uses in his Zhifang waiji, rather than Ricci’s term Da Ming 大明. Aleni, however, is far from consistent. On the map of Asia in his Zhifang waiji he has Da Ming yitong 大明一統, ‘Country of the Great Ming [dynasty]’, for China, and he uses the same name on his map of the world preserved in the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana. On another copy in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Brera, he uses yet another name for China, Da Qing yitong大清一統, ‘Country of the Great Qing [dynasty]. 23

    It was in the in the nineteenth century, in the midst of an emergent international order and under pressure from it, that Zhongguo in the singular acquired an unequivocal meaning, referring to a country with a definite territory but also a Chinese nation on the emergence. 24 The new sense of the term was product, in Lydia Liu’s fecund concept, of “translingual encounter.” Already by the 1860s, the new usage had entered the language of Qing diplomacy. The conjoining of China/ Zhongguo in international treaties in translation established equivalence between the two terms, which now referred both to a territory and the state established over that territory. 25 Zhongguo appeared in official documents with increasing frequency, almost interchangeably with Da Qing Guo, and most probably in response to references in foreign documents to China. It no longer referred to a “Central State.” Historical referents for the term were displaced(and, “forgotten”) as it came to denote a single sovereign entity, China. It is not far-fetched to suggest, as Liu has, that it was translation that ultimately rendered Zhongguo into the name of the nation that long had been known internationally by one or another variant of China.

    A few illustrations will suffice here. The world map printed in the first Chinese edition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law in 1864, used the Chinese characters for Zhongguo to identify the region we know as China. 26 Da Qing Guo remained in use as the official appellation for the Qing. For instance, the 19th article of the “Chinese-Peruvian Trade Agreement”(ZhongBi tongshang tiaoyue) in 1869 referred to the signatories as “Da Qing Guo” and “Da Bi Guo.” 27 Without more thorough and systematic analyisis, it is difficult to say what determined choice. It seems perhaps that where reference was to agency, Da Qing Guo was the preferred usage, but this is only an impressionistic observation. More significant for purposes here may be the use of Da Qing Guo and Zhongguo in the very same location and, even more interestingly, the reference further down in the article to Zhongguo ren, or Chinese people.

    The extension of Zhongguo to the Hua people abroad is especially signiicant. Zhongguo in this sense overflows its territorial boundaries, which in later years would be evident in the use of such terms as “Da Zhongguo” (Greater China) or “Wenhua Zhongguo” (Cultural China). Even more revealing than the proliferating use of Zhongguo in official documents and memoranda may be the references to “Chinese.” In the documents of the 1860s, Huaren and Huamin are still the most common ways of referring to Chinese abroad and at home (as in Guangdong Huamin). 28 However, the documents are also replete with references to Zhongguo ren(Chinese), Zhongguo gongren(Chinese workers), and, on at least one occasion, to “Biluzhi Zhongguo ren,” literally, “the Chinese of Peru,” which indicates a deterritorialized notion of China on the emergence, that demands recognition and responsibility from the “Chinese” state beyond its boundaries. 29

    In its overlap with Hua people, primarily an ethnic category, Zhongguo ren from the beginning assumed a multiplicity of meanings—from ethnic and national to political identity, paralleling some of the same ambiguities characteristic of terms like China and Chinese. Foreign pressure in these treaties– especially US pressure embodied in the Burlingame mission of 1868– played a major part in enjoining the Qing government to take responsibility for Hua populations abroad. The confounding of ethnic, national and political identities confirmed the racialization of hua populations that already was a reality in these foreign contexts by bringing under one collective umbrella people with different national belongings and historical/cultural trajectories.

    Late Qing intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan who played a seminal part in the formulation of modern Chinese nationalism were quick to point out shortcomings of the term Zhongguo as a name for the nation. Liang Qichao offered pragmatic reasons for their choice: since neither the inherited practice of dynastic organization nor the foreign understanding ( China, Cathay, etc) offered appropriate alternatives, the use of “Zhongguo” made some sense as most people were familiar with the term. Nearly three decades later the historian Liu Yizheng would offer a similar argument for the use of Zhongguo. 30One historian recently has described the change in the meaning of Zhongguo as both a break with the past, and continuous with it. 31. The contradiction captures the ambivalent relationship of modern China to its past.

    Naming the nation was only the first step in “the invention of China.” The next, even more challenging, step was to Sinicize, or more appropriately, make Chinese (Zhongguohua), the land, the people, and the past. Liang Qichao’s 1902 essay, “the New History” appears in this perspective as a program to accomplish this end. As the new idea of “China/Zhongguo” was a product of the encounter with Euromodernity, the latter also provided the tools for achieving this goal. The new discipline of history was one such tool. Others were geography, ethnology, and archeology. History education in the making of “new citizens” was already under way before the Qing was replaced by the Republic, and it has retained its significance to this day. So has geography, intended to bring about a new consciousness of “Chinese” spaces. Archeology, meanwhile, has taken “Chinese” origins ever farther into the past. And ethnology has occupied a special place in the new disciplines of sociology and anthropology because of its relevance to the task of national construction out of ethnic diversity. 32

    It was twentieth century nationalist reformulation of the past that would invent a tradition and a nation out of an ambiguous and discontinuous textual lineage. It is noteworthy that despite the most voluminous collection of writing on the past in the whole world, there was no such genre before the twentieth century as Zhongguo lishi (the equivalent of “Chinese” history)—some like Liang Qichao blamed the lack of national consciousness among “Chinese” to the absence of national history. The appearance of the new genre testified to the appearance of a new idea of Zhongguo, and the historical consciousness it inspired. The new history would be crucial in making the past “Chinese”—and, tautologically, legitimize the new national formation. 33

    Especially important in constructing national history were the new “comprehensive histories”(tongshi), covering the history of China/ Zhongguo from its origins(usually beginning with the Yellow Emperor whose existence is still very much in doubt) to the present. 34 What distinguished the new “comprehensive histories” from their imperial antecedents was their linear, evolutionary account of the nation as a whole that rendered the earlier dynastic histories into building blocks of a progressive narrative construction of the nation. The first such accounts available to Qing intellectuals were histories composed by Japanese historians. Not surprisingly, the first “comprehensive histories” composed by Qing historians were school textbooks. It is worth quoting at length the conclusion to a 1920 New Style History Textbook that concisely sums up the goals of nationalist historiography from its Qing origins to its present manifestations with Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”:

    The history of China is a most glorious history. Since the Yellow Emperor, all the things we rely on—from articles of daily use to the highest forms of culture—have progressed with time. Since the Qin and Han Dynasties created unity on a vast scale, the basis of the state has become ever more stable, displaying China’s prominence in East Asia. Although there have been periods of discord and disunity, and occasions when outside forces have oppressed the country, restoration always soon followed. And precisely because the frontiers were absorbed into the unity of China, foreign groups were assimilated. Does not the constant development of the frontiers show how the beneficence bequeathed us from our ancestors exemplifies the glory of our history? It is a matter of regret that foreign insults have mounted over the last several decades, and records of China’s humiliation are numerous. However, that which is not forgotten from the past, may teach us for the future. Only if all the people living in China love and respect our past history and do their utmost to maintain its honor, will the nation be formed out of adversity, as we have seen numerous times in the past. Readers of history know that their responsibility lies here. 35

    This statement does not call for much comment, as it illustrates cogently issues that have been raised above, especially the rendering of “Chinese” history into a sui generis narrative of development where “outside forces” appear not as contributors to but “disturbances” in the region’s development, and imperial conquests of “the frontiers” a beneficent absorbtion into a history that was always “Chinese.” Ironically, while Marxist historiography in the 1930s(and until its repudiation for all practical purposes in the 1980s) condemned most of this past as “feudal,” it also provided “scientific” support to its autonomous unfolding through “modes of production” that of necessity followed the internal dialectics of development. 36
    A noteworthy question raised by this statement concerns the translation’s use of “China,” presumably for Zhongguo in the original, which returns us to the perennial question of naming in our disciplinary practices. How to name the new “comprehensive histories” was an issue raised by Liang Qichao from the beginning. In a section of his essay, “Discussion of Zhongguo History,” entitled “Naming Zhongguo History,” he wrote,

    Of all the things I am ashamed of, none equals my country not having a name. It is commonly called ZhuXia[all the Xia], or Han people, or Tang people, which are all names of dynasties. Foreigners call it Zhendan[Khitan] or Zhina[Japanese for China], which are names that we have not named. If we use Xia, Han or Tang to name our history, it will pervert the goal of respect for the guomin[citizens]. If we use Zhendan, Zhina, etc., it is to lose our name to follow the master’s universal law [gongli]. Calling it Zhongguo or Zhonghua is pretentious in its exaggerated self-esteem and self-importance. ; it will draw the ridicule of others. To name it after a dynasty that bears the name of one family is to defile our guomin. It cannot be done. To use foreigners’ suppositions is to insult our guomin. That is even worse.  None of the three options is satisfactory. We might as well use what has become customary. It may sound arrogant, but respect for one’s country is the way of the contemporary world. 37

    Liang was far more open-minded than many of his contemporaries and intellectual successors. Interestingly, he also proposed a three-fold periodization of Zhongguo history into Zhongguo’s Zhongguo from the “beginning of history” with the Yellow Emperor(he consigned the period before that to “prehistory”) to the beginning of the imperial period, when Zhongguo had developed in isolation; Asia’s Zhongguo(Yazhou zhu Zhongguo)from the Qin and Han Dynasties to the Qianlong period of the Qing, when Zhongguo had developed as part of Asia; and, since the eighteenth century, the world’s Zhongguo(shijie zhi Zhongguo), when Zhongguo had become part of the world. 38

    Historicizing “China/Zhongguo

    Historicizing terms like China/Zhongguo or Chinese/Zhongguo ren is most important for disrupting their naturalization in nationalist narratives of national becoming. It is necessary, as Leo Shin has suggested, “to not take for granted the `Chineseness’ of China,” and to ask: “how China became Chinese.” 39 It is equally important, we might add, to ask how and when Zhong guo became Zhongguo, to be re-imagined under the sign of “China.”

    Strictly speaking by the terms of their reasoning, Zhongguo/China as conceived by late Qing thinkers named the nation-form with which they wished to replace the imperial regime that seemed to have exhausted its historical relevance. The new nation demanded a new history for its substantiation. Containing in a singular continuous Zhongguo history the many pasts that had known themselves with other names was the point of departure for a process Edward Wang has described pithily as “inventing China through history.” 40 The schemes proposed for writing the new idea of Zhongguo into the past by the likes of Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan or Xia Zengyou (author of the first “new” history textbook in three volumes published in 1904-1906) drew upon the same evolutionary logic that guided the already available histories of “China” by Japanese and Western historians, re-tailoring them to satisfy the explicitly acknowledged goal of fostering national consciousness. In these “narratives of unfolding,” in Melissa Brown’s felicitous phrase, the task of history was no longer to chronicle the “transmission of the Way”(Daotong), as it had been in Confucian political hagiography, but to bear witness to struggles to achieve the national idea that was already implicit at the origins of historical time. 41 The break with the intellectual premises of native historiography was as radical as the repudiation of the imperial regime in the name of the nation-form that rested its claims to legitimacy not on its consistency with the Way or Heaven’s Will but on the will of the people who constituted it, no longer as mere subjects but as “citizens”(guomin) with a political voice. From the very beginning, “citizenship” was the attribute centrally if not exclusively of the majority ethnic group that long had self-identified as Han, Hua, or HuaXia—for all practical purposes, the “Chinese” of foreigners. Endowed with the cultural homogeneity, longevity and resilience that also were the desired attributes of Zhongguo, this group has served as the defining center of Zhongguo history, as it has of “Chinese” history in foreign contexts

    In a discussion celebrated for its democratic approach to the nation, “What is a Nation?,” the French philosopher Ernst Renan observed that,

    Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of all political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences. 42

    The quest for a national history set in motion in the late Qing has likewise been beset by the same struggles over memory and forgetting that have attended the invention of nations in the modern world. Similarly as elsewhere, the same forces that spawned the search for a nation and a national history transformed intellectual life with the introduction of professional disciplines, among them, history. 43 The imperial Confucian elite that had monopolized both official and non-official historical writing had developed sophisticated techniques of empirical inquiry and criticism which found their way into the new historiography. But the new historians answered to different notions and criteria of “truth” which at least potentially and frequently in actuality made their work “a threat to nationality.” From the very beginning, moreover, historians were divided over conceptions of the nation, its constitution and its ends. These divisions were manifest by the late thirties in conflicts over the interpretation of the national past among conservatives, liberals and Marxists, to name the most prominent, all of whom also had an ambivalent if not hostile relationship to official or officially sanctioned histories. 44

    What was no longer questioned, however, was the notion of Zhongguo history, which by then already provided the common ground for historical thinking and inquiry, regardless of the fact that the most fundamental contradictions that drove historical inquiry were products of the effort to distill from the past a national history that could contain its complexities. Laurence Schneider has astutely captured by the phrase, “great ecumene,” the notion of Tianxia (literally, Under-Heaven) which in its Sinocentric version has commonly been rendered into a “Chinese world-order.” 45 If Tianxia had a center, it was Zhong guo as Central State, not Zhongguo as “China.” Zhongguo/China history not only has erased(or marginalized) the part others played in the making of this ecumene(and of the Central State itself), but also has thrown the alluring cover of benevolent “assimilation” upon successive imperial states that controlled much of the space defined by the ecumene not by virtuous gravitation but by material reward and colonial conquest—including the area contained by the Great Wall, so-called “China proper.” It is rarely questioned if neighboring states that modeled themselves after the Central State did so not out of a desire to emulate the superior “Chinese” culture but because of its administrative sophistication and roots in venerated Zhou Dynasty classics—or, indeed, when Confucius became “Chinese”—especially as these states were quite wary of the imperialism of the Central State and on occasion at war with it. It is commonly acknowledged by critics and defenders alike, moreover, that the various societies that made up the “great ecumene” at different times were governed by different principles internally and externally than those that govern modern nations. The Han/Hua conquest of “China proper” no doubt brought about a good measure of cultural commonality among the people at large and uniformity for the ruling classes, but it did not erase local cultures which have persisted in intra-ethnic differences among the Han. Even more significantly from a contemporary perspective, so-called tributary states and even colonized areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang were independent parts of an imperial tribute system rather than “inherent” properties of a Zhongguo/Chinese nation. Nationalist historiography has not entirely erased these differences which are recognized in such terms as “five races in unity”(wuzu gonghe) under the Guomindang government in the 1930s, and “many origins one body”(duoyuan yiti), that is favored by its Communist successors. But these gestures toward multi-culturalism has not stopped successive nationalist governments(or the histories they have sponsored) from claiming Tianxia as their own, or even extending their proprietary claims into the surrounding seas. In Ruth Hung’s incisive expression, “Sino-orientalism thrives on the country’s expansionism and success on the global stage. It is about present-day China in relation to the world, and in relation to itself—to its past and to its neighbouring peoples in particular. Its critique of external orientalism conceals and masquerades a nationalism; it is an alibi for nationalism and empire.” 46

    Critical historians have not hesitated to question these claims. The prominent historian Gu jiegang, known for his “doubting antiquity”(yigu) approach to the past, wrote in 1936, in response to officially sponsored claims that Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, Muslims, etc., were all descended from the Yellow Emperor and his mythical cohorts, that “If lies are used, what is to keep our people from breaking apart when they discover the truth? Our racial self-confidence must be based on reason. We must break off every kind of unnatural bond and unite on the basis of reality.” 47 His warning was well placed. The contradictions generated by Zhongguo/China history continue to defy conservative nationalist efforts to suppress or contain them. Such efforts range from claims to exceptionalism to, at their most virulent, xenophobic fears of contamination by outside forces, usually “the West.” 48 Interestingly, attacks on pernicious “Western” influences betray little recognition of the “Western” origins of the idea of “Zhongguo” they seek to enforce.

    The Politics of Names

    Knowing the origins of Zhongguo in its translingual relationship to “China” is not likely to make any more difference in scholarly discourse or everyday communication than knowing that words like “China” or “Chinese” are reductionist mis-representations that reify complex historical relationships. It may be unreasonable to expect that they be placed in quotation marks in writing to indicate their ambiguity, and even less reasonable to qualify their use in everyday speech with irksome gestures of quotation. It should be apparent from the Chinese language names I have used above , however, I believe that we should be able to use a wider range of vocabulary in Chinese even in popular communication to enrich our store of names for the country and for the people related to it one way or another.
    Is the concern with names otherwise no more than an esoteric academic exercise? I think not. Three examples should suffice here to illustrate the political significance of naming. First is the case of Taiwan where proponents of independence insist on the necessity of a Taiwan history distinct from Zhongguo history, justified by a deconstruction of Zhongguo history that opens up space for differences in trajectories of historical development for different “Chinese” societies, including on the Mainland itself. 49 In the case of Taiwan, these differences were due above all to the presence of an indigenous population before the arrival of the Han, and the colonial experience under Japan, that are considered crucial to the development of a local Taiwanese culture. 50 The colonial experience as a source of historical and cultural difference has also been raised as an issue in recent calls for a Hong Kong history, along with calls for independence. Such calls derive plausibility from proliferating evidence of conflict between local populations in “Chinese” societies such as Hong and Singapore and more recent arrivals from the PRC. 51
    The second example pertains to the seas that are the sites of ongoing contention between the PRC and its various neighbors. In the PRC maps that I am familiar with, these seas are still depicted by traditional directional markers as Southern and Eastern Seas. Their foreign names, South China Sea and East China Sea are once again reminders of the part Europeans played in mapping and naming the region, as they did the world at large, with no end of trouble for indigenous inhabitants. The names bring with them suggestions of possession that no doubt create some puzzlement in public opinion if not bias in favor of PRC claims. They also enter diplomatic discourses. In the early 1990s, “ASEAN states called for a name change of the South China Sea to eliminate `any connotation of Chinese ownership over that body of water.’” 52The Indian author of a news article dated 2012, published interestingly in a PRC official publication, Global Times, writes that, “While China has been arguing that, despite the name, the Indian Ocean does not belong to India alone, India and other countries can equally contend that South China Sea too does not belong to China alone.” 53 A recent petition sponsored by a Vietnamese foundation located in Irvine California, addressed to Southeast Asian heads of state, proposes that the South China Sea be renamed the Southeast Asian Sea, a practice I myself have been following for over a year now. 54 In a related change not directly pertinent to the PRC, Korean-Americans in the state of Virginia recently pressured the state government successfully to add the Korean name, “East Sea” in school textbook maps alongside what hitherto had been the “Sea of Japan.”
    Names obviously matter, as do maps, not only defining identities but also their claims on time and space. Histories of colonialism offer ample evidence that mapping and naming was part and parcel of colonization. It is no coincidence that de-colonization has been accompanied in many cases by the restoration of pre-colonial names to maps. Maps are a different matter, as they also have come to serve the nation-states that replaced colonies, again with no end of trouble in irredentist or secessionist claims.
    My third example is the idea of “China” itself, the subject of this essay. The reification of “China” finds expression in an ahistorical historicism: the use of history in support of spatial and temporal claims of dubious historicity, projecting upon the remote past possession of territorial spaces that became part of the empire only under the last dynasty, and under a very different notion of sovereignty than that which informs the nation–state. It was the Ming(1368-1644) and Qing(1644-1911) dynasties, following Yuan(Mongol) consolidation, that created the coherent and centralized bureaucratic despotism that we have come to know as “China.” These dynasties together lasted for a remarkable six centuries(roughly the same as the Ottoman Empire in Western Asia), in contrast to the more than twenty fragmented polities(some of equal duration, like the Han and the Tang) that succeeded one another during the preceding 1500 years of imperial rule. The relatively stable unity achieved under the consolidated bureaucratic monarchy of the last six centuries has cast its shadow over the entire history of the region which up until the Mongol Yuan Dynasty(1275-1368) had witnessed ongoing political fluctuation between dynastic unity and “a multistate polycentric system.” 55
    In his study of Qing expansion into Central Asia, James Millward asks the reader to “think of the different answers a scholar in the late Ming and an educated Chinese at the end of the twentieth century would give to the questions, `Where is China?’ and `Who are the Chinese?’ and goes on to answer:

    We can readily guess how each would respond: The Ming scholar would most likely exclude the lands and peoples of Inner Asia, and today’s Chinese include them(along with Taiwan, Hong Kong, and perhaps even overseas Chinese communities). These replies mark either end of the process that has created the
    ethnically and geographically diverse China of today. 56

    In light of the discussion above, Millward goes only part of the distance. Unless he was a close associate of the Jesuits, the late Ming scholar would most likely have scratched his head, as did Pereira’s subjects, wondering what “China” might be. Even so, the question raised by Qing historians like Millward, who advocate “Qing-centered” rather than “China-centered” histories, have prompted some conservative PRC historians to charge them with a “new imperialism” that seeks “to split” China—a favorite charge brought against minorities that seek some measure of autonomy, or those in Hong Kong and Taiwan who would rather be Hong Kong’ers and Taiwanese rather than “Chinese.” 57
    Such jingoistic sentiments aside, it is a matter of historical record that it was Manchu rulers of the Qing that annexed to the empire during the eighteenth century approximately half of the territory the PRC commands presently—from Tibet to Xinjiang, Mongolia , Manchuria and Taiwan, as well as territories occupied by various indigenous groups in the Southwest. Until they were incorporated into the administrative structure in the late nineteenth century, moreover, these territories were “tributary” fiefdoms of the emperor rather than “inherent”(guyoude) possessions of a “Chinese” nation, as official historiography would claim. Complex histories are dissolved into a so-called “5000-year Chinese history” which has come to serve as the basis for both irredentist claims and imperial suppression of any hint of secessionism on the part of subject peoples. The PRC today is plagued by ethnic insurgency internally, and boundary disputes with almost all of its neighboring states. It may not bear sole responsibility for these conflicts as these neighboring states in similar fashion project their national claims upon the past. Suffice it to say here that “Zhongguo/China,” which represented a revolutionary break with the past to its formulators in the early twentieth century, has become a prisoner of the very myths that sustain it. Ahistorical historicism is characteristic of all nationalism. “Zhongguo/China” is no exception.
    There are no signs indicating any desire to re-name the country after one of the ancient names that are frequently invoked these days in gestures to “tradition,” names like Shenzhou, Jiuzhou, etc. Those names in their origins referred to much more limited territorial spaces, shared with others, even if they were adjusted over subsequent centuries to accommodate the shifting boundaries of empire. Zhongguo/China, as putative heir to two-thousand years of empire, claims for the nation imperial territories as well as the surrounding seas at their greatest extent (which was reached, not so incidentally, under the Mongols and Manchus), and at least in imagination relocates them at the origins of historical time. The cosmological order of “all-under-heaven” (tianxia), with the emperor at its center(Zhongguo) has been rendered into a Chinese tianxia. Its re-centering in the nation rules out any conceptualization of it as a shared space in favor of an imperium over which the nation is entitled to preside, which hardly lends credence to assertions by some PRC scholars and others of significant difference from modern imperialism in general. 58 An imperial search for global power is also evident in the effort to remake into “Chinese” silk roads the overland and maritime silk roads constructed over the centuries out of the relay of people and commodities across the breadth of Asia.
    Names do matter. They also change. I will conclude here by recalling the prophetic words of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci as he encountered “China” in the late sixteenth century: “The Chinese themselves in the past have given many different names to their country and perhaps will impose others in the future.” Who knows what the future may yet bring?
    * I would like to express my appreciation to David Bartel, Yige Dong, Harry Harootunian, Ruth Hung, John Lagerwey, Kam Louie, Mia Liu, Sheldon Lu, Roxann Prazniak, Tim Summers, QS Tong, Rob Wilson and anonymous readers for boundary 2 for their comments and suggestions on this essay. They are not responsible for the views I express.

    notes:

    1. Claims to exceptionalism may be characteristic of all nationalism, as a defining feature in particular of right-wing nationalism. There is nothing exceptional about Chinese claims to exceptionality, except perhaps its endorsement by others. The United States is, of course, the other prominent example. The two “exceptionalisms” were captured eloquently in one of the earliest encounters between the two polities when the US Minister Anson Burlingame in 1868 proclaimed the prospect of “the two oldest and youngest nations” in the world marching together hand-in-hand into the future. Exceptionalism, we may note, easily degenerates into an excuse for assumptions of cultural superiority and imperialism. Under pressure from conservatives, Boards of Education in Texas and Colorado have recently enjoined textbook publishers to stress US exceptionalism in school textbooks. The drift to the right has also been discernible in the PRC since Xi Jingping has assumed the presidency and encouraged attacks on scholars who in the eyes of Party conservatives have been “brain-washed” by “Western” influence. For a report on US textbook controversies, see, Sara Ganim, “Making history: Battles brew over alleged bias in Advanced Placement standards,” CNN, February 24, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/20/us/ ap-history-framework-fight/ (consulted 8 March 2015). To their credit, students in Colorado and Hong Kong high-schools have walked out of classes in protest of so-called “patriotic education,” an option that is not available to the students in the PRC—even if they were aware of the biases in their school textbooks.
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    2. Some recent examples are, Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambrdge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas(Singapore: Academic Press, 1992); Leo Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) ; Zhao Gang, “Reinventing China: Imperial Ideology and the Rise of Modern Chinese National Identity in the Early Twentieth Century,” Modern China 32.1(January 2006): 3-30; Joseph W. Esherick, “How the Qing Became China, in Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young (ed), Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), pp. 229-259; Arif Dirlik, “Timespace, Social Space and the Question of Chinese Culture,” in Dirlik, Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China(Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2011), pp. 157-196; Arif Dirlik, “Literary Identity/Cultural Identity: Being Chinese in the Contemporary World,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture(MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2013) ; Peter K. Bol, “Middle-period discourse on the Zhong guo: The central country,” Hanxue yanjiu(2009), http://nrs. harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos: 3629313; Melissa J. Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Hsieh Hua-yuan, Tai Pao-ts’un and Chou Mei-li, Taiwan pu shih Chung-kuo te: Taiwan kuo-min te li-shih(Taiwan is not Zhongguo’s: A history of Taiwanese citizens)(Taipei: Ts’ai-t’uan fa-jen ch’un-ts’e hui, 2005) ; Lin Jianliang, “The Taiwanese are Not Han Chinese,” Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, 6/6/2015, http://www.sdh-fact.com/essay-article/418 ; Shi Aidong, Zhongguo longde faming: : shijide long zhengzhi yu Zhongguo xingxiang (The Invention of the Chinese Dragon: Dragon Politics during the 16-20th centuries and the Image of China)(Beijing: Joint Publishing Company, 2014); Ge Zhaozhuang, Zhai zi Zhong guo: zhongjian youguan `Zhong guo’de lishi lunshu (Dwelling in this Zhongguo: Re-narrating the History of `Zhongguo’)(Beijing: Zhonghua Publishers, 2011); Ge Zhaozhuang, He wei Zhongguo: jiangyu, minzu, wenhua yu lishi(What is Zhongguo: Frontiers, Nationalities, Culture and History)(Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ren Jifang, “`HuaXia’ kaoyuan” (On the Origins of “HuaXia,” in Chuantong wenhua yu xiandaihua(Traditional Culture and Modernization), #4(1998). For an important early study, see, Wang Ermin, “`Chung-kuo ming-cheng su-yuan chi ch’I chin-tai ch’uan-shih”(The Origins of the name “Chung-kuo” and Its Modern Interpretations), in Wang Ermin, Chung-kuo chin-tai si-hsiang shih lun((Essays on Modern Chinese Thought)(Taipei: Hushi Publishers, 1982), pp. 441-480. The bibliographies of all these works refer to a much broader range of studies. Prasenjit Duara has offered an extended critique of nationalism in history writing with reference to the twentieth-century in, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). I am grateful to Leo Douw for bringing Ge(2014) to my attention, and Stephen Chu for helping me acquire it at short notice..
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    3. I am referring here to the important argument put forward by Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) that Jesuits “manufactured” Confucianism as the cultural essence of “China” which was equally a product of their manufacture. For the confusion of names in both Chinese and European languages that confronted the Jesuits, see, Matteo Ricci/Nicholas Trigault, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci, 1583-1610, tr. from the Latin by Louis Gallagher, S.J.(New York: Random House, 1953), pp.6-7. Ricci/Trigault write prophetically that “The Chinese themselves in the past have given many different names to their country and perhaps will impose others in the future.”(p. 6). The Jesuits also undertook a mission to make sure that the name popularized by Marco Polo, Cathay, was the same as “China.” Pp.312-313, 500-501
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    4. The term minzu absorbs ethnicity into “nationality.” From that perspective, there could be no intra-Han ethnicity. See, Melissa Brown, , Is Taiwan Chinese?, and Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1580-1980(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992)
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    5. The racist homogenization of the Han (not to speak of “Chinese”) population is contradicted by studies of genetic variation. There is still much uncertainty about these studies, but not about the heterogeneity of the population which, interestingly, has been found to correspond to regional and linguistic variation: “Interestingly, the study found that genetic divergence among the Han Chinese was closely linked with the geographical map of China. When comparisons were made an individual’s genome tended to cluster with others from the same province, and in one particular province, Guangdong, it was even found that genetic variation was correlated with language dialect group. Both of these findings suggest the persistence of local co-ancestry in the country. When looking at the bigger picture the GIS scientists noticed there was no significant genetic variation when looking across China from east to west, but identified a ‘gradient’ of genetic patterns that varied from south to north, which is consistent with the Han Chinese’s historical migration pattern. The findings from the study also suggested that Han Chinese individuals in Singapore are generally more closely related to people from Southern China, whilst people from Japan were more closely related with those from Northern China. Unsurprisingly, individuals from Beijing and Shanghai had a wide range of ‘north-south’ genetic patterns, reflecting the modern phenomenon of migration away from rural provinces to cities in order to find employment. “ Dr. Will Fletcher, “Thousands of genomes sequences to map Han Chinese genetic variation,” Bionews, 596(30 November 2009), http://www.bionews.org.uk/ page_51682.asp(consulted 5 December 2014). For a discussion of racism directed at minority populations, see, Gray Tuttle, “China’s Race Problem: How Beijing Represses Minorities,” Foreign Affairs, 4/22/2015, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143330/gray-tuttle/chinas-race-problem 1/
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    6. It is noteworthy that the reification of “China” has a parallel in the use of “the West” (xifang) by both Chinese and Euro/Americans, which similarly ignores all the complexities of that term, including its very location. The commonly encountered juxtaposition, China/West( Zhongguo/ xifang), is often deployed in comparisons that are quite misleading in their obliviousness to the temporalities and spatialities indicated by either term.
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    7. Liu, The Clash of Empires, p. 80. Endymion Wilkinson tells us that there were more than a dozen ways of referring to “what we now call `China.’” For a discussion of some of the names and their origins, including “China,” see, Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, revised and enlarged edition(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), p. 132
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    8. Victor Mair, “The North(western) Peoples and the Recurrent Origins of the `Chinese’ State,” in Joshua A. Fogel(ed), The Teleology of the Nation-State: Japan and China(Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 46-84
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    9. Bol, “Middle-Period Discourse on the Zhong Guo,” p.2. John W. Dardess, “Did the Mongols Matter? Territory, Power, and the Intelligentsiain China from the Northern Song to the Early Ming,” in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn(ed), The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 111-134, especially, pp. 112-122, `Political Geography: What was “China.”’ Ge Zhaoguang and Zhao Gang have also found evidence of broader uses of Zhong Guo. Ge is particularly insistent on the existence of Zhongguo from the late Zhou to the present, with something akin to consciousness of “nationhood”(ziguo, literally self-state) emerging from the seventeenth century not only in Zhongguo(under the Qing) but also in neighboring Japan and Korea. The consequence was a shift from Under-Heaven(tianxia) consciousness to something resembling an interstate system (guoji zhixu). Ge, He wei Zhongguo?, p.9. Ge’s argument is sustained ultimately by Zhongguo exceptionalism that defies “Western” categories. At the latest from the Song Dynasty, he writes, “this Zhongguo had the characteristics of `the traditional imperial state,’ but also came close to the idea of `the modern nation-state.”(p. 25). That China is not an ordinary “nation” but a “civilization-state” is popular with sympathetic prognostications of its “rise,” such as, Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order(London: Penguin Books, 2012, Second edition) and chauvinistic apologetics like Zhang weiwei, The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State(Hackensack, NJ: World Century Publishing Corporation, 2012). Highly problematic in ignoring the racialized nationalism that drives domestic and international policy, such arguments at their worst mystify PRC imperial expansionism. There are, of course, responsible dissenting historians who risk their careers to call the “Party line” into question. For one example, Ge Jianxiong of Fudan University, see, Venkatesan Vembu, “Tibet wasn’t ours, says Chinese scholar,” Daily News & Analysis, 22 February 2007, http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-tibet-wasn-t-ours-says-chinese-scholar-1081523
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    10. Henry H. Em, The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 28-29.
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    11. Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Nguyen and Ching Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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    12. Liu, The Clash of Empires, p. 77
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    13. Bol, “Middle-Period Discourse on the Zhong Guo,” p.4. See, also, Hsieh, Tai and Chou, Taiwan pu shih Chung-kuo te, op.cit., p.31 We might add that the celebrated “sinocentrism” of “Chinese,” based on this vocabulary, is a mirror image of “Eurocentrism” that has been internalized in native discourses.
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    14. European(including Russian) Orientalist scholarship provided important resources in the formulation of national historical identity in other states, e.g., Turkey. For a seminal theoretical discussion, with reference to India, see, Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). With respect to the importance of global politics in the conception of “China,” we might recall here the Shanghai Communique (1972) issued by the US and the PRC. The Communique overnight shifted the “real China” from the Republic of China on Taiwan to the PRC.
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    15. Shi, Zhongguo longde faming, pp. 8-9. For the original reference in Pereira, see, “The Report of Galeote Pereira,” in South China in the Sixteenth Century: Being the narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar de Cruz, O.P., Fr. Martin de Rada, O.E.S.A., ed. By C.R. Boxer(London: The Hakluyt Society, Second series, #106, 1953), pp. 3-43, pp.28-29. Da Ming and Da Ming ren appear in the text as Tamen and Tamenjins. Interestingly, the account by de Rada in the same volume states that “The natives of these islands[the Philippines] call China `Sangley’, and the Chinese merchants themselves call it Tunsua, however its proper name these days is Taibin.” (p. 260). According to the note by the editor, Tunsua and Taibin are respectively Zhong hua and Da Ming from the Amoy(Xiamen) Tiong-hoa and Tai-bin. Shi recognizes that “the invention of the Chinese dragon” presupposed “the invention of China,” which is also the title of a study by Catalan scholar, Olle Manel, La Invencion de China:Perceciones et estrategias filipinas respecto China durante el siglo XVI(The Invention of China: Phillipine China Perceptions and Strategies during the 16th Century) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Publishers, 2000). Jonathan Spence credits Pereira with having introduced lasting themes into Euopean Images of China. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), pp. 20-24. In a similar vein to Pereira’s, Matteo Ricci wrote at the end of the century, “It does not appears strange to us that the Chinese should never have heard of the variety of names given to their country by outsidersand that they should be entirely unaware of their existence.” Ricci/Trigault, China in the Sixteenth Century, p. 6
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    16. Zhang Deyi, Suishi Faguo ji(Random Notes on France)(Hunan: Renmin chuban she, 1982), p. 182.
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    17. Quoted in Wang Ermin, “`Chung-kuo min-gcheng su-yuan chi ch’i chin-tai ch’uan-shih,” p. 451.
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    18. Quoted in John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 117.
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    19. For a discussion of problems in the reception of Jesuit maps by Ming/Qing cartographers, see, Cordell D.K. Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography and the Myth of Westernization,” in J.B. Harley and David Woodward(ed), The History of Cartography, Volume 2, Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 170-202.
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    20. This term, literally “unified under one rule,” was the term Mongols used, when the Yuan Dynasty unified the realm that had been divided for nearly two centuries between the Song, Liao, Jin and Xi Xia. Brook explains that the Ming took over the term to claim “identical achievement for themselves.” See, Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), p. 134. For a close analysis of this period, see, Morris Rossabi, China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
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    21. Various versions of the map are available at https://www.google.com/search?q=matteo+ricci+ world+map&safe=off&biw=1113&bih=637&site=webhp&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=LmL2VKjWJ5C1ogSroII4&ved=0CB0QsAQ&dpr=1 .
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    22. For Ricci’s own account of the production of the map, and the different hands it passed through, see, Ricci/Trigault, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci, 1583-1610, tr. from the Latin by Louis Gallagher, S.J.(New York: Random House, 1953), pp. 168, 331.
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    23. Ann Heirman, Paolode Troia and Jan Parmentier, “Francesco Sambiai, A Missing Ling in European Map Making in China?,” Imago Mundi, Vol. 61, Part I(2009): 29-46, p. 39. It is quite significant that Aleni’s map, first published in 1623 toward the end of the Ming, was widely available during the Qing, and found its way into the Imperial Encyclopedia compiled under the Qianlong Emperor in the late eighteenth century..
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    24. In this sense, the Qing case is a classical example of the Giddens-Robertson thesis that the international order preceeded, and is a condition for, the formation of the nation-state, especially but not exclusively in non-Euro/American societies. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994).
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    25. It may be worth mentioning here that in spite of this equivalence, the English term is much more reductionist, and, therefore, abstract. Chinese has a multiplicity of terms for “China”: Zhongguo, Zhonghua, Xia, Huaxia, Han, Tang, etc. The term “Chinese” is even more confusing, as it refers at once to a people, to a “race,” to members of a state that goes by the name of China as well as the majority Han people who claim real Chineseness, creating a contradiction with the multiethnic state. Once again, Chinese offers a greater variety, from huaren, huamin, huayi, Tangren, Hanzu, to Zhongguoren, etc.
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    26. Liu, The Clash of Empires. p. 126.
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    27. Chen Hansheng(ed), Huagong chuguo shiliao huibian(Collection of Historical Materials on Hua Workers Abroad)(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), 10 Volumes, Vol. 3, p.1015
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    28. “Zongli yamen fu zhuHua Meishi qing dui Bilu Huagong yu yi yuanshou han”(Zongli yamen Letter to the American Ambassador’s Request for Help to Chinese Workers in Peru)(18 April 1869). In Ibid., p.966. The Zongli Yamen(literally the general office for managing relations with other countries), established as part of the Tongzhi Reforms of the 1860s, served as the Qing Foreign Office until the governmental reorganization after 1908.
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    29. “Zongli yamen wei wuyue guo buxu zai Hua sheju zhaogong bing bujun Huaren qianwang Aomen gei Ying, Fa, E, Mei Ri guo zhaaohui”(Zongli yamen on the Prohibition of Labor Recruitment by Non-Treaty Countries and on Chinese Subjects Communicating with England, France, Russia, United States and Japan in Macao.” In Ibid., pp.968-969, p. 968.
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    30. Wang Ermin, pp. 452, 456.
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    31. Chen Yuzheng, Zhonghua minzu ningjuli de lishi tansuo(Historical Exploration of the Chinese Nation’s Power to Come Together)(Kunming: Yunnan People’s Publishing House, 1994). See Chapter 4, “Zhongguo—cong diyu he wenhua gainian dao guojia” mingcheng” (Zhongguo: from region and culture concept to national name), pp. 96-97.
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    32. For history, geography and archeology, in the late Qing and early Republic, see the essays by Peter Zarrow, Tzeki Hon and James Leibold in Brian Moloughney and Peter Zarrow(ed), Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-century China (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2011). See also, Chen Baoyun, Xueshu yu guojia: “Shidi xuebao” ji qi xue renqun yanjiu(Scholarship and the State: The History and Geography Journal and Its Studies of Social Groupings)(Hefei, Anhui: Anhui Educational Press, 2008). For ethnology and sociology, see, Wang Jianmin, Zhongguo minzuxue shi(History of Chinese Ethnology), Vol. I(Kunming: Yunnan Educational Publishers, 1997), and, Arif Dirlik(ed), Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth-Century China: Between Universalism and Indigenism (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2012). See, also, Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); James Leibold, “Competing Narratives of National Unity in Republican China: From the Yellow Emperor to Peking Man,” Modern China, 32.2(April 2006): 181-220; and, Tze-ki Hon, “Educating the Citizens: Visions of China in Late Qing History Textbooks” (published in The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China [Brill, 2007], 79-105) (35 pages). . A recent study provides a comprehensive account of the transformation of historical consciousness, practice and education during this period through the growth of journalism. See, Liu Lanxiao, Wan Qing baokan yu jindai shixue(late Qing Newspapers and Journals and Modern Historiography)(Beijing: People’s University, 2007).
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    33. For further discussion, see, Dirlik, “Timespace, Social Space and the Question of Chinese Culture,” pp. 173-180. Shi Aidong’s study of “the invention of the Chinese dragon” offers an amusing illustration of how the dragon, rendered into a symbol of “China” by Westerners, has been appropriated into the Chinese self-image extended back to the origins of “Chinese” civilization. It is not that the dragon figure did not exist in the past, but that a symbol that had been reserved exclusively or the emperor (and aspirants to that status) has been made into the symbol of the nation.
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    34. Zhao Meichun, Ershi shiji Zhongguo tongshi bianzuan yanjiu(Research into the Compilation of Comprehensive Histories in Twentieth-century China)(Beijing: Chinese Social Science Publications Press, 2007).
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    35. Quoted(as an epigraph) in Peter Zarrow, “Discipline and Narrative: Chinese History Textbooks in the Early Twentieth Century, in Moloughney and Zarrow(ed), Transforming History, pp. 169-207, p. 169. We may note that the notion of “China” going back to legendary emperors resonated with orientalist notions of “China” as a timeless civilization. It is inscribed in the appendices of most dictionaries, which means it reaches most people interested in “China” and “Chinese.”
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    36. For further discussion, see, Arif Dirlik, “Marxism and Social History,” in Ibid., pp. 375-401. Marxist historiography took a strong nationalist turn during the War of Resistance Against Japan(1937-1945). The rise of “cultural nationalism” among Marxists and non-Marxists alike during this period is explored in Tian Liang, Kangzhan shiqishixue yanjiu(Historiography During the War of Resistance)(Beijing: Renmin Publishers, 2005). Possibly the most influential product of this period well into the post-1949 years was Zhongguo tongshi jianbian(A Condensed Comprehensive History of Zhongguo) sponsored by the Zhongguo Historical Research Association and compiled under the chief editorship of the prominent historian Fan Wenlan(first edition, 1947).
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    37. Liang Qichao, “Zhongguo shi Xulun”(Discussion of Zhongguo History)(1901),” in Liang, Yinping shi wenji(Collected Essays from Ice-Drinker’s Studio), #6(Taipei: Zhonghua Shuju, 1960), 16 vols., Vol 3, pp. 1-12, p.3.
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    38. Ibid., pp. 11-12. See, also, Xiobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), Chap. 1.
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    39. Shin, The Making of the Chinese State, p. xiii. As the above discussion suggests, how “China” became “China” is equally a problem.
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    40. Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography(Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 2001).
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    41. Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese?, pp. 28-33. For Daotong, see, Cai Fangli, Zhongguo Daotong sixiang fazhan shi(History of Zhongguo Daotong Thinking)(Chengdu: Sichuan Renmin Publishers, 2003). Cai traces the oigins of Daotong thinking to the legendary emperors, Fuxi, Shennong and Yellow Emperor, and its formal systematization and establishment to the Tang Dynasty Confucian, Han Yu, who played an important part in rolling back the influence of Buddhism and Daoism to restore Confucianism to ideological supremacy. He attributes the formulation of “Daotong historical outlook”(Daotong shi guan) to the Han Dynasty thinker, Dong Zhongshu, who formulated a cosmology based on Confucian values(p. 239). In this ourlook, dynasties changed names, but the Dao(the Way) remained constant, and dynasties rose and fell according to their grasp or loss of the Dao.
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    42. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” Text of a speech delivered at the Sorbonne on 11 March
    1882, in Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?tr. by Ethan Rundell, (Paris: Presses-Pocket, 1992), p.3.
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    43. See the essays in Moloughney and Zarrow(ed), Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-century China.
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    44. See, Li Huaiyin, Reinventing Modern China: Imagintion and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing(Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2013).
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    45. Laurence A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), p. 261. For further discussion of “ecumene,” see, Arif Dirlik, “Timespace, Social Space and the Question of Chinese Culture,” in Dirlik, Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China, pp. 157-196, pp. 190-196. A concise and thoughtful historical discussion of Tianxia by a foremost anthropologist is, Wang Mingming, “All Under Heaven (tianxia): cosmological perspectives and political ontologies in pre-modern China,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(1): 337-383. Morris Rossabi, China Among Equals, offers a portrayal of the ecumene. It was only in the late imperial period during the Ming and the Qing Dynsties(1368-1911) that the centralized bureaucratic regime emerged that we know as “China.” For a portrayal of cosmopolitanism during the Mongol Empire, see, Thomas T. Allsen, “Ever Closer Encounters: The Appropriation of Culture and the Apportionment of Peoples During the Mongol Empire,” Journal of Early Modern History,1.1(1997): 2-23. For a critical discussion of the PRC preference for sinocentrism over “shared history” in the region, see, Gilbert Rozman, “Invocations of Chinese Traditions in International Relations,” Journal of Chinese Political Science(2012) 17: 111-124.
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    46. Ruth Y.Y. Hung, “What Melts in the `Melting Pot’ of Hong Kong?,” Asiatic, Volume 8, Number 2(December 2014): 57-87, p. 74.
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    47. Quoted in Schneider, Ibid..
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    48. For a recent report on the attack on academics “scornful of China” or their deviations from official narratives, see, “China professors spied on, warned to fall in line,” CBS News, November 21, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-communist-newspaper-shames-professors-for-being-scornful-of-china/# (consulted 22 November 2014). It is not only official histories that promote a “5000-year glorious history.” The same mythologizing of the past may be found among the population at large, nativist historians, and opponents of the Communist regime such as the Falun gong which serves to unsuspecting spectators the very same falsehoods dressed up as Orientalist exotica. A brochure for the Falun gong “historical spectacle, Shen Yun, in Eugene, Or, states that, “Before the dawn of Western civilization, a divinely inspired culture blossomed in the East. Believed to be bestowed from the heavens, it valued virtue and enlightenment. Embark on an extraordinary journey through 5000 years of glorious Chinese heritage, where legends come alive and good always prevails. Experience the wonder of authentic Chinese culture.”
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    49. Hsieh, Tai, and Chou, Taiwan pu shih Chung-kuo te: Taiwan kuo-min te li-shih. Former Taiwan President, and proponent of independence, Lee Teng-hui, was involved in the publication of this book. The title translates literally as “Taiwan Is Not Zhongguo’s”—in other words, does not belong to Zhongguo.
    Back to the essay

    50. For further discussion, see, Arif Dirlik, “Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made,” Keynote address, Conference on Taiwan, the Land Colonialisms Made, College of Hakka Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, December 18-19, 2014.
    Back to the essay

    51. Conflicts in Hong Kong are quite well-known. A theoretically and historically sensitive account is offered in Hung, “What Melts in the `Melting Pot’ of Hong Kong?” See, also, Alan Wong, “Hong Kong Student Organization Says It Won’t Attend Tiananmen Vigil,” New York Times, April 29, 2015, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/hong-kong-student-organization-says-it-wont-attend-tiananmen-vigil/?_r=0 . The reason given was: “Many of us dislike the vigil’s underlying notion that we’re all Chinese,” explained Sunny Cheung, a 19-year-old leader of the student union of Hong Kong Baptist University, which had voted against attending the vigil. “We want to build a democratic Hong Kong. It’s not our responsibility to build a democratic China.” For a thoughtful discussion of conflicts in Singapore that does its best to put a positive spin on the problem, see, Peidong Yang, “Why Chinese nationals and S’poreans don’t always get along,” Singapolitics, March 27, 2013, http:// www.singapolitics.sg/ views/why-chinese-nationals-and-sporeans-dont-always-get-along, and, “PtII: Why Chinese nationals and S’poreans don’t always get along,” Singapolitics, April 18, 2013, http://www. singapolitics.sg/views/pt-iiwhy-chinese-nationals-and-sporeans-dont-always-get-along .
    Back to the essay

    52. Eric Hyer, “The South China Sea Disputes: Implications of China’s Earlier Territorial Settlements,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 68 No.1(Spring 1995): 34-54, p. 41.
    Back to the essay

    53. Rajeev Sharma, “China and India Jostle in Indian Ocean,” Global Times, 2012-10-18, http:// www.globaltimes.cn/content/739276.shtml.
    Back to the essay

    54. Nguyen Tai Hoc Foundation, “Change the name `South China Sea’ to `Southeast Asia Sea,’” https://www.change.org/p/change-the-name-south-china-sea-to-southeast-asia-sea; Yang Razali Kassim, “South China Sea: Time to Change the Name,” Eurasia Review, April 28, 2015, http://www.eurasiareview.com/28042015-south-china-sea-time-to-change-the-name-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29 .
    Back to the essay

    55. Mark Mancall, China at the Center: 300 Years of Foreign Policy(New York: The Free Prss, 1984), p. 5. See, also, Dardess, “Did the Mongols Matter?”
    Back to the essay

    56. Jame A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 18.
    Back to the essay

    57. “Xuezhe ping `xin Qing shi’: `xin diguo zhuyi’ biaoben”(Scholar criticizes `new Qing history’: `an emblem of `new imperialism’), Chinese social science net, 20 April 2015, http://www.cssn.cn/zx/201504/t20150420_1592588.shtml. Such attacks are most likely intended as warnings to more open-minded historians in the PRC not to fall in with foreign historians, which has become part of a resurgent repressiveness under the Xi Jinping regime.
    Back to the essay

    58. For a historically and theoretically sensitive discussion of “tianxia,” see, Wang Mingming, “All under heaven(tianxia): Cosmological perspectives and political ontologies in pre-modern China,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1)(2012): 337-383. Possibilities of “sharing” are explored in,Young-sun Ha, “Building a New Coevolutionary Order in Asia,” East Asia Institute(EAI) Commentary No. 35(July 20, 2014), 3pp.
    Back to the essay


    Arif Dirlik is a US Historian and former Professor of Duke University and a retired “Knight Professor of Social Science” from the University of Oregon.

  • Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore: A Conversation between Adeline Koh and Sangeetha Thanapal

    Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore: A Conversation between Adeline Koh and Sangeetha Thanapal

     

    Edited by Petra Dierkes-Thrun
    Introduction (by Adeline Koh)

    ~

    Singapore, a tiny Southeast Asian nation-state, is well known for its impressive economic growth since its independence in 1965. Filled with towering skyscrapers, an impressive, well-maintained public transport system and an unemployment rate the envy of most industrialized nations, the small country is often referenced as a model postcolonial state.

    Despite these impressive economic strides, many of the racial tensions that have their roots in Singapore’s colonial history continue to manifest today, especially in relation to gender. Formerly a British colony, Singapore boasts a multi-racial, multi-ethnic population, most of which are classified into four major groups by the state: Chinese, Malay, Indian and ‘Other’. Unlike Singapore’s neighboring countries Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore’s ethnic Chinese population is the majority ethnic group. These four categories are also constantly being challenged and nuanced by the high level of foreigners who are employed and study in Singapore. Constructions of ethnicities are highly inflected by gender roles in the four major ethnic groups and nuanced by the constant influx of migrants in the country, which include mainland Chinese ‘study mamas’ (mothers accompanying their young children to study in Singapore), female domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia, and male construction workers from China, India and Bangladesh.

    Singapore’s ethnic Chinese population enjoys the most economic wealth and social status in this small country, which manifests itself in political and material privilege. Despite the fact that there are four officially sanctioned state languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil), television screens on public transport often broadcast shows only in English or Mandarin; increasingly, customer service representatives will be fluent in Mandarin but not the other two official languages; there are multiple reports of taxi drivers refusing to answer calls in areas where there are often more minority people. National beauty pageants also tend to celebrate a Chinese ideal of feminine beauty, as opposed to other ethnicities, so that it becomes exceedingly rare for a minority to win these competitions.

    Scholarly work on race and ethnicity in Singapore seldom discusses this inflection of racial privilege with gender, an extremely important intersection that nuances the structure of minority identity in the country. In this interview, I speak with Sangeetha Thanapal, an Indian Singaporean woman who first introduced the controversial concept of ‘Chinese privilege’ in Singapore. Thanapal holds that structural ethnic Singaporean Chinese’s racial privilege is in some ways analogous to White privilege in Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, despite the important differences in the historical, social, political, and geographic circumstances and developments of these two privileges. Thanapal’s provocative work and the virulent responses it engendered (mainly by Singaporean Chinese), inspired me to write a Medium essay titled ‘To My Dear Fellow Singapore Chinese: Shut Up When A Minority Is Talking About Race’ (which has since garnered over 105,000 page views and 56 recommends). We are now collaborating on a Medium Collection on Chinese Privilege, which seeks to bring to light the stories of minority voices in Singapore.

    Chinese privilege in Singapore is unique because it occurs outside of mainland China and territories which it has historically controlled. In this manner, our interview is intended as the beginning of an examination of a larger Chinese privilege, with its own histories of colonialism and migratory communities. We note that in order to zero in on the current racial and political structures in Singapore, as well as specifically on the complex role of gender, our interview does not focus on the historical development of this privilege per se, or on the obviously important, historically motivated distinctions between different groups of Chinese in Singapore. In the nineteenth century, under British colonialism, southern Chinese immigrated from China to Singapore and Malaysia to escape famine and the effects of the Opium Wars back home, and arrived to a colony in which they were brutally subjugated: the majority of male Chinese immigrants experienced great abuse under a system of indentured labor (the “coolie” system), and many of the (comparatively few) female immigrants were forced into prostitution. While this interview is intended to open up a conversation about monolithic Singaporean Chinese privilege today, we plan a more comprehensive critical historical genealogy of comparative Chinese privilege in our future work in order to elaborate upon these distinctions and developments.

    Furthermore, future work should pursue two additional important lines of inquiry: first, a clear conceptual delineation between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking Singaporeans and the different sorts of privileges which they encounter; and second, a comparison between the historical forces driving the subalternity of the indigenous Malays, and that of the diasporic Indian population. Like the Chinese, many contemporary Indian Singaporeans arrived in the colony as indentured labor, as well as convicts, traders and as sepoys under the British military. Which historical and material conditions allowed the Chinese to appropriate the forms of privilege they enjoy in Singapore today, while Indians could not join or rival them in this privilege in their own Singaporean experience? Further, we want to investigate the sorts of cultural imaginaries that are used in the creation of Singaporean Chinese privilege and its connection with reinventions of mainland Chinese chauvinism (such as in the Chinese term for China, Zhong Guo, meaning Middle Kingdom, center of the world between heaven and hell). We also want to continue building on this concept of Chinese privilege through a simultaneous examination of Tamil-Hindu internal prejudices of the Indian community in Singapore, as well as its relationship with the Malay community.

    In many respects, then, this interview is simply a first step towards a larger, sorely needed conversation about race, gender, and privilege in Singapore. We hope it will inspire others to build on our suggested research trajectories and also develop new ones of their own.

    *******

    Adeline Koh: Sangeetha, thanks so much for speaking with me today. To begin with, could you tell me about your experience being an Indian Singaporean?

    Sangeetha Thanapal: To be Indian Singaporean is to carry a number of identities, not all of whom work in concert with each other. We are expected to keep in touch with our root culture, language and traditions, but never to engage in any kind of ethnic chauvinism. We are expected to be bilingual cosmopolitan citizens of the world, while constantly being grounded in Indian culture. Those who manage to do this effectively are invariably performing a form of code switching between their traditional Indian language-speaking identities and their English-speaking, modern ones. We are told we have to be firmly established in our cultures, but people who follow this advice are seen as provincial. To speak your mother tongue well is to invite questions about how long ago you immigrated from India. It is this tension that we have to constantly negotiate, and many of us cannot or refuse to do so. To be Indian is to have my ethnicity matter in all things, but to be Singaporean is not have it matter at all, supposedly. It is ironic and–given the inability of the state to adequately marry these two binaries–unsurprising that race and ethnicity are difficult concepts to examine and contend with in Singapore.

    AK: Could you elaborate on this?

    ST: The racialism paradox in Singapore makes race front and center of your identity, while at the same time denying that race has anything to do with the obvious differences in people’s treatment. One example is the Singaporean Identity Card, which states your ethnicity.1 This identity card is akin to a Social Security number in the United States (used to apply for housing, bank loans, even something as simple as a phone number), and hence including this information makes someone’s racial identity a dominant factor. It is not hard to imagine the many ways in which this can disadvantage minorities. Even job applications ask for your ethnicity, a practice that is illegal in many countries. Educational achievements are viewed through the lens of race, not gender or class.2 Why does the state constantly racialize us and pit us against one another? This also obfuscates the intertwinement of race and class. For instance, the state says that Malays are underperforming3 in academics, leaving out their constant marginalization leading to such class factors. The Singaporean pledge literally says, ‘regardless of race, language or religion,’ implying that meritocracy trumps race in this alleged land of opportunity. Supposedly, hard work comes with the same opportunities for all. The government has a governance principle: ‘Work for reward, Reward for work.’4 Meritocracy is a neoliberal lie that tends to ignore the systemic inequalities that have strong material effects on people’s ability to live and work in Singapore. It places the blame for failure on those who did not work hard enough or take full advantage of the choices they had, conveniently forgetting that some people did not have a diverse range of choices to begin with.

    AK: It almost seems as though minority Singaporeans have to adopt what W.E.B. Dubois called a ‘double consciousness’–always having to think in terms of the language and social of the dominant group while maintaining their own cultural space. What do you think?

    ST: When Dubois speaks of double consciousness, he is referring to people of colour’s, specifically Black people’s, constant negotiation of conflicting racial identities, often a result of racial oppression. In The Souls of Black Folk, he writes that Black people feel ‘’twoness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body…’5 It is the struggle between our view of ourselves, versus the dominant racial narrative. Dubois was speaking to people sharing an African history and heritage, of course, and in that context, he also addressed White supremacy and its implication in such double consciousness. In Singapore, Chinese supremacy and institutionalized racism against minorities have resulted in a similar double consciousness. We constantly think about and cater to Chinese people, as they have institutionalized power. In Singapore, the government regularly emphasizes the need for the different ethnic groups to stay in touch with their cultures and traditions, so it is not just Chinese supremacy itself that’s responsible. Personally, I think they don’t actually object to Indians and Malays giving up their cultures; on the contrary: they would probably love it if many of us gave up our cultures to assimilate through marriage or learning Mandarin, for example. The government finds Malay culture a hindrance to its economic growth and would like spread more ‘Chinese’ attitudes of hard work and personal drive. I think the government also wants Chinese people to be steeped in their traditions and are afraid of encroaching westernization. It only cares about keeping minorities’ traditions as long as they are a marketable tourism commodity, but not because they are valuable on their own. The government needs to keep up its multi-racial facade for tourists, who feel like coming to Singapore means that they can access authentic Chinese, Malay and Indian culture, all in the same place.

    AK: Interesting. Dubois talks about ‘twoness’ in relation to race. How would this be further refined in relation to gender? Can you describe the difference between being an Indian Singaporean man and a woman?

    ST: Being an Indian Singaporean woman is to be at the very bottom of the totem pole. Patriarchy and ensuing male privilege means that while Indian men are discriminated against for being Indian, they are also treated better than Indian women, both by the majority Chinese community and within the Singaporean Indian community. Indian women are still fairly restricted in their movements and their lives, expected to be both the modern worker and the traditional housewife. Indian men retain their patriarchal freedom. In Singapore, the hierarchy of race puts the Chinese at the top, Malays in the middle, and Indians at the bottom. Some have argued that Indians have it better than Malays in Singapore, which I think is a valid argument, depending on context. Indians are generally better off than the Malay community in terms of education and economic status, and one might even say that their minority class privilege intersects with the majority Chinese’s.6 In 2010, the average household income for Indians was almost twice as high as in Malay households.7 There is, however, a lot more research regarding Malay marginalization.8 Because of the diasporic Tamil Hindu immigrants’ relatively high socio-economic standing, many people do not think there is discrimination against our ethnic group. What is important is that instead of seeking to compete for attention for our oppression, we study the Chinese dominated state’s specific ways of enacting it against both communities, and validate differing experiences while encouraging a new solidarity.

    As mentioned above, women of different races are treated differently. This kind of colourism and inter-POC (people of colour) policing of skin colour is not new or unique to Singapore, of course. A lot of it is internalized White supremacy: the lighter you are, the higher on the hierarchy you stand. Colourism is a serious problem within the Indian community itself, and, to a lesser extent, within the Malay community as well. White supremacy and Chinese supremacy function in combination here. Darker-skinned Indian and Malay women are constantly bombarded with messages that their skin colour makes them unattractive. Our body shapes, which are naturally curvier, are compared to skinnier, fairer Chinese women’s, and found inadequate. In such body policing, race and gender again intersect and amplify each other. The communities themselves are responsible here, but so are the state and the media. In the 2013 Singapore Miss Universe, there were no Indian or Malay women in the top twenty. Since 1966, which is when Singapore started being represented at the Miss Universe pageant, Malay or Indian women have won the title at home a grand total of four times.9 In 2014, for only the second time ever, an Indian woman won Miss Singapore Universe. She was inundated with disparaging comments on her face and skin colour online.10

    Discrimination against Indian men is mitigated by their gender. Not so women’s: whatever racial discrimination they undergo, it is made yet worse by being female. William Keng Mun Lee of the University of Lingnan argues that in Singapore, women in general are in lower-paying jobs across both core and periphery. This observation, despite the small differences in the educational standards of males and females in Singapore, leads him to theorize that this is due to structural factors such as sexism and discrimination. Interestingly, however, he says that it is also due to ‘Chinese male workers success in protecting their economic success by excluding females from high-paying jobs.’11 Chinese males, not Singaporean men in general, hold wealth and power in the core industries in Singapore. So if Chinese females are being excluded for being women, how much worse is the situation for Indian and Malay women?

    AK: Let’s talk a little bit about the concept you’ve developed, ‘Chinese privilege.’ It’s a terrific concept that can be easily used to explain social inequity in Singapore. How did you come up with the concept of Chinese privilege?

    ST: I remember the exact moment. I was reading bell hooks’ ‘Beloved Community: A World Without Racism.’ I deeply sympathized with what she was saying, even though she was speaking about a different context. I performed a simple experiment. I took a paragraph I particularly loved and I substituted the words ‘Chinese’ for ‘White.’ I read it back to myself, and the moment of realization that that paragraph could have been written about Singapore, and not the U.S., was what made me realize that racial privilege is not simply a White phenomenon. I don’t mean that I never realized it before, only that I had lacked the language to express it in a way that wholly encompassed the experience not as singular, but as universal to minorities here. In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, hooks speaks of ‘supremacist attitudes that permeate every aspect of […] culture’ while ‘most white folks unconsciously absorbing the ideology of white supremacy […] do not realize this socialisation is taking place [… and] feel they are not racist.’12

    Now, I am not going to make the claim that hooks’s ideas are wholly transferable to the Singaporean context. That would be an undue appropriation of the African American experience and erase the specificity of their oppression. But there are enough similarities for me to associate the two phenomena in my mind: the daily microaggressions that minorities experience, employment discrimination, the paradoxical, simultaneous derision and appropriation of their culture.

    While I realize that the concept of White privilege has its own context and history, it really helped me understand the situation in Singapore by analogy. Chinese Supremacist attitudes permeate our society. The PAP believes in keeping the Chinese and their Confucian ethic at the helm, supposedly for our economic growth and success. So-called Special Assistance Plan schools, where all taxpayers’ money pays for Chinese students’ opportunities only, with the argument that this practice enables better trade with China in the future.13 The media constantly laud China as the world’s next superpower, even though economists predict its one-child policy will cause it to fall behind an ever-burgeoning Indian state. And the state continues to make racist comments such as the following: ‘We could not have held the society together if we had not made adjustments to the system that gives the Malays, although they are not as hardworking and capable as the other races, a fair share of the cake.’14 Religion, specifically Islam, is not spared from racist attacks: ‘In those days, you didn’t have a school tuckshop, so you bought two cents of nasi lemak and you ate it. And there was a kway teow man and so on. But now, you go to schools with Malay and Chinese, there’s a halal and non-halal segment and so too, the universities. And they tend to sit separately, not to be contaminated. All that becomes a social divide. Now I’m not saying right or wrong, I’m saying that’s the demands of the religion but the consequences are a veil across and I think it was designed to be so. Islam is exclusive.’15

    Chinese people do not see such comments as racist. Most people see it as normal–common wisdom. If minorities ever raise their voices, they are told to shut up and sit down.

    I started doing a similar analogy exercise with other texts after my experience with bell hooks. In Privilege, Power and Difference, Allan G. Johnson says:

    Being able to command the attention of lower-status individuals without having to give it in return is a key aspect of privilege. African Americans for example, have to pay close attention to whites and white culture and get to know them well enough to avoid displeasing them, since whites control jobs, schools, government, the police, and most other resources and sources of power. White privilege gives little reason to pay attention to African Americans or how White privilege affects them.16

    If you pay attention to minorities in Singapore, the analogy rings so true. We know about Chinese culture, some of us learn Mandarin to make ourselves more employable, we try to understand how the Chinese work, we give in to them when they speak Mandarin around us, never asking them to be sensitive towards us. We know that knowledge of them will help us; they, on the other hand, know very little about our cultures, religions or languages. They do not have to: not knowing it does not affect them in a material way. Reading about the African American experience triggered these important insights about our own situation for me.

    AK: Could you say a little more about how you define Chinese privilege? Does Chinese privilege take place around the world, or is it specific to Singapore?

    ST: I define Chinese privilege similarly as White privilege, again by analogy rather than wholesale transference of one distinct historical context to another. White privilege is invisible and normal to those who have it, which makes it hard to discuss because people rarely see how they are being privileged. It goes beyond advantages people enjoy because of their race. It is also the unearned power the system confers by virtue of your race alone. It is a set of institutional benefits, with greater access to power and resources and opportunity, that are closed off to those who do not have it. In the same vein, these advantages are bestowed upon Chinese Singaporeans, regardless of any other intersectional identity they carry. By virtue of being Chinese in Singapore, they start life on a higher place in the scale as compared to minorities. They are the beneficiaries of a system of racial superiority, which is why when I talk about the country I call it a Chinese Supremacist state.

    Many see Chinese privilege in Singapore as the root cause of Singapore’s economic strength. Lee Kuan Yew is the only man to have ever held three political titles in the government. That alone should signal his significance. He was Singapore’s first Prime Minister, and as such, the chief architect behind modern Singapore. He later became Senior Minister, a title he held until his predecessor Goh Chock Tong ascended to the position. In an attempt to continue keeping him in power, he was then given the title of Minister Mentor in 2004. He has been in power since 1959, and only stepped down in 1990, making him the world’s second longest serving head of state, after Fidel Castro. He is the man who has most impacted Singapore with his policies and his words still continue to hold enormous power and clout. In 1989, he commented that Chinese immigration from Hong Kong to Singapore was necessary, given the low birth rates amongst Chinese Singaporeans: without the Chinese ‘there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible.’17 Chinese privilege means that problems within the Chinese community are framed as national crises, while problems within minority communities are blamed on culture or genetics, and left to the communities themselves to handle.

    Chinese privilege in Singapore falls into a unique category with Taiwan (and China, of course). Chinese privilege cannot exist in the U.S. or in Europe because Chinese lack institutionalized economic, social and political power in those places. In Singapore, Chinese Singaporeans have power in every facet of life; it is systemic and systematic.

    AK: For me as a Chinese Singaporean, your analysis makes a lot of sense. How does this racial concept of privilege intertwine with other intersectional oppressions, such as gender?

    ST: In 2012, a survey found that women hold just 6.9 per cent of directorships. Moreover, the joint study with advocacy group BoardAgender, found 61.3 per cent of the more than 730 companies listed on the Singapore exchange do not have a single female member on their boards.’18 The survey does not break it down further by race, making the assumption that all women in Singapore are discriminated against only on the basis of their gender, not their race. Singapore has the same gender representation as other places that tend to erase race in favor of gender. In the West, White women often stand in for ‘all women,’ even though they actually earn more than Black and Latino men in the US,19 just as Chinese women are seen as representatives of all women in Singapore, including minorities.

    Recently, an article cited a survey of Singaporean women’s under-representation on company boards. ‘Companies with more diversity in boardrooms are more profitable, but Singapore doesn’t fare so well – 56.5% of the companies surveyed had all-male board members.’20 It was a matter of much discussion. The article itself concluded that ‘we recommend empowering board nominating committees to cast their net wider and pro-actively look for women candidates.’ However, the article also mentions that ‘59% of the boards were of single ethnicity.’ No discussions, no conversations online or in the mainstream media ensued about this, and the article does not even seem to pick up on the potential impact for minorities, let alone minority women. If women’s rights groups such as AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) are solely focussed on gender representation, not gender in conjunction with racial imbalance, do we need to wonder why minorities on company boards are so few in number? Who are the women actually being represented here? Clearly, Chinese women are the default here. Given the intersection of gender and race, Indian and Malay women are at a double disadvantage. But that conversation does not happen.

    Feminism in Singapore is about making Chinese women equal to Chinese men, not about equality for all women. Dismantling the Chinese patriarchal structure itself would mean that Chinese women would have to give up their racial power and privilege, too, and they do not want to do that. Chinese women need to realise that they actually have better opportunities than many minority men here. As minority women, we are far more attuned to racism and sexism than Chinese women are, because we fight both those intersections every day, and we see how we are treated not as women, but specifically as Malay or Indian women.

    In the recent Singapore Literature Prize awards, all the winners were male, and a furor about women’s exclusion from these prestigious awards broke out.21 Again, however, there is no furor over the fact that no minority person has even won the English prize for fiction. The closest call was the playwright Haresh Sharma in 1993 and the poet Alfian Sa’at, who was awarded a commendation prize in 1998 (both before the prize was categorized into languages). This year, there was not even one minority on the English short list, either for fiction or non-fiction. Chinese writers are fully represented both in the Chinese and English categories. This is what Chinese privilege looks like in everyday life. There was only one, just one, minority woman, in the entire shortlist across all three categories under the English poetry category.22 Of course, she did not win.

    Chinese women clearly realize the gender disparity in Singapore. But since they see themselves as the only women worth talking about in Singapore, they do not focus on the effects of racial discrimination against other women in Singapore.

    AK: I have seen exactly what you mean–Chinese feminists who remain silent when their minority sisters and brothers are being discriminated against. It makes me so mad. For those who are new to the concept, can you please elaborate a little bit more on the effects of Chinese privilege, and give some concrete examples about how Chinese privilege affects minorities in Singapore?

    ST: Privilege and oppression are two sides of the same coin. If one exists, the other does, too. Chinese privilege means that Singaporean minorities are oppressed. Within minority groups themselves, there are subtle differences. Light-skinned North Indians are treated marginally better than darker-skinned South Indians. The term ‘shit-skin’ is often a slur the Chinese use to describe us. This further intersects with class, as class privilege often mediates racial oppression. Higher-class Indians are treated better, and are often co-opted into Chinese supremacy, or they assimilate themselves by choice by marrying Chinese partners, etc. Those the government co-opts become exemplary tokens of our so called multi-culturalism — but they might as well be Chinese. S Dhanabalan, once almost tapped to be the next Prime Minister of Singapore, is of Indian Tamil descent and was a prominent minority in the government.23 He was supposed to represent the Tamil-Indian population in Singapore. He has a Chinese wife and is Christian, while most Indians in Singapore are Hindus. There is such a lack of proper representation of minorities in Parliament. K Shanmugam, another Minister, was instrumental in the state policing of religious Hindu expressions, such as Thaipusam,24 where he spoke on behalf of the government, all the while claiming to represent Indian Singaporeans. Elite Indians buy into the state rhetoric and enforce it against their own people. The complicity with the Chinese majority interest by those who could have done something for the community ensures farcical representation only, designed to only allow us a voice compatible with the government line.

    AK: The issue of interracial marriage is an interesting one. How do you understand Chinese privilege in relation to marriage and relationships?

    ST: In recent years, the number of interracial marriages in Singapore have risen. This is to be expected–after all, we are a multiracial country with a multitude of races and cultures. In 2012, one in five marriages was interethnic.25 Singapore prides itself on being a postracial society, and within the Indian community, there has been indeed been a strong increase of Indian men dating and marrying Chinese women. And yet, the reverse is rarely true–Chinese men do not usually date or marry Indian women. It is also important to realize that the Indian men who marry Chinese women are by and large extremely well-educated members of the higher Indian-Singaporean socioeconomic classes. Chinese women are not marrying blue-collar Indian men, but rather those considered most eligible. Again, race and class issues are intertwined here. Fanon perhaps explains this phenomenon best in Black Skin, White Masks: for Black men, relationships with white women are often about the need for recognition and indirectly, the desire for assimilation.26 I believe this is true in the Singapore context. Indian men who date Chinese women are desperate to assimilate. They instinctively realize the privilege of being Chinese, and unable to access it any other way, aspire to marry a Chinese woman. They do not have to experience racism as much when their wives’ Chinese privilege protects them, and it gives them access to opportunities that are usually reserved for Chinese people. They are effectively deracializing themselves.

    Heterosexual patriarchy is also at work here. Women are expected to marry up wherever possible. Indian women occupy the lowest rung of the Singaporean race hierarchy, and Chinese men occupy the highest. For a Chinese man to date and marry an Indian woman means to marry far beneath his status. Chinese women of a middling socio-economic class can move up a class by marrying the wealthiest indian men in the country. These Indian men, lacking racial privilege, which is itself a ‘property right’,27 can also move up the racial class through gaining access to their wives’ racial privilege. Chinese men gain nothing and lose everything by marrying an Indian girl, while Indian men gain access to racial privilege and Chinese women to class privilege by marrying rich Indian men. But what about Indian women? Singapore does not break down interracial marriages by gender, which obfuscates this racist situation, but the number of people needing to marry into Chineseness shows how powerless the minority communities really are. Indian women like me do not usually have access to the same opportunities Indian men have. Again, we observe the complex intertwinement of sexual, class, and race discrimination here, and the internal paradoxes and contradictions to official postracial, egalitarian Singaporean rhetoric are obvious.

    AK: One interesting theme repeated here is that representation is either always Chinese or White. What do you think is the relationship of Chineseness to Whiteness in Singapore?

    ST: Generally speaking, I think that Chinese Singaporeans do not seem to struggle with reconciling Whiteness and Chineseness. I believe this is the case because Chineseness is seen as equal, and in certain aspects even superior to Whiteness. Whiteness is liked, welcomed, and used as a stamp of approval, but the liberal political ‘Western values’ frequently clash with our ‘Asian values.’ Chinese people tend to see themselves as victims of White racism (while at the same time refusing to recognize their own racism regarding other minorities in Singapore, as I outlined above). White expatriates work well-paying jobs and live in the most expensive apartments in Singapore. They are treated very well everywhere they go in Singapore, because the ‘White is better’ mindset still exists here. Chineseness functions the same way in Singapore as Whiteness, sometimes even more so, since the Chinese are the true owners of power here while White people are long-time beneficiaries of that power.

    As a person of colour living in a supposedly decolonized Singapore, I would say that what makes our struggles markedly different from minorities in the West is that we have to deal with Whiteness on top of Chinese supremacy. So we experience a double racial oppression. I often say minorities here have been colonised twice, once by the British, and once again by the Chinese. What other decolonised state has a completely alien population control political and economic power, while the formerly decolonized indigenous people remain continuously marginalized? The language of Critical Race Theory can only take us so far in Singapore. We need to start coining our own terminology and framework for talking about racism in Singapore. This conversation has just only begun.

    AK: When you complicate this issue of privilege by bringing gender into the picture, how do things shift for women, regarding White privilege and Chinese privilege?

    ST: Intersections always make things complicated, especially for people who carry multiple oppressed identities, and so these shifts are difficult to quantify. White women have more privilege than Chinese women. Chinese women have more privilege than Indian and Malay women. Even among Indian and Malay women, the comparative amount of privilege is hard to pin down. Indians in Singapore are by and large Tamil, the darkest Indians from the subcontinent. Malay women are generally fairer, a light brown compared to the dark brown of most Indian women here. Due to colourism, Malay women might thus have a tad more privilege. But at the same time, this can be negated by something simple as wearing the hijab. Singapore is suspicious of Malay Muslims, and Malay women who wear the hijab are seen as conservative and oppressed. Indian women, however, are not seen as religiously fanatical, even if they are in ethnic attire, as Hinduism is not seen as the same kind of threat as Islam.

    AK: Can you talk about people who inhabit in-between racial spaces, for example people who might be of one ethnicity but can pass for another? How does racism affect them in Singapore?

    ST: Passing is a mixed bag, and it is present across all intersectionally oppressed identities. To put it simply, passing is the ability to be able to ‘pass’ as your oppressors, even though you carry an identity and occupy a space as the ‘other.’ There are many people of mixed race in Singapore, especially a group of people in Singapore called ‘Chindians’, which is a term for people who are Indian and Chinese, and who can pass for Chinese and thus have access to Chinese privilege. People like ‘Chindians’ can effectively move between the worlds of oppressors and oppressed. It is really difficult for people who pass, because they are always fighting to have their entire identities validated.

    AK: We are nearing the end of our conversation. What messages would you like to give to young minorities in Singapore?

    ST: Audre Lorde said that our silence will not protect us. This is true no matter who we are. When you are silent, you are complicit. Inaction against oppression is collusion with oppression.

    To young minorities in Singapore, I would say: you can start small. Call out Chinese people when they behave micro-aggressively. Call out our own people when we show stereotypical prejudices towards Malays, Indians and other minorities. Many Indians believe the Malays are better positioned because of their supposedly free education, even though that policy actually ended a long time ago. Malays believe the Indians are the preferred minority, because there are more high-profile and prominent Indians, and because Indians are compared favorably to Malays, to blame Malays for their alleged lack of progress. Indians are merely the token minority, there only because the state needs to have some public minorities to salvage its international reputation. Indians see Malays as having some sort of special advantage because the state protects their religion, and because they are indigenous to this part of the world. The Chinese supremacist state uses such highly problematic comparisons for its own ends. It wants to keep us from finding solidarity with each other. It wants us to be suspicious of each other. But divide- and-rule tactics only work when we buy the Chinese supremacist state’s lines of thinking and argument.

    Zora Neale Hurston said that when you are silent, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it. Every time you remain silent, they believe they have the right to treat you this way, and worse than that, that you want to be treated this way. Again, to the Singaporean youth I would say, do not be afraid, and do not be silent. This country has gone through four generations since independence, and with each, it has become less willing to talk about its serious race problems. That needs to change. The conversation needs to happen. You cannot sit back and let a few of us take all the hits. Hit us long and hard enough, and without the support from our own communities, we will inevitably cower, too. It is unconscionable for you to let others fight your oppression, while you wait to reap the rewards of what may come. Realise that we can only do this together, or we cannot do it at all.
    _____

    Notes:

    1. “National Registration Identity Card.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

    2. Ministry of Education, Singapore: Press Releases – Performance by Ethnic Group in National Examinations 2002-2011.” Oct. 29, 2012. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2012/10/performance-by-ethnic-group-in.php. Back to the essay

    3. Zakir Hussain, “No Short Cut to Raising Malays’ Maths Grades,” in The Straits Times, Dec. 18, 2009. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://news.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20091214-185790.html Back to the essay

    4. Hsien Loong Lee, “Singapore’s Four Principles Of Governance.” Civil Service College, Nov. 1, 2004. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. https://www.cscollege.gov.sg/knowledge/ethos/ethos november 2004/pages/singapore four principles of governance.aspx Back to the essay

    5. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1996), 9. Back to the essay

    6. Education Statistics Digest.” Ministry of Education, Singapore, Jan. 1, 2013. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/education-statistics-digest/files/esd-2013.pdf Back to the essay

    7. Demographics of Singapore.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 14, 2015. Back to the essay

    8. See L. Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community (Oxford University Press, 2001) for an excellent discussion on oppression of the Malay community. Back to the essay

    9. “Miss Singapore Universe.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 16, 2015. Back to the essay

    10. Surekha Yadav, “Is Singapore a Racist Country?” Malay Mail Online, Aug. 30, 2014. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.themalaymailonline.com/opinion/surekha-a-yadav/article/is-singapore-a-racist-country Back to the essay

    11. William Keng Mun Lee, “Gender Inequality And Discrimination In Singapore,” in Journal of Contemporary Asia 28, no. 4 (1998): 484-97. Back to the essay

    12. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 267. Back to the essay

    13. “Special Assistance Plan.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

    14. Tom Plate, “The Fox and the Hedgehog (Not a Disney Movie),” in Giants of Asia; Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew Citizen Singapore; How to Build a Nation. 2nd ed. (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International [Asia] Ptd, 2013), 61. Back to the essay

    15. Kuan Yew Lee and Fook Kwang Han, Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, 1st ed. (Singapore: Straits Times, 2011), 230. Back to the essay

    16. Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference. 2nd ed. (Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 24. Back to the essay

    17. Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, Floating on a Malayan Breeze Travels in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 194. Back to the essay

    18. Joe Havely, “Singapore Lags in Board Diversity,” Singapore Lags in Board Diversity. Think Business, National University of Singapore, Business School, Mar. 7, 2012. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://thinkbusiness.nus.edu/articles/item/7-singapore-boardroom-diversity Back to the essay

    19. Derek Thompson, “The Workforce Is Even More Divided by Race Than You Think,” in The Atlantic, Nov. 6, 2013. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

    20. Yen Nee Lee, “Companies with More Diverse Boards Fare Better: Study.” TODAY Online, Sept. 29, 2014. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://tablet.todayonline.com/business/companies-more-diverse-boards-fare-better-study Back to the essay

    21. Corrie Tan, “Gender Bias Allegations over Singapore Literature Prize English Poetry Results,” Books News & Top Stories, in The Straits Times, Nov. 6, 2014. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/books/story/gender-bias-allegations-over-singapore-literature-prize-english-poetry-results Back to the essay

    22. “Singapore Literature Prize,” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 16, 2015. Back to the essay

    23. “S. Dhanabalan,” Wikipedia. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. Back to the essay

    24. “The Uproar Over Thaipusam.” The Online Citizen, Jan. 21, 2011. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2011/01/the-uproar-over-thaipusam/ Back to the essay

    25. Theresa Tan, “More Mixed Unions, Remarriages Based on Latest Marriage Data,” in The Sunday Times, Sept. 30, 2012, Special Reports section. Back to the essay

    26. Frantz Fanon, “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008), 45-60. Back to the essay

    27. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707-791. Back to the essay

  • Crisis and Criticism: The Predicament of Global Modernity

    Crisis and Criticism: The Predicament of Global Modernity

    'Uighur academic Ilham Tohti sits during his trial on separatism charges in Urumqi, Xinjiang region, in this still image taken from video shot on September 17-18, 2014. REUTERS/CCTV via Reuters TV' at Reuters
    ‘Uighur academic Ilham Tohti sits during his trial on separatism charges in Urumqi, Xinjiang region, in this still image taken from video shot on September 17-18, 2014. REUTERS/CCTV via Reuters TV’ credit: Reuters

    a lecture presented at the University of Pittsburgh on September 10th, 2014

    by Arif Dirlik
    ~
    I will make a case in this discussion* for closer attention to demands on criticism thrown up by current global circumstances that are yet to be recognized in mainstream critical practice for their urgent significance. That we are living through a time of unprecedented crisis is widely acknowledged. What is less certain is whether this crisis is one of the crises endemic to the capitalist world system, an outcome of systemic transformations at work that suggest an impending hegemonic shift (with the People’s Republic of China[PRC] as the up-and-coming claimant), or a terminal crisis that signals the collapse of life as we know it as unbridled capitalist development in its various competing versions runs up against the ecological limitations of the earth.

    At the same time, the social and geo-cultural issues that have dynamized criticism for the past half century seem presently to have reached a dead-end. The drift to social division, political authoritarianism and cultural fragmentation no doubt is responsible for the apparent sense of helplessness that has become the refrain of critical work, and needs to frame discussion of the crisis of criticism. But there is also an urgent need to attend to the part played in this crisis by the failure of critical practice to update its concerns in response to changing social and global circumstances. These circumstances call for reconsideration of the conceptual and political orientations that inspired criticism in its origins in the 1960s, but are most striking presently for their seeming helplessness if not irrelevance in the face of a new global situation.

    Of special interest in my discussion are issues of culture and cultural difference at both national and global levels. The relationship between culture and criticism has been a staple for the last two decades both of postcolonial criticism and geopolitical thinking, provoked by questions pertaining to the past and present status of the hegemony of Euromodernity and Eurocentric ways of thinking. Ongoing reconfiguration of power relations globally, and emergent claims to alternative “centrisms”(and “alternative modernities”), suggest a need to recast the terms of this relationship: whether or not criticism, if it is to remain meaningful, needs to reconsider some of the intellectual and ideological impulses that have driven it since the upheavals of the 1960s. Any such consideration raises delicate political questions, which may be one fundamental reason for the reluctance to confront them. Criticism, if it is to be worthy of the name, needs to face up to these problems lest it in its silence over these questions it degenerates into complicity with emergent configurations of political power, social oppression, and cultural obscurantism.

    Central to the question of criticism are the problematic legacies of the Enlightenment as the cultural hallmark of Euromodernity, especially the issue of universalism. The Enlightenment has been credited with the achievements of Euromodernity. It also has been condemned for the latter’s destructive consequences. Its claims to universality have drawn much criticism in recent years along with the challenges to Euromodernity. As the Enlightenment also has been endowed with seminal significance as the fountainhead of critical practice, the appearance of alternative claims on modernity throws up significant questions for criticism. I take up some of these questions below.

    It is not my intention here to engage in an abstract discussion of what may constitute “criticism,” which already has been taken up by a long line of thinkers but also because too much preoccupation with abstraction often ends up in a theoretical autism that afflicts much critical writing that appears lost in the maze of its own theoretical elaborations. Suffice it to say that I understand criticism not in the routine professionalized and politically constrained sense that it appears in our educational system (as in the promise of cultivating “critical thinking”—often not very critical in what it excludes), but radical critical work that seeks to go “to the root” of things, pursues inquiry into foundations and totalities, into the very categories of analysis we deploy to grasp and explain the conditions of our existence, and throws it all back in the face of power to demand a better world. Critical work in any meaningful sense needs to be transformative in its consequences, not just in exploring more efficient functioning of the existing system but in opening its social and political assumptions to questioning and change. It seems increasingly that there is no promise on the horizon of all the things criticism seeks to achieve (including “critical thinking”), which raises painful questions about the meaning of radical criticism and what is to be expected of its further pursuit. And yet, this makes criticism not less but all the more urgent against a status quo whose promise of a bright future secured by unencumbered markets and technological innovation is not sufficient to cover over the deepening marginalization if not the threat of actual extinction of ever greater numbers of people around the world–dangers widely recognized even by those who preside over the existing system, as well as those who are responsible for its ideological sustenance.1

    * * *

    I would like to enter my discussion through a scandalous incident that took place at the recent 20th biennial meeting of the European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS). The meeting this year, hosted by the venerable universities of Minho and Coimbra in Portugal, was devoted to the exploration of the development of China studies, entitled, “From the origins of Sinology to current interdisciplinary research approaches: Bridging the past and future of Chinese Studies.” When they received their conference programs, the participants discovered that two pages had been torn out of the programs by the organizers, apparently at the insistence of Mme. Xu Lin, Director-General of the Hanban, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) state organ in charge of the so-called Confucius Institutes, who in 2009 was appointed counselor to the State Council (the cabinet) with vice-ministerial rank, presumably in recognition of her contribution to the propaganda goals of the state. The pages torn out related to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in Taiwan, which long had sponsored the EACS and, according to a report in a Taiwanese newspaper, donated 650, 000 Taiwanese yuan (around US$ 22,000.-) to this year’s meeting.2 EACS investigation of the incident also found that, according to Mme. Xu, some of the abstracts in the program “were contrary to Chinese regulations, and issued a mandatory request that mention of the support of the CCSP [Confucius China Studies Program] be removed from the Conference Abstracts. She was also annoyed at what she considered to be the limited extent of the Confucius Institute publicity and disliked the CCKF [Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation] self-presentation.”3

    This act of academic vandalism has been met with dismay, at least among those who are still capable of being shocked at the intrusion of PRC propaganda organs into the very institutional structures of academic work. If I may share with you responses from distinguished colleagues who must remain nameless since I do not have their permission to cite them by name:

    A Danish historian who long has been involved with EACS:

    Indeed, what did the organizers of the conference and the EACS have in mind when accepting such a move? It is a very hot summer in Europe, but surely no excuse for not fighting Hanban considering the very long relationship between the EACS and the CCK Foundation. As far as I have understood, the CCK Foundation did not even have any representatives present at the conference! Well, it is difficult in Europe in general fighting back Hanban’s Confucius Institutes…

    A distinguished historian of religion in China from the University of Paris, presently teaching in Hong Kong:

    Europeans are even more gutless than Americans, and clearly no less stupid. You are right: disgusting! Every book I put out in Shanghai I have to fight to get “CCK-financed” in the English acknowledgements. Impossible to put it in the Chinese version.

    A US historian of religion commenting on a news item on the conference I had posted on FB:

    Moments like these when the veil drops are precious, let’s hope it exposes some truths.

    A distinguished anthropologist from Beijing University:

    This kind of “original rudeness” has been practiced for decades as “civility.” A disgrace, urgently needing treatment.

          And after I asked him to further explain these terms:      

    by “civility” I usually refer to civilization; “original rudeness” is what I invent in English to describe the rough manners encouraged in Mao’s time and continued to be performed until now. In old and new Chinese movies, we often see those boys or girls who look really straightforward and “foolish” are more attractive to their opposite sex. To some extent, this kind of rudeness has been seen as what expresses honesty…but the bad performance from the official of Hanban might just be another thing. I would see it as stupid; but other Chinese may see it differently – some may be even proud of him[sic] we can see from this that cosmopolitan civility is still needed in China.

    I share these messages with you to convey a sense of the deep frustration among many scholars of China with their impotence against the insinuation of PRC state and propaganda organs in educational institutions in Europe and North America.4 In the case of the colleague from Beijing University, there is also embarrassment at the delinquent behavior of a government official, combined with a different kind of frustration: that the act is unlikely to make much impression on a PRC academic and popular culture that is inured to vandalism if it does not actually condone it, beginning with the Party-state itself.

    The frustration is not restricted to scholars of China. The Canadian Association of Higher Education Teachers and the American Association of University Professors have both rebuked universities in the two countries for allowing Confucius Institutes into universities and/or for their compliance with the terms set by the PRC.5 University of Chicago professors have petitioned the university administration to reconsider its agreement with the Hanban. The most thorough and eloquent criticisms of the institutes have been penned not by a China specialist but the distinguished anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.6 This broad involvement of university faculty indicates that the issues at hand go beyond Confucius Institutes or the PRC, and is revealing of accumulating frustration with significant trends that promise to end higher education as we have known it. The Institutes have been beneficiaries but also possibly the most offensive instance to date of the increasingly blatant administrative usurpation of faculty prerogatives in university governance, progressive subjection of education to business interests, and the normalization of censorship in education. At the behest of the Hanban for confidentiality, agreements over the institutes have been entered in most cases without consultation with the faculty, or at best with select faculty who, whatever the specific motivations may be in individual cases, display few qualms about complying with trends to administrative opacity or the secrecy demanded by the propaganda arm of a foreign state. The promise of the institutes to serve as bridges to business opportunities with the PRC has served as a major enticement, giving business and even local communities a stake in their acceptance and promotion, but further compromising academic autonomy. Despite all manner of self-serving protestations by those involved in the institutes, formally entered agreement to avoid issues that might conflict with so-called Chinese cultural and political norms—or whatever might “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”—translates in practice to tacit self-censorship on questions the PRC would like to keep out of public hearing—the well-known issues of Taiwan, Tibet, June Fourth, jailed dissidents, etc., etc. It also legitimizes censorship.7

    These issues concern, or should concern, everyone who has a stake in higher education. The questions facing scholars of China are narrower in focus and more specific to disciplinary concerns, but they may be even more fundamental and far-reaching in their implications than the institutional operations of the university. Beneath mundane issues of language teaching, teacher quality, academic rigorousness lie a very important question: who controls the production of knowledge about China. Like other similar organizations, including the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Hanban has already entered the business of sponsoring research and conference in research universities. But control is another matter. Interestingly, in its very vulgarity, Xu Lin’s attempt to suppress the mention of a Taiwan competitor at an academic conference brings up this question more insistently than the sugar-coated representations of Confucius Institutes as simple providers of knowledge of Chinese language and culture to school-children, or facilitators of business. The conjoining of teaching and business in Hanban activity itself should give us pause about easy acceptance of those representations. But the problem goes deeper.

    It is a puzzle that a great many commentators in the US and Europe should be in self-denial about PRC aspirations to global hegemony when within the PRC it is a matter of ongoing conversation among Party leaders and influential opinion-makers, as well as the general public. To be sure, there is no end of speculation over elusive questions of whether or not and when the PRC might achieve global hegemony.8 But there is far less attention to the more immediate question of aspirations to hegemony—except among some on the right—possibly because it might fuel animosity and ill-feeling. It seems safer to go along with the more diplomatically innocuous official statements that all the PRC wants is equality and equal recognition, not world hegemony, even as it carves out spaces of “influence” around the globe.

    In recent years, PRC leaders have made no secret that they wish to replace the existing world order over which the US presides. At the most modest level, President Xi Jinping’s suggestion to the US President that the Pacific was big enough for the two countries to share as part of a “new great power relationship” was remarkable for its erasure of everyone else who lives within or around the Pacific. It would take the utter blindness of servile partisanship to portray PRC activity in eastern Asia, based on spurious historical claims, as anything but moves to establish regional hegemony which, John Mearsheimer has argued, is the first step in the establishment of global hegemony—a Monroe Doctrine for Eastern Asia.9 At the popular level, an obscure philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhao Tingyang, has achieved fame nationally and in international power circles for his design of an alternative to the current international system based on a modernized version of the hierarchical “Under-Heaven”(Tianxia) tributary system that informed imperial China until the early twentieth century.10

    Zhao’s work is interesting because it has been acclaimed as a plausible example of the call for “IR theory with Chinese characteristics” that corresponds to the PRC’s rising status—a call that eloquently brings together knowledge-production and the search for hegemony. The prevalent obsession with tagging the phrase “Chinese characteristics” onto everything from the most mundane to the most abstractly theoretical is well-known. But it seems to have acquired some urgency with the Xi Jinping leadership’s apparent desire to regulate “Western” influence on scholarship and intellectual activity in general as part of his vaunted “China Dream” that also includes the elimination of corruption along with rival centers of power, enhancing Party prestige and control over society, and the projection of PRC hard and soft power both upon the global scene.

    The policy blueprint laid down in the landmark third plenary session of the 18th Central Committee stressed “the strengthening of propaganda powers and the establishment of a Chinese system of discourse (Zhongguo huayu xitong) to propel Chinese culture into the world at large (tuidong Zhonghua wenhua zouxiang shijie).”11 The discourse is to be constructed upon the three pillars of “the fine tradition of making Marxism Chinese,” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the creation of a contemporary Chinese culture by melding the Chinese and the foreign, and the old and the new. The Xi leaderships stress on the “ninety-year” revolutionary tradition—perhaps the foundation of Party legitimacy—is not necessarily in conflict with the plans for greater integration with the global neoliberal economy, since in Party theorization of “Chinese Marxism” the content of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is subject to change in response to changing circumstances—and in accordance with the policies of each new generation of leaders.12 While the “China dream” is the subject of ongoing discussion, Xi Jinping has made his own the long standing “dream” of the rejuvenation and renaissance of the Chinese nation as the marker of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” under his leadership. Lest this be taken to be a return to a parochial conservatism, it is important to note that discussions of “Chinese discourse” note his emphasis on “making our own the good things from others” as well as “making the old serve the present” as fundamental characteristic of “Chinese” cultural identity. It might be recalled that the latter slogan caused much distress among foreign observers during the Cultural Revolution amidst reports that peasants, taking the slogan at its word, had begun to dismantle the Great Wall to use its stones to build homes for themselves! Presently, according to President Xi, the rich products of this 5000 year old tradition should be taken out to the world to foster awareness of the universal value of a living Chinese culture that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries in its rich intellectual and artistic achievements. He also called upon Chinese scholars around the world to “tell China’s story” (Zhongguode gushi).

    A PRC expert on foreign relations and the US active in global international relations circles has provided a convenient summary of Party leaders and intellectuals’ close attention to “discursive struggles” over the last decade, beginning with the Hu Jintao leadership, and its institutional and intellectuals issues.13 The motivation, as he puts it, was to carve out a political cultural space of its own corresponding to the PRC’s rising stature as a world power:

    Although China has already joined the mainstream international community through this policy [Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up policy], one of the main findings of the paper is that China does not want to be a member of Western system. Instead, China is in the process of developing a unique type of nation-building to promote the Chinese model in the coming years.14

    The formulation of a Chinese discourse was both defensive and promotional: to defend the PRC against its portrayals as a threat to world economy and politics, but at the same time to promote an image that would enhance its reputation in the world as a counterpart to a declining US hegemony caught up in constant warfare, economic problems, cultural disintegration and waning prestige.

    It is interesting, however, that revamping the propaganda apparatus in public relations guise drew its inspiration mainly from the US example. The major inspiration was the idea of “soft power” formulated by the US scholar and one time government official Joseph Nye. US public relations practices and institutions are visible in everything from sending intellectuals out to the world to present a picture of PRC realities as the “Chinese people” perceive them to hosting international events, from publication activity in foreign languages to TV programming, from students sent abroad to students attracted to the PRC, and in the wholesale transformation of the very appearance and style of those who presented the PRC to the world. The idea of discourse was of Foucauldian inspiration, subject to much interpretation and misinterpretation. But its basic sense was quite clear. Participants in the discussion of discursive power and in its institutional formulations “all emphasize discourse as a kind of power structure and analyze the power of discourse through the lens of dominant characteristics such as culture, ideology and other norms. They consist of the ways we think and talk about a subject matter, influencing and reflecting the ways we act in relation to it. This is the basic premise of discourse theory.”15 And they all share a common goal. In the author’s own words, without editing,

    Obviously, China chooses to join the international society led by a western value held concept from thirty years ago, but it did not plan to accept completely the named “universal value concept” of the western countries, nor wish to be a member of those countries. Instead, China wishes to start from its national identity and form a world from China’s word, and insist in the development road with Chinese characteristics, so as to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation. In order to realize this century dream, China is busy drawing on its discursive power and achieving this strategy with great efforts in public diplomacy.16

    Confucius Institutes (going back to 2004) were conceived as part of this discursive struggle, with “Confucius identified as a teaching brand to promote the[sic] Chinese culture.”17 Language teaching was crucial to this task. The number of foreigners learning Chinese (“40 million” at last count) is itself a matter of pride, but the ultimate goal is the assimilation of “Chinese culture” through introduction to the language and whatever cultural resources may be available locally (from art, opera, singing and dancing to cooking and wine-tasting). It would be good to know how so-called Chinese culture is actually represented in the classroom beyond these consumer routines. To my knowledge, no one has so far been able to do a thorough ethnography of the Institutes, partly because of the opaqueness (at the “mandatory request” of Hanban) of their operations.18 One of the most interesting and probably far-reaching aspect of Hanban educational activities is to employ higher education Confucius Institutes as platforms to reach out into the community and public school classrooms. While we may only guess at the intentions behind this outreach, I think it is plausible to assume that they are not there to train future China specialists, although that, too, may happen, but to create cultural conditions where “China” ceases to be foreign, and acquires the same kind of familiarity that most people around the world have with United States cultural activity and products; at its best, to feel at home in a Chinese world. Kids in kindergarten and elementary school are more likely to be amenable to this goal than the less reliable college students!19

    Lest it seem that I am reading too much into this activity, let me recall a portrayal of an imaginary (“dreamlike?”) Chinese world by Tu Wei-ming, former Harvard professor, prominent promoter of Confucianism as a global idea, and presently founding Dean of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Beijing University—a highly respected and influential senior intellectual. In an essay published in 1991, he offered the following as a description of what he called “cultural China”:

    Cultural China can be examined in terms of a continuous interaction of three symbolic universes. The first consists of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—that is, the societies populated predominantly by cultural and ethnic Chinese. The second consist of Chinese communities throughout the world, including a politically significant minority in Malaysia…and a numerically negligible minority in the United States…The third symbolic universe consists of individual men and women, such as scholars, teachers, journalists, industrialists, traders, entrepreneurs, and writers, who try to understand China intellectually and bring their conceptions of China to their own linguistic communities. For the last four decades the international discourse on cultural China has been shaped more by the third symbolic universe than by the first two combined…Sinologists in North America Japan, Europe, and increasingly Australia have similarly exercised a great deal of power in determining the scholarly agenda for cultural China as a whole.20

    “China’s rise” over the last two decades has reconfigured the geography of “cultural China,” and the dynamics of the interaction between these three “symbolic universes,” with the relocation of the “center” in mainland China which now seeks to bring the other two spheres under its hegemony. We need not view Tu’s description as some kind of blueprint in order to appreciate the valuable insight it offers into reading the contemporary situation. The PRC seeks to bring under its direct rule the Chinese societies of Hong Kong and Taiwan, with Singapore somewhat more problematic given its distance from the mainland, and this despite the fact that it served as a model for PRC development beginning in the 1990s. Chinese overseas are obviously a major target of PRC cultural activity, especially now that their numbers are being swelled by new immigrants from the PRC with considerable financial and political clout. What I have discussed above—and the Xu Lin episode—provide sufficient evidence, I think, to indicate the significance placed upon expanding the third sphere, and shaping its activities. Hegemony over the production of knowledge on China is crucial to this end.

    There is nothing particularly earth-shattering about this activity except that the PRC’s habitual conspiratorial behavior makes it seem so. We may observe that the PRC is doing what other hegemonic powers—especially the US—have done before it: recruit foreign constituencies in the expansion of cultural power. To put it in mundane terms, as the so-called “West” established its global hegemony by creating “westernized” foreigners, the PRC in search of hegemony seeks through various means to expand the sphere of “Chinized” foreigners, to use the term offered by the author of the article discussed above.21

    There has been considerable success over the last decade in promoting a positive image for the PRC globally, although it is still unclear how much of this success is due not to cultural activity but the economic lure of a fast developing economy.22 PRC analysts are quite correct to feel that this may be the opportune moment, given that the existing hegemon is mired in social division, dysfunctional political conflict, continual warfare and a seeming addiction to a culture of violence. It is also the case that the craze for what is called “development” trumps in the eyes of political leaders and large populations around the world qualms about human rights and democracy, especially where these are not major concerns to begin with.

    It is also the case that similarly to its predecessors going back to the Guomindang in the 1930s, the current PRC regime has been unable to overcome a nativist provincialism intertwined with anxieties about the future of the Communist Party that is a major obstacle to its hegemonic aspirations.23 Complaints about cultural victimization and national humiliation sit uneasily with assertions of cultural superiority and aspirations to global hegemony. Hankerings for a global “Tianxia” ignore that despite the scramble to partake of the PRC’s economic development, other nation-states are just as keen about their political sovereignty and cultural legacies as the PRC itself—just as surely as they are aware of the spuriousness of claims to genetic peacefulness when PRC leaders, with enthusiastic support from public opinion, openly declare that “national rejuvenation” includes the recapture, if necessary by violence, the domains of their imperial predecessors, and then some.24 Pursuit of the globalization of so-called “Chinese culture” is accompanied by a cultural defensiveness that tags “Chinese characteristics” to everything from the most mundane everyday practices to crucial realms of state ideology. Claims of universal value for Chinese cultural products are rendered questionable by the simultaneous denial of universality as a tool of “Western” hegemony. PRC leaders and their spokespeople officially deny any aspirations to global hegemony, needless to say, but then we might wonder what they have in mind when they accuse other powers of “obstructing China’s rise,” when those powers celebrate the PRC’s economic development on which they have become dependent, and allow its propaganda organs into their educational systems! Similarly, if the goal is not hegemony over knowledge production about “China,” why would these same leaders and their functionaries be so concerned to show the world the universal value of Chinese civilization, when that is already very much part of the global perception that has made the PRC the beneficiary of a benign Orientalism—or tear out pages of a conference program on the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation which shares the same goal of promoting “Chinese” civilization?

    While the new “public relations” approach has yielded impressive results, discursive struggle entails more than a competition in the global cultural or “discourse market,”25 but finds expression also in the suppression of competing discourses at home and abroad. The “good things” from the outside world do not include the seven deadly sins which have been expressly forbidden as “dangerous western influences”: universal values, freedom of speech, civil society, civil rights, the historical errors of the Chinese Communist Party, crony capitalism, and judicial independence.26 While the PRC boasts a constitution, talk of matters such as “constitutional democracy” is not to be permitted.27 A prohibition against the use of terms like “democracy,” “dictatorship,” “class,” etc., has been in effect for some time and, according to a colleague from Shanghai, authorities look askance at the use even of a seemingly word like “youth” (qingnian) in titles of scholarly works. Just recently, the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was chosen by the Party Central Commission for Discipline Inspection as the location from which to warn the Academy that “it had been infiltrated by foreign forces.”28 The persecution and incarceration of both Han and Minority scholars and activists who transgress against these prohibitions is a matter of daily record. The same commentator who was cited above for the reference to a “global discourse market,” writes that “basically speaking,” the prohibitions have not changed the widespread attitude of reverence in the intellectual world for things western, “the blind and superstitious following of western scholarship and theories, and entrapment in the western `discourse pitfall’ (xianjin).” People may contend all they want, she concludes, but the discourse we need is one with Chinese “airs” (fengge) that strengthens China’s “discursive power”(huayu quan).29 This translates in practice to the construction of theories (including Marxism) and historical narratives built around Chinese development (with the Party at its core) that may also serve as inspiration if not an actual model for others.

    * * *

    The case of the PRC is especially important for illustrating the challenge to knowledge production of the reconfigurations of global power, but it is by no means the only one. Arguably even more egregious than Xu Lin’s attempt at censorship at the EACS conference was the lawsuit brought against the University of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, for its alleged insults to Indian religion, which resulted in Penguin publishers’ agreement to pulp the copies of the book in India. The lawsuit was brought by a Dina Nath Batra whose own books, devoted to purging the study of the past of “Western cultur[al]” influences, have been compulsory reading in Gujarat under state minister, Narendra Modi, now the prime minister of India. The Modi government recently appointed as the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research a little-known historian also devoted to what Indian scholars describe as “the saffronization of education.”30

    If such incidents were just about censorship, we could easily ignore them as merely more vulgar and extreme cases of censorship which is not particularly novel at either the national or the global level, including in the USA. This is not to downplay their significance as threats to democracy and academic freedom globally, as they also set examples for others. Silence before such acts is to be complicit in oppressive practices.

    Nevertheless, it would be a serious mistake to allow preoccupation with these oppressive practices to distract attention from even deeper problems with long term consequences. What renders these acts truly significant are the alternative knowledge or value system in whose name the censorship is exercised. The grievances that they express are hardly to be denied. Nor may we dismiss without due consideration the alternatives they offer at a time when the existing order presided over by Euro/American hegemony shows every sign of being unsustainable materially and spiritually.

    It has been clear for some time now that “our ways of knowing” are in deep crisis. The social upheaval of the 1960s brought diverse new constituencies into educational institutions, who demanded representation both in the content of learning and its mode of delivery, which has expanded the scope of knowledge enormously but also made it more complicated than ever to determine what is and is not worth knowing. Similarly, on the global scene, postcolonial and postrevolutionary regimes that emerged from post-World War II national liberation struggles demand new kinds of knowledge that counter the erasure of their pasts and their cultural interests by colonial domination and imperialist hegemony. 31 This has been a concern all along of Chinese revolutionaries of differing stripes. The Gandhian legacy in India is even better known. The list may easily be expanded to include diverse peoples around the world, from indigenous peoples to formerly imperial entities. The colonial hubris that “progress” or “modernization” would doom to forgetfulness the pasts of the colonized or the dominated overlooked the very part colonial domination and imperial hegemony played in provoking the construction of the pasts that would serve the cause of independence and development. Those pasts have surfaced with a vengeance, insisting on their own voices in modernity, and the inclusion of their pasts in its making. Their very presence exposes the fallibility of the knowledge claims of Euromodernity, and the damage it has inflicted on nature and human societies in the very course of forcing them onto the path of “progress.” Almost by tacit common consent, it seems, modern knowledge is on trial, facing claimants who demand recognition of their various versions of how things came to be, and where they would like to see them headed.

    These claims, however, are beset by contradictions. The same processes that have opened up the intellectual space to “alternative modernities,” as they are described, also are inexorably forcing people into a common future that will allow no viable alternative—what is commonly called globalization and/or development. This is a condition that I have described as global modernity: the simultaneous integration of the world through the globalization of capital, and its fracturing along a variety of faultlines which finds expression not only in conflicts of interest but in the assertion of reified sovereign cultural identities.<sup32 The contradiction is visible also in the realm of knowledge in the denial of universality to social, political and cultural practices while endowing with nearly universal status the logic of technology and the culture of consumption. The former appear not only as endowments of nation or civilization, but also as guarantors that identity will not be lost in its globalization. This is the significance of knowledge production in support of the cultivation of those values. On the other hand, it is difficult to keep apart the two realms of knowledge, the kind of knowledge for success in the capitalist economy and the kind of knowledge necessary to the cultivation of national or civilizational identity, as the dynamic interplay between the two realms produce new demands on identity and subjectivity.33 For over a century now, Chinese thinkers and leaders have not been able to find an answer to their search for a modernity that would preserve and strengthen a “Chinese” substance with “Western” instrumentality, the famous ti-yong distinction. Indeed, I hope it is clear from my discussion above of the search for a “Chinese discursive system” that even the effort to eliminate the influence of so-called “Western discourse” resorts to a conceptual vocabulary provided by the latter. This does not mean that there are no real differences among peoples, but it does suggest that those differences be viewed at all times also through the commonalities which are also a pervasive presence.

    It seems deeply ironic that economic and to some extent social and cultural globalization should signal the end of universalism but it is not very surprising. Political universals follow the logic not of philosophy but of power and hegemony. Globalization may have been intended to complete the conquest of the globe for the capitalist modernity that for nearly half a millennium had empowered Euro/American domination. Capitalist modernity has emerged victorious, but contrary to expectations, rather than buttress the existing centers of hegemony, its benefits have gone mostly to challengers who now make their own claims on global power and hegemony, in the process denying the universality of value- and knowledge-claims that for two centuries have denied recognition to their intellectual and ethical inheritances. The denial of universality is at bottom little more than the denial of Euro/American hegemony in search of intellectual and ethical sovereignty, with the exception of the PRC whose aspirations, I have suggested, suggest not just a defensive nationalism but alternative global designs.

    It might be useful here to recall two competing metaphors that appeared in the 1990s, almost simultaneously, that have a direct bearing on this question: the “clash of civilizations,” put forward by the late Samuel Huntington, and “hybridization,” that has held a central place in postcolonial criticism.34 We can see both paradigms at work in the contemporary world, albeit in different mixes and subject to local inflections. It is interesting that both paradigms criticized Eurocentric universalism, if for different reasons. Huntington’s exclusivist culturalism led him to advocate hardened cultural boundaries for the reason that others did not or could not share the values the “West” considered universal. Postcolonial criticism, on the other hand, perceived in hybridity the possibility of rendering cultural boundaries porous as a first step in the recognition of cultures only unsuccessfully suppressed under Euromodernity, and offering the possibility of exchange and negotiation between different cultural entities once they had achieved some measure of equivalence. Radical critics have understandably been drawn to the latter alternative, and in the process ignored the appeals of the “clash” paradigm among patriotic groups, including “leftist” patriotic groups in countries like China where memories of revolutionary anti-imperialism survive the abandonment of revolution. The puzzling attraction to Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction among such groups also appears more easily comprehensible when taken in conjunction with the Huntingtonian anticipation of “clash” if and when these groups emerged from under the hegemony of “western civilization,” which they already seemed to be doing when he offered his paradigm in the early 1990s. The “clash” paradigm has insistently moved to the foreground over the last two decades. The “hybridity” paradigm is by no means dead, but its vulnerabilities have also become increasingly evident. Cultural hybrids are not “things,” as they may appear in their biological counterparts—like nectarines, as it were—but complexes of relationships and contradictions the resolution of which depends on concrete historical circumstances.35 Put bluntly, depending on context, “hybrids” may end up on the political right or the left—or anywhere on a broad spectrum of possibilities. The stress in much postcolonial criticism on hybridity along ethnic, national or “civilizational” boundaries, moreover, invites reification of these categories, distracting attention from the differences and hybridities in their very constitution. In a global environment of counterrevolutionary shift to the right—combined with nostalgia for lost imperial greatness—pressures to exclusionary culturalism along these boundaries are quite powerful despite intensifying transnationalism propelled by a globalized capitalism. This may be seen, for example, in the growth of diasporic nationalism in closer identification with nations of origin, especially in the case of countries such as the PRC, India and Turkey which have registered impressive success in their ability to employ globalization to national ends.

    What these changes imply for critical practice is worth pondering. Globalization insistently forces into one common intellectual space diverse conversations on knowledge and values. It creates commonalities but also differences that challenge assumptions of universality in hegemonic societies that long have been able to treat alternative voices as a minor nuisance. Comparisons between the present and Cold War conflicts are widely off the mark. Cold War confrontations between capitalism and socialism presupposed competing political economic spatialities, but shared common assumptions about universality. Socialism assumed national form, to be sure, but we may recall that differences between existing socialist societies were voiced in the language of “revisionism,” suggesting deviation from a political project informed by universal principles. To take the case of the Chinese revolution, when revolutionaries in the 1940s began to insist on “making Marxism Chinese”(Makesi zhuyi Zhongguohua), the project was conceived as the integration of “the universal principles of Marxism” with the concrete circumstances of Chinese society. The phrase is still commonplace in ideological discourse in postrevolutionary PRC, but more as a fading trace from the past than a meaningful guide to the future. The globalization of capitalism has abolished the competing spaces of political economy. Differences are expressed instead in claims to alternative cultural spaces. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is above all a cultural idea yoked to aspirations of national rejuvenation that are conspicuously suspicious of universality. To speak of “revisionism” in our day would no doubt seem farcically anachronistic. The global space capitalism claimed in the aftermath of the Cold War is already fragmenting under pressure from claims of cultural difference empowered by reconfigurations of the capitalist world economy. If universalism persists as a goal, it can no longer be phrased in the same terms as it was under the hegemony of Euromodernity, but will have to be formulated out of contemporary conversations that now include voices silenced or marginalized under the regime of Euromodernity.

    Rescuing alternative knowledge and value systems from the erasures of Euromodernity has been part and parcel of radical critical thinking since the 1960s, nourished by a very universalist belief in the possibilities of human diversity. This task is much more complicated than it may appear. What these alternative knowledge and value systems consist of has been open to question all along—whether we speak of the cultures of women, ethnicities, indigenous peoples or nations and civilizations. The “traditions” that identified nations and civilizations in Euro/American modernization discourses were reified misrepresentations of complex intellectual and cultural legacies, often with blurred boundaries between the inside and the outside. Diversity in these societies is erased by a multiculturalism that similarly identifies “authentic” cultural identity with reified traditions.

    The relationship to Euromodernity has been equally complicated. After two centuries of global revolutionary transformation, it is hardly possible to speak of East/West, Asia/Europe, Chinese/Western, etc., as if they were mutually exclusive cultural entities. The cultural identities that are attributed to Chineseness, Hinduism, Islam, or even more crudely, continental entities like Asia and Europe, are ironically legacies of Euromodern reification of these cultural entities. Their defense equally notably, draws upon the language of critical analysis that is rejected for being “Western.” Their sustenance requires not only warding off baneful “Western influences” by political fiat but also erasing or rewriting memories of their own revolutionary pasts in which those influences played crucial parts. After all, while the Communist Party of China may insist on the “Chineseness” of its Marxism, there is still a persistent reminder in the term “Marxism” of what it owes to the outside world, and the universalist vision that initially inspired its politics. Scholars of religion have argued that “religion” itself is a category that came with “the West,” along with all the other disciplinary appellations that have shaped the discourse on learning globally.

    The point here is that how we respond to claims on alternative knowledges and values—or what appears in our discourse as national or global “multiculturalism—is not simply a matter of respect for difference, or of cultural tolerance and cosmopolitanism, but is deeply political in its implications that calls for critical judgment and discrimination, not just on competing cultural claims but more profoundly the notions of culture that inform them. Radical multiculturalism driven by universal human goals that temper difference with commonality is a different matter entirely than the multiculturalism of an identity politics obsessed with difference, with little regard for commonality, the managerial multiculturalism of transnational corporations, or the consumptive multiculturalism promoted by global capitalism. The appreciation of “cultural complexity,” the porosity of cultural boundaries, and the historicity of culture that emerged from the radical struggles of the 1960s challenged the reification of culture in modernization discourse but never quite overcame it. It has retreated in intervening years before the “polyculturalism” that multi-national corporations began to promote at about the same time, which replicated the reification of culture in modernization discourse, albeit with a recognition of contemporary presence to “traditions” that hitherto had been viewed as relics of doomed historical legacies.36 “Difference,” likewise, has come to overshadow commonality as categories that inspired collective affinity and action such as class or third world solidarity” have lost their plausibility, or have been systematically discredited, along with the universalist ethic in which they were grounded.

    In her recent study, Moral Clarity, Susan Neiman writes that “the relativism that holds all moral values to be created equal is a short step from the nihilism that holds all talk of values to be superfluous.”37 We know that just as all cultural legacies and practices (including our own) are not bad, neither are they all good. We know that different cultural orientations have different motivations and consequences, so they are not all equal, without resorting to the language of good and evil. We know, or should know, that everyday life presents us with antinomies where choice seems impossible. We are all familiar with problems in the imposition of gender norms across ethnic and national boundaries. How do we respond when an elected member of the national assembly is prevented from taking her seat on account of wearing a head-dress, setting secular against democratic commitments? How do we respond when in the name of national order and security a state abuses its own citizens and intellectuals? What do we do when the identification of national culture with a set of religious precepts results in the oppression not only of its secular intellectuals but other sets of religious precepts upheld by its minority populations? Perhaps most relevant to the question at hand of critical practice, how do we respond to the bizarre proclamation of an American academic that academic freedom is a “Western” idea that should not be imposed upon others when a PRC academic loses his job for his promotion of “Western” freedoms? There are differences within differences, and dealing with them calls upon us to make choices, choices that are not just intellectual but deeply ethical and political.

    Neiman’s study is devoted to an argument for the retrieval of Enlightenment values that have been under attack for the last half century from the left, for their alleged complicity in Euro/ American imperialism and, from the right, for the secular humanism that allegedly has undermined national morality and purpose. The argument draws on the work of Jonathan Israel, who has drawn a distinction between radical and moderate Enlightenment, with the former supplying most of the values that have come to be associated with Enlightenment as such. Israel identifies the “basic principles” of radical Enlightenment as:

    democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state… Its universalism lies in its claim that all men have the right to pursue happiness in their own way, and think and say whatever they see fit, and no one, including those who convince others they are divinely chosen to be their master, rulers or spiritual guides, is justified in denying or hindering others in the enjoyment of rights that pertain to all men and women equally.38

    These are the same values, we might add, that are condemned by spokespeople for the PRC regime, orthodox Muslims, or fundamentalist Hindus for their incompatibility with so-called native cultures which, in their claims to cultural purity, find alibi in multi-culturalist reification of cultural identity. Among the foremost casualties of the repudiation of the Enlightenment in cultural criticism is criticism itself. In the words of the British writer, Kenan Malik,

    The issue of free speech and the giving of offence have become central to the multiculturalism debate. Speech, many argue, must be less free in a plural society. For such societies to function and be fair, we need to show respect for all cultures and beliefs. And to do so requires us to police public discourse about those cultures and beliefs, both to minimize friction between antagonistic cultures and beliefs, and to protect the dignity of individuals embedded in them. As [Tariq] Modood puts it, “If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism.” One of the ironies of living in a plural society, it seems, is that the preservation of diversity requires us to leave less room for a diversity of views.39

    What we seem to be witnessing, I might add, is a slide to the logic of communal politics. The motivating impulse behind multi-culturalism may be the recognition of difference, but even more significant is the part it plays in producing and defining cultural identities.40

    * * *

    About a year ago, I had the pleasure of visiting a university in your neighboring state to the north at the invitation of the Department of Sociology. Over a casual dinner, some mention was made of the Enlightenment, possibly by self, as a resource for countering the seemingly worldwide drift to intellectual and cultural obscurantism. The response from one of the colleagues was swift and decisive: “there is nothing good to be said for the Enlightenment!”

    What impressed me most about this response was the categorical denial of ambiguity and historicity to the Enlightenment and its legacies that left no opening for critical engagement and dialogue. The Enlightenment presently invites criticism for endowing with universal status what were but the cultural assumptions of an emergent capitalist modernity infused with the values of its Euro/American origins. This meant by implication the denial of contemporary validity and relevance to alternative epistemologies and value-systems. In the unfolding of Euromodernity, universal reason would be captured for economic and technological rationality, and universal morality for the moral imperatives of the market economy and the nation-state. Euro/American capitalism was entangled from its origins in the colonization of known and unknown lands and peoples. Colonial modernity found ideological justification for rule over others in its claims to universal reason and morality, which made it “the white man’s burden” to rescue them from stagnant “traditions” they were mired in and usher them into modernity. Under the hegemony of Euromodernity, these assumptions have guided both politics and the production of knowledge of the world. Others—exterminated, colonized, deracinated, hegemonized—until recently have been silenced, by force if necessary but most effectively by being woven into an epistemological web designed by the hegemonic according to the dictates of Euromodernity. As a recent work puts it,

    Euro-American social theory, as writers from the south have often observed, has tended to treat modernity as though it were inseparable from Aufklarung, the rise of Enlightenment reason. Not only is each taken to be a condition of the other’s possibility, but together they are assumed to have animated a distinctively European mission to emancipate humankind from its uncivil prehistory, from a life driven by bare necessity, from the thrall of miracle and wonder, enchantment and entropy. 41

    None of this should be in dispute for anyone with an unbiased eye. What may be done about it, however, is much more problematic. Critics of the Enlightenment range from those who object to its ethnocentrism and its entanglement in colonial modernity to Tea Party ethnocentrists critical of democracy, science and secular humanism. The choices we make in dealing with the legacies of two centuries of colonial erasure and imperial hegemony are not merely intellectual, they are also profoundly political. The anti-hegemonic impulse that informs criticisms of the Enlightenment from anti-colonial anti-racist or gendered perspectives is more than matched by the service such criticism renders to political and cultural reaction and repression globally.42

    The fact that these attacks on Enlightenment culture and epistemology coincide with the globalization of capitalist modernity should give us pause about rendering the Enlightenment and Euromodernity into Siamese twins, or dissolving the one into the other.43 If Euromodernity was about Enlightenment, it was also about religious legacies the Enlightenment sought to counter that nevertheless shaped European societies, about narratives of capitalism and the nation-state. There are different possibilities in the articulation of these various narratives that shape our understanding of the emergence and consequences of the Enlightenment. Where “social theory” is concerned, too much emphasis has been placed on its Eurocentrism, obscuring its origins in the need for new ways of organizing knowledge demanded by the rise of capitalism and the nation-state. This may explain why despite criticism of its Eurocentrism, the globalization of capitalism seems inevitably to bring in its wake the disciplinary products of so-called “Western” theory.

    These relationships in their complexity deserve a more dialectical analysis that accounts for the contradictory historical relationship between the two, exemplified by Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment in response to the rise of Nazi’ism and the “culture industries.”44 For all their political manipulation of human rights and democracy, capital and the capitalist state as in the US have repeatedly shown that they are no slaves to their professions of either of reason or the autonomous thinking individual, human rights and secularism—at home or abroad. If the Enlightenment could not resolve the tension between instrumental reason and a transcendent rationality, as generations of social philosophers attest to, it is also the case that instrumental reason is what matters in the pursuit of economic and political power—including the instrumentalization of human beings as labor power and consumers.45 It is not to be forgotten that to the extent Enlightenment ideals have become social realities in Euro/American societies, it was a result not of some cultural disposition but of prolonged and arduous struggles against power by constituencies from workers to women and subaltern ethnic groups. These struggles continue—now with the additional burden of resisting efforts by states and capital to roll back these past gains.

    The need to distinguish capitalist modernity and Enlightenment legacies is even more apparent presently in the case of non-EuroAmerican societies anxious to partake of the fruits of global capitalism but equally anxious to keep at arm’s length the values most commonly associated with Enlightenment legacies. The reconfiguration of global power relations with the globalization of capital has empowered challenges to the cultural hegemony of Euromodernity, opening up the ideological space to the reappraisal of Enlightenment legacies from locations where they appeared not as instruments of liberation and progress but indispensable components of an oppressive apparatus of power. The rejection of these legacies is part of a broader effort to recover cultural and intellectual identities that had been consigned to the past as dead or stagnant traditions under the regime of Euromodernity. These traditions are now called upon as resources for “alternative modernities” that account for native values and system of knowledge, be it Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism or the many indigenous legacies that demand recognition. The universalistic assumptions of Euromodernity are giving way, at least in the realm of thought, to alternative claims on both reason and morality.

    In praise or in condemnation, the juxtaposition of the Enlightenment as the source of Euromodernity against alternative cultural modernities inevitably produces cultural reification and reductionism, which is itself a consequence of the many encounters of modernity. It is often overlooked(if not viewed as of marginal significance) that the same Enlightenment legacies that capitalist modernity claimed for itself have also provided legitimation for struggles against the new forms labor, gender and racial oppression and exploitation took under the market economy. If Enlightenment legacies provided cultural justification for colonialism, moreover, it also offered a language of anti-colonialism that was readily assimilated by many in their struggles against European domination and capitalist modernity—not to speak of homegrown oppression and exploitation.46

    Euromodernity may have claimed possession of universal reason and morality, but what these consisted of have been subjects all along of disagreement, contention and conflict—and the considerable measure of openness that owed much to the institutionalization of dissent. Contrary to simplistic binarisms that set the vitality of modernity against the quietude of tradition, no world of thought and morality is free of dissent and disagreement, however strenuous the imposition of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the institution of dissent as a normative principle over enforced loyalty to any ideological orthodoxy or lineage may be the distinguishing feature of Euromodernity as a cultural formation, embodied in the capitalist economy that empowered it. Neiman writes that “the Enlightenment is inherently self-critical, morally bound to examine its own assumptions with the same zeal it examines others.”47 Michel Foucault, whose influential writings have done much to reveal the complicity of Enlightenment ideals in shaping modern practices of power, wrote nevertheless that

    between the high Kantian enterprise and the little polemical professional activities that are called critique, it seems to me that there has been in the modern Western world (dating, more or less, empirically from the 15th to the 16th centuries) a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call, let’s say, the critical attitude….critique only exists in relation to something other than itself: it is an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know or happen to be, it oversees a domain it would want to police but is unable to regulate.48

    In her commentary on Foucault’s text, “What is Critique?,” Judith Butler suggests, along lines similar to Neiman’s, that to Foucault this critical attitude, “this exposure of the limit of the epistemological field is linked with the practice of virtue, as if virtue is counter to regulation and order, as if virtue itself is to be found in the risking of established order. He is not shy about the relation here. He writes, `there is something in critique that is akin to virtue.’ And then he says something which might be considered even more surprising: `this critical attitude [is] virtue in general.’”49 Karl Marx, we may recall, felt equally virtuous in his commitment to “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

    It should be obvious why political regimes that demand loyalty to their legitimizing principles should find this “critical attitude” undesirable or even dangerous. Attempts to establish ideological orthodoxies have been unable to withstand this combined force of economy and culture that demanded constant flexibility, innovation and criticism—including in so-called democratic societies. The Enlightenment may be the fountainhead of Euromodernity, but conflicts over its meaning are as much a defining feature of Euromodernity as loyalty to the universalism it has claimed. Legacies of the Enlightenment are visible in the very criticisms of the Enlightenment. The question, “What is Enlightenment?,” Foucault writes,

    marks the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either….for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today?50

    The same complexity attended the reception of Enlightenment ideas outside of Euro/ America. Viewed in historical perspective, the contemporary attacks on the Enlightenment represent a reversal of the hopes Enlightenment ideals inspired for a century among intellectuals of the Global South struggling against despotism at home and imperialism abroad—and continue to do so. To be sure, Euromodern ideas and values provoked opposition among elites and populations at large for their foreignness or subversion of native values, and more often than not forced upon them.51 But they were also assimilated in one form or another by generations who were products of the encounter as sources of new visions of change that ranged from the total repudiation of “tradition” in the name of the modern to indigenized modernities that sought to translate the new values to native idiom. Liberal and socialist visions that bore upon them the imprint of the Enlightenment would trigger revolutionary changes that have launched societies globally on new trajectories of change. Indigenization itself is a two-way street: indigenizing foreign ideas to accommodate native legacies transforms not only the imported ideas but the traditions to which they are articulated. Even so-called “conservative” efforts to uphold native legacies have ended up endowing those legacies with new meanings and functions. Here, too, a distinction needs to be drawn between capitalist modernity and Enlightenment legacies, as the acceptance of one did not need automatically to acceptance of the other. Revolutions against capitalism and imperialist domination drew upon imported socialist and anarchist ideas for their legitimation. Conversely, participation in the global capitalist economy offers no guarantee of respect for freedom, democracy or human rights.

    It may be no coincidence that contemporary attacks on the Enlightenment have acquired a hearing in a literally counter-revolutionary drift globally. Ideas derivative of the Enlightenment have nourished revolutionary or more broadly progressive movements and aspirations for two centuries not just in Europe and North America but globally. The relationship of Enlightenment legacies to modern revolutionary movements is as complex as their relationships to capitalist modernity, but the entanglement of Enlightenment visions in modern revolutionary movements is one important reason for the attacks directed against it at a time of wholesale repudiation of revolutionary pasts.52 As in the PRC beginning in the 1980s, revolutions have been consigned to a “conservative” past while the mantle of progress has been transferred to an alliance of economic neoliberalism and increasingly dictatorial states aligned with global capital that nourish off cultural nationalism.53

    What needs to be underlined is that the criticism of Euromodernity is not limited to the repudiation of the hegemony of Euro/America but also targets the revolutionary pasts which appear now not as agents of progress and liberation but deviations from the proper historical paths of development. In the process, the pasts that revolutions sought to cast aside as obstacles to modernity have been revived as the sources of alternative modernities. Especially noteworthy is the mutually reinforcing relationship between liberal multiculturalism and cultural nativism or ethnocentrism that share common grounds in the criticism of Eurocentrism which is also their raison-d’etre. It is not uncommon these days to encounter attacks in the name of alternative cultural traditions and multiculturalism on legacies of academic freedom and critical thinking for being “Western” peculiarities—even as millions around the world continue to engage in political struggles to achieve those ends. This supposed “Western” peculiarity, moreover, is under attack in the “West,” as institutions avail themselves of a rising tide of censorship and surveillance to restrict free speech in accordance with the dictates of political and economic pressures.54

    Kant’s own understanding of Enlightenment is phrased it in terms that are striking for their relevance in a global political environment that seems devoted to the infantilization of populations or, in the more colorful phrasing of imperial Chinese critics of despotism, “stupid people policy” (yumin zhengce).55 The terms have been echoed repeatedly in anarchist thinking in subsequent years:

    Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another…The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest number of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they have been harnessed, these guardians then show them the dangers that threaten them, should they attempt to walk alone…Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature…Thus a public can only attain enlightenment slowly…Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.56

    The “freedom” Kant has in mind here is not the freedom of consumer society, which juxtaposes freedom against democracy, but the freedom to deploy reason for public ends, which is the very condition of democracy. Referring to the anarchist Rudolf Rocker, Noam Chomsky notes in a recent talk that,

    This brand of socialism, [Rocker] held, doesn’t depict “a fixed, self-enclosed social system” with a definite answer to all the multifarious questions and problems of human life, but rather a trend in human development that strives to attain Enlightenment ideals. So understood, anarchism is part of a broader range of libertarian socialist thought and action that includes the practical achievements of revolutionary Spain in 1936; reaches further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in the American rust belt, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and many other countries, most extensively in the Basque country in Spain; and encompasses the many cooperative movements around the world and a good part of feminist and civil and human rights initiatives. This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself. 57

    Critics of Enlightenment bear the burden for explaining why Enlightenment aspirations for freedom and democracy should be inconsistent with respect for and accommodation of alternative cultural legacies rather than as the very conditions that make possible recognition of those legacies in all their richness and diversity. Colonialism, denying the “maturity” of its subjects, also denied them the freedom necessary to come into their own as political and cultural subjects. Arguments based on “ontological differences” between native traditions and democracy or freedom share with the cultural colonialism they would resist assumptions that perpetuate popular dependence on the state not merely as an organ of government but also as the arbiter of cultural identity. On the other hand, from Frantz Fanon to Edward Said, seminal critics of Eurocentrism and colonialism from what used to be called the “third world” did not see any inconsistency between asserting the rights of the colonized and Enlightenment universalism, arguably because their affirmations of anti-colonial rights and subjectivities were framed within the critique of oppression in general rather than the temptations of identity politics.58

    Like it or not, we live in a post-Euromodern world. Repudiation of Euro/American cultural hegemony is not the same as repudiating the history of Euromodernity that has transformed societies globally, launching them in new historical trajectories. At a more substantial level, the legacies of the Enlightenment continue to offer legitimation for the embrace of difference that is missing from many of the ethnocentric culturalisms that would challenge it.
    At the same time, it is equally the case that reaffirmation of Enlightenment values may no longer be phrased in the language of the historical Enlightenment but has to answer to problems thrown up in the intervening two centuries, especially the postcolonial challenge. In the words of the late Emmanuel Eze,

    In contrast to traditional theories of colonialism, critical theory in the postcolonial age, in its many facets, carries forward the promise of emancipation embodied in aspects of the Enlightenment and modernist discourses. But it also seeks to hold the processes of modernity and the European-inspired Enlightenment accountable for the false conceptual frameworks within which they produced, for example, the idea of history as something in the name of which peoples outside of the narrow spheres of Europe appeared to many European states as legitimate objects of capitalist enslavement, political conquest and economic depredation. It is in these dual intentions that the critical element in postcolonial theory is to be understood. 59

    As Chomsky’s statement suggests, Enlightenment universalism is not a given, it is a project that remains to be realized. The project is no longer just Euro/American but needs to be global—not just in scope but in inspiration, inspiration that draws not only upon different historical legacies but even more importantly on ongoing grassroots struggles for human liberation, dignity and welfare—and increasingly, it seems, for survival in the face of impending ecological catastrophe. Against contemporary reifications of culture, we may recall the eloquent words of a thinker who, ironically, has been a foremost resource for postcolonial criticism of Euromodernity:

    A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. … A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. 60

    National culture as Fanon conceived it was an ongoing project that drew its inspiration not from parochial yearnings for past glory, or chauvinistic fantasies of global hegemony, but from struggles for liberation driven by universally shared aspirations to justice and democracy. It was a conception that has been shared widely among those frustrated by Euromodernity’s denial of who they were, but who also found a new promise in the vision of universality it offered. The author of a recent study writes, with reference to the seminal Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao and his social democratic disciples, Zhang Dongsun and Zhang Junmai, that, they

    devised their cultural plan for constructing a new China along with their universal vision of a new world from a global perspective. …they re- discovered cultural differences (Chinese tradition) within the global system of culture and evaluated all differences by a universal standard of morality…their cultural vision can be understood in terms of “global universalism,” which denies “European universalism” but never abandons the universal itself….[they]envisioned a universal culture based on the universal human capacity for morality, and embraced Chinese culture as a local representation of this universal morality….they challenged Western universalism without falling into the traps of cultural relativism or nationalist cultural pride. 61

    These sentiments may sound quaint in a neoliberal global environment in which Social Darwinian norms and conflicts over civilizational claims are on the ascendancy, and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Enlightenment is at its most elusive when we may need it the most. Enlightenment universalism is not to be dismissed as merely a handmaiden of capitalist modernity or colonialism, even though its entanglements with the latter have marred its image among those who encountered it upon the banners of Euro/American imperialism. We need to recall that it was also the inspiration for radical aspirations to freedom to live and breathe in dignity. Freedom is the condition of Enlightenment, as Kant maintained, but also its goal. It may hardly be discarded for its European origins, or the foul deeds that have been perpetrated in its name, for it is an integral part of histories globally that continues to inspire struggles for human rights to existence—and democracy—against the betrayals of capital and its states. The answer to problems of public enlightenment is more enlightenment, not willing surrender to oppression and bigotry in the guise of cultural difference.

    * I am grateful to Paul Bove, Christopher Connery, Leo Douw, Russell Leong, Liu Zixu, Martin Miller, Ravi Palat, David Palumbo-Liu, and Wang Mingming for their comments on this article. They are in no way responsible for my argument(s).
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    Notes

    1. See, for example, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2014).
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    2. Shih Hsiu-chuan, “Foundation angry over EACS brochures” Taipei Times, Tuesday, July 29, 2014, (consulted 29 July 2014).
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    3. EACS, “Report: The Deletion of Pages from EACS Conference Materials in Braga(July 2014),” Issued August 1, 2014. For the report and the letter of protest (“To whom it may concern”), see, the association website, here, viewed 2 August 2014.
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    4. For a broader spectrum of China specialists, see, “The Debate Over Confucius Institutes,” in two parts, China File, 06.23.14 and 07.01.14, here (Consulted 10 August 2014). It is interesting that most of the contributors to the debate are critical of the institutes. Indeed, in this sample at any rate, the defenders are those associated with the institutes or with business. Business organizations all along have been against criticism of the PRC for fear that it will interfere with business, and also supportive of the institutes for facilitating it.
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    5. Peter Schmidt, “AAUP Rebukes Colleges for Chinese Institutes and Censures Northeastern Illinois”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15 2014, (consulted 10 August 2014). It is possible, hopefully, that the arrogance of PRC functionaries is finally catching the public eye. See, “Beijing’s Propaganda Lessons”, The Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2014, (viewed 10 August 2014). Rather than accede to Hanban demands for greater control, the Lyons (France) Confucius Institute was shut down in Fall 2013.
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    6. Marshall Sahlins, “China U.”, The Nation, November 18, 2013, (viewed 10 August 2014).
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    7. Naïve and sometimes self-serving arguments that the Confucius Institutes are under the Hanban which answers to the Ministry of Education disguise the importance of the reach of the Central Propaganda Bureau into all state organs, including Party think-tanks, and especially education. For a discussion, see, David Shambaugh, “China’s Propaganda System: Institutions, Processes and Efficacy,” The China Journal, No. 57 (January 2007): 25-58. See also, Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham, MD: Rowman&Littlefield, 2009).
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    8. World system analysts such as Immanuel Wallerstein and the late Giovanni Arrighi long have been interested in the question of hegemonic transition. The most thorough discussion I am aware of is Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (London: Verso, 2009)
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    9. John J. Mearsheimer, “The Gethering Storm: China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia,” The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 3(2010): 381-396, pp. 387-388. Mearsheimer is absolutely correct that the PRC search for hegemony has learned a great deal from the previous US experience. We might add that over the last three decades, the PRC has persistently mimicked the US in its pursuit of power and development.
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    10. For a brief English version, see, Tingyang Zhao, “Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tian-xia),” Social Identities, 12.1 (2006): 29-41. The idea has found favor among some US international relations experts such as David Kang at the University of Southern California. For critical discussions, see, William A. Callahan, “Chinese Visions of World Order: Post-Hegemonic or a New Hegemony?” International Studies Review, 10(2008): 740-761; Xu Bijun, “Is Zhao’s Tianxia System Misunderstood?” Tsinghua China Law Review, Vol. 6 (January 29, 2014): 95-108; Christopher R. Hughes, “Reclassifying Chinese nationalism: the geopolitik turn,” Journal of Contemporary China, 20(71) (2011): 601-20; and, Zhang Feng, “The Tianxia System: World Order in a Chinese Utopia”, China Heritage Quarterly, No. 21 (March 2010), (consulted 31 July 2014). Works like Zhao’s are part of an ongoing effort to construct an “IR theory with Chinese characteristics,” corresponding to the PRC’s global stature. For a historically sensitive account of the concept, see, Wang Mingming, “All under heaven (tianxia): Cosmological perspectives and political ontologies in pre-modern China,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1)(2012): 337-383. For a reminder that the tributary system might not be welcome to modern nations with their claims on sovereignty, see, Amitav Acharya, “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future,” International Security, 28.3 (Winter 2003/04): 149-164. Others, most notably pan-Islamists, have their own vision of a new world order that, similarly to tianxia, seek to transcend the nation-based order overseen by “the West.” See, Behlul Ozkan, “Turkey, Davutoglu, and the Idea of Pan-Islamism,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 56.4(2014): 119-141, published online. I am grateful to Prof. Tugrul Keskin for bringing this article to my attention.
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    11. Gao Wenbing, “Rongtong gujin Zhongwai jiangou `Zhongguo huayu xitong’” (Meld old and new, Chinese and foreign; construct a `Chinese system of discourse’), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), July 23, 2014, (consulted 2 August 2014).
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    12. For a detailed discussion, see, Arif Dirlik, “The Discourse of `Chinese Marxism.’” In Modern Chinese Religion: 1850-Present, Value Systems in Transformation, ed. Vincent Goossaert, Jan Kiely, and John Lagerwey (Leiden and Boston: Brill, forthcoming).
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    13. Kejin Zhao, “China’s Rise and Its Discursive Power Strategy” (2011?), (Viewed 2 August 2014). Zhao is a resident scholar at the Carnegie–Tsinghua Center and deputy director of Tsinghua’s center for U.S.-China relations.
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    14. Ibid., p.1
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    15. Ibid., p.2
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    16. Ibid., p. 31
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    17. Ibid., p.28
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    18. For a forthcoming project, see, Jennifer Hubbert, “The Anthropology of Confucius Institutes”, Anthropology News, 1 May 2014, (consulted 6 August 2014).
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    19. One may surmise that Confucius Institutes (and PRC students) are recruited to serve as the “eyes and ears” of officials who seem also to watch closely what happens in communities. When a US citizen of Taiwanese descent decided to have a mural on Tibet painted on a building he owned in the small town of Corvallis that is home to Oregon State University, officials from the PRC Consulate in San Francisco were dispatched to warn the mayor of consequences if the “transgression” was not stopped. See, “China asks city in Oregon to scrub mural for Tibetan, Taiwanese independence”, NBC News, Wednesday, September 12, 2012, (consulted 14 February 2014). PRC leaders are quick to take offense at outsiders’ “interference” in “China’s internal affairs,” which does not stop them from interfering in the affairs of others. Most common is the retaliation for friendly gestures toward the Dalai Lama. The Xu Lin episode is only one more example, if an egregious one, of the export of censorship. See, Elizabeth Coates, “Chinese Communist Party-backed Tech Giants Bring Censorship to the Global Stage”, TechCrunch, August 2, 2014, (consulted 7 August 2014). In spite of all this, and for all the complaints by PRC officials, the US State Department backed off from terminating the visas of “academics at university-based institutes…teaching at the elementary- and secondary-school levels” in violation of “the terms of their visas.” See, Karin Fischer, “State Department Directive Could Disrupt Teaching Activities of Campus-Based Confucius Institutes”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2012, (consulted 10 August 2014). According to the Wall Street Journal (see above, note 5), Confucius classrooms continue to spread in US primary and secondary schools in collusion with the administrators of the SAT.
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    20. Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” in Tu Wei-ming(ed), The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1-34, pp. 15-16.
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    21. The editors of an English-language theoretical journal recently invited members of the editorial board (all foreign) to submit discussions of the “China Dream” for a special issue. Getting well-known foreign Marxist or socialist intellectuals involved in such a discussion is of obvious symbolic significance in centering the PRC, and President Xi as a theorist. Upon inquiring about criticism of internal and external developments under President Xi, the editor honestly informed me that, yes, that might be a bit of a problem. This does not mean that there aren’t many socialists, among others, who think that the PRC’s is a socialist road, choosing to ignore the authoritarian capitalism that drives the system, the colonial policies toward minority populations, and an income gap more severe than most capitalist countries where, according to a recent report, one percent owns one-third of the national wealth. See, Xinhua Network, “1% of Chinese own one-third of national wealth: report”, 26 July 2014, (consulted 4 August 2014). It would appear that a world order dominated by corporate capitalism and oligarchy of wealth has become part of “Chinese Marxism,” and the “China Dream.” Tsinghua law professor and advciser to the government, Wang Zhenmin, recently explained that democracy had to be limited in Hong Kong in order to protect the wealthy and secure capitalist development. See, Michael Forsythe and Keith Bradsher, “On Hong Kong, Democracy and Prorecting the Rich”, The New York Times, August 29, 2014, (viewed 2 September 2014).
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    22. For further discussion, see, Arif Dirlik and Roxann Prazniak, “Social Justice, Democracy and the Politics of Development: The People’s Republic of China in Global Perspective,” International Journal of China Studies, 3.3(December 2012): 285-313.
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    23. For a recent discussion derived from a longer study, see, David Shambaugh, “The Illusion of Chinese Power”, Brookings Brief, August 18, 2014, (viewed 2 September 2014).
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    24. The reference here is to President Xi’s assertion that Chinese are genetically indisposed to aggression against others. See, “Xi: there is no gene for invasion in our blood”, China Daily, 16 May 2014, (consulted 4 August 2014). Even if it is rhetorical, the racialization of the notion of “Chineseness” in this claim is noteworthy. Now that PRC historians once again have made Mongols into part of “Chinese” history, I wonder if this includes genes of the likes of Genghis Khan. What we call “China,” of course is a product of colonization, mainly by the Han people from the north. William Callahan informs us that according to a study published by the Chinese Academy of Military Science, over three thousand years, imperial dynasties were engaged in 3756 wars, an average of 1.4 wars a year. William A. Callahan, China Dreams: Twenty Visions of the Future (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 48. See also Callahan’s study of “national humiliation” discourse, The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).
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    25. “Marketing” of culture has been part of these discussions on discursive power. As with the other market, the Party-state does not hesitate to step in and determine its limits. The reference here is to a recent article published in the official Party journal, Qiushi (Seeking Truth, formerly the Red Flag), Yin Xia, “Jianli Zhongguo tese huoyu tixi ji xu sixiang jiede damianji juexing” (The establishment of discourse with Chinese characteristics urgently requires broad awakening of the intellectual world), Qiushi theory network, July 22, 2014.
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    26. Benjamin Carlson, “7 things you can’t talk about in China”, globalpost, June 3, 2013. For background in the new leadership’s ideological plans, see “Document 9: A China File Translation”, 11/08/13, (consulted 6 August 2014). The prohibition has been accompanied by criticism of the hypocrisy of the US government which exports “freedom” while betraying it at home. See, “Experts: the so-called `press freedom’ is just a `beautifying tool’”, Guangming online, 30 October 2013, (consulted 7 August 2014), The experts included three academics, regulars on the IR scene, and often cited in the press: Shi Yinhong of Renmin University, Shen Dingli of Fudan University and Zhao Kejin, the author discussed above.
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    27. Chris Buckley, “China Takes Aim at Western Ideas” The New York Times, August 19, 2013, (viewed 28 August 2014).
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    28. Sharon Tiezzi, “Top Chinese Think-tank Accused of `Collusion’ with `Foreign Forces’”, The Diplomat, June 18, 2014; Adrian Wan, “Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is `infiltrated by foreign forces’: anti-graft official”, South China Morning Post, Tuesday, 15 June, 2013; and, Cary Huang, “Chill wind blows through Chinese Academy of Social Sciences”, South China Morning Post, 2 August 2014, (consulted 6 August 2014). The ideological campaign recently has been extended to major universities (Beijing, Fudan and Zhongshan). See, Vanessa Piao, “3 Universities Pledge to Uphold Party Ideals on Campus”, The New York Times, September 2, 2014, (viewed, 2 September 2014). The universities are Beijing, Fudan and Zhongshan universities.
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    29. Yin Xia, “Jianli Zhongguo tese huoyu tixi ji xu sixiang jiede damianji juexing. “Chinese airs” was the term Mao Zedong used in 1940 his seminal essay, “On New Democracy,” which inaugurated “making Marxism Chinese.”
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    30. Kim Arora, “Penguin to destroy copies of Wendy Doniger’s book, `The Hindus’”, The Times of India, Feb 11, 2014; Ritu Sharma, “Man who got Wendy Doniger pulped is `must reading’ in Gujarat schools”, The Indian Express, July 25, 2014; Pankti Dalal, “Gujarat model of using epics as facts in education”, india.com, Sunday, 27 July 2014; “Interview: Ramayana, Mahabharata Are True Accounts of the Period…Not Myths”, July 21, 2014; and Romila Thapar, “History Repeats Itself”, india today, July 21, 2014, (all consulted 5 August 2014) . The Outlook interview is with Prof. Y.S. Rao, the new Chairman, who expresses his belief that “faith and reason can go together” in historical work. Romila Thapar, one of the most distinguished Indian historians, discusses the importance of evidence, but also comments on Rao’s hostility to Marxist historiography which has made seminal contributions to Indian historiography.
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    31. For a recent example of such demands, see, Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon, “No more enclosures: knowledge democracy and social transformation”, Open Democracy, 20 August 2014, (viewed, 20 August 2014)
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    32. Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2007).
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    33. This recalls an anectode the author was told by the late distinguished Pcific writer Epeli Hau’ofa, who was then head of the business school at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. We have to teach our students two kinds of English, he said, World Bank English and pidgin English, one for success in the world, the other for the conduct of everyday life. The question is global. It nevertheless has to be ditingusihed according to power relations. There is a big difference between the deployment of “native” knowledge for global hegemony, and its importance for the survival of a small fragile society. Ethical neutrality may only end up in complicity with power. See, Arif Dirlik, “The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of Indigeneous Historicism,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 20.2(1996):1-31.
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    34. For “clash of civilizations,” see, Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72.3 (Summer 1993): 22-49; “If not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 72.5 (Nov/Dec 1993): 186-195; and, “The West Unique, Not Universal,” Foreign Affairs 75.6(Nov/Dec 1996): 28-46. These various essays were compiled and expanded in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996). The most thorough study of hybridity in historical perspective is Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, UK: Routledge, 1995). A prominent Chinese scholar who advocates similar ideas is He Chuanqi. See, “China Modernization Report 2009: The Study of Cultural Modernization”, China Development Gateway. See, also, an influential advocate of “Confucianism,” Kang Xiaoguang, “Confucianization: A Future in the Tradition,” Social Research, 73.1 (Spring 2006): 77-120. See, also, David Ownby, “Kang Xiaoguang: Social Science, Civil Society, and Confucian Religion,” China Perspectives, #4 (2009): 101-111. Kang views belief in democracy as a “superstition.
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    35. For further discussion, see, Arif Dirlik, “Bringing History Back In: Of Diasporas, Hybridities, Places and Histories,” Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 21.2 (1999):95-131.
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    36. For the origins of multiculturalism in corporate managerial needs, see, Arif Dirlik, “The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization: Flexible Production, Work and Culture,” in A. Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 186-219.
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    37. Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, revised edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 12.
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    38. Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. vii-viii.
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    39. Kenan Malik, Multiculturalism and Its Discontents (London: Seagull Books, 2013), pp. 71-72. Indeed, any such criticism is met almost in knee-jerk fashion with charges of racism. The mutual tolerance in most cases is also less than mutual—as the example of the PRC, among others, illustrates.
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    40. Vijay Prashad, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New York: The New Press, 2012), esp. pp. 12-19, 110-114.
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    41. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South, Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), p. 2. For the deployment of universalism in the service of Euro/American power, see, Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: The New Press, 2006).
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    42. There is, moreover, a fallacy to the kind of criticism offered by Comaroff and Comaroff in the work just cited. It seems as if they would like to eat their cake, and have it, too. Bringing other perspectives into theory should not present much of a problem, even if it has become a major concern only recently. The more fundamental issue is that of theory itself, and the disciplinary organization of learning, which casts a web over our ways of knowing. If the hegemony of Enlightenment knowledge is to be challenged, that means questioning the whole enterprise of theory and disciplinary division of intellectual labor. This, of course, is the position of radical critics such as Ashis Nandy and Vine DeLoria, Jr., as well as Islamic fundamentalists and radical advocates of national learning in Chinese societies.
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    43. Anthony Appiah has observed that “attacks on `Enlightenment humanism’ have been attacks not on the universality of Enlightenment pretensions but on the Eurocentrism of their real bases. The confounding of Enlightenment and Eurocentrism is a pervasive problem. See, Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 249-250.
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    44. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by John Cumming (New York: The Seabury Press, 1944). This devastating critique of the Enlightenment’s complicity in the rising tide of despotism in the 1930s nevertheless ends with the conclusion that “Enlightenment which is in possession of itself and coming to power can break the bounds of enlightenment.”(p. 208).
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    45. Darrow Schechter, The Critique of Instrumental Reason: From Weber to Habermas(New York: Continuum Books, 2010) for a comprehensive critical discussion.
    Back to the essay

    46. Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
    Back to the essay

    47. Neiman, Moral Clarity, p. 136.
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    48. Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed by Sylvere Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), pp. 41-01, p. 42.
    Back to the essay

    49. Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, Transversal (May 2001), (consulted 10 August 2014).
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    50. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. By Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, p. 32.
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    51. The disillusionment with “Western civilization” has antecedents. It was especially pronounced in the aftermath of World War I which to many represented the spiritual bankruptcy of the “West.” See, Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernismin in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and pan-Asian Thought (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2007), and, Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Alternative Visions of World Order in the Aftermath of World War I: Global Perspectives on Chinese Approaches,” in Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier eds., Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Ironically, such disillusionment was also a reason for the attraction to socialist alternatives, suggesting a distinction between “Western” modernity and capitalism.
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    52. Enlightenment (qimeng) has been an ongoing concern of Chinese intellectuals since the New Culture Movement of the 1910s-1920s. See, Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, CA: Univerity of California Press, 1986); He Ganzhi, Jindai Zhongguo qimeng yundong shi (History of the Modern Chinese Enlightenment Movement) (Shanghai: no publisher, 1936); Gu Xin, Zhongguo qimende lishi tujing (Historical Prospects of the Chinese Enlightenment) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1992); and, Zhang Xudong, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms Cultural Fever, Avant-garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
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    53. It is also important to note that this shift is anything but spontaneous. The surge in religion has been financed by states, and encouraged by Euro/American geopolitical interests, as in the case of Islam, with explicitly anti-revolutionary intentions. Organized activity also has played a major part, as in the case for example of the Gulen movement, whose impressive use of education in popularizing its goal of an Islamic capitalist modernity compare favorably with the censorial clumsiness of Confucius Institutes. For sympathetic studies, see, Helen Rose Ebaugh, The Gulen Movement: A Sociological Analysis of a Civic Movement Rooted in Moderate Islam (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2010), and, Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gulen Movement, ed. By M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003).
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    54. The dismissal of the Amerindian scholar Ward Churchill from the University of Colorado for negative comments about 9/11 has been followed by ongoing efforts to restrict speech on a variety of issues, most egregiously in the US, Israel. The most recent case is that of Steven Salaita who has been “unhired” by the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana on the grounds of “uncivil” language in tweets that were critical of Israel. The chilling effect on criticism of a vague charge that potentially covers a broad range of speech and behavior is imaginable. See, David Palumbo-liu, “Why the `Unhiring’ of Steven Salaita Is a Threat to Academic Freedom”, The Nation, August 27, 2014, (viewed 28 August, 2014). Ironically, Salaita is also a scholar of Amerindian Studies, with an interest in settler colonialism. Settler colonialism as the experience both of Amerindians and Palestinians has received increased attention among Amerindian scholars in recent years.
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    55. Herbert Marcuse similarly referred to “the systematic moronization of children and adults alike.” See, Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 81-117, p. 83. “Repressive tolerance” also effectively captures the repression of diversity (as well as critical reason) by unthinking tolerance of multiculturalism!
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    56. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”(1784), in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, tr. by Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), pp. 41-48, pp. 41-42. Emphases in the original.
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    57. Noam Chomsky, “What is the Common Good?” Dewey Lecture at Columbia University, December 6, 2013, adapted for publication in Truthout, 07 January 2014, (consulted 27 April 2014). See, also, Jacques Ranciere for a view of anarchy as the condition for democracy: “Democracy first of all means this: anarchic `government’, one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern.” Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), p. 41. In his many works, the Japanese social philosopher Kojin Karatani also has elaborated on the links between Kantian notions of Enlightenment and anarchism, especially the anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. See, Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, tr. by Michael K. Bourdaghs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
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    58. For a sustained philosophical argument that is as down to earth as it is analytically sharp, see, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). We may also recall here an observation by Ernesto Laclau on “a dimension of the relationship particularism/universalism which has generally been disregarded. The basic point is this: I cannot assert a differential identity without distinguishing it from a context, and, in the process of making the distinction, I am asserting the context at the same time. And the opposite is also true: I cannot destroy a context without destroying at the same time the identity of the particular subject who carries out the destruction.” Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), Chap. 2, “Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity,” p. 27. The “ontological differences” is with reference to the work of Ahmet Davutoglu, Alternative Paradigms: The Impact of Islamic and Western Weltanshauungs on Political Theory (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), p. 195, where the author describes the “Islamic paradigm” as “absolutely alternative to the Western.” Davutoglu is currently the foreign minister(and soon-to-be prime minister) of Turkey. He is an advocate of Pan-Islamic expansionism, with Turkey at the center, and for all his insistence on “ontological difference,” draws heavily on Euro/American geopolitical ideas, especially German notions of lebensraum from the early 2oth century. See, Ozkan, “Turkey, Davutoglu, and the Idea of Pan-Islamism,” op.cit., fn. 10.
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    59. Eze, On Reason, p. 183.
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    60. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. by Constance Frrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 188.
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    61. Soonyi Lee, “Culture and Politics in Interwar China: The Two Zhangs and Chinese Socialism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of East Asian Studies, New York University (2014), p. 27.
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  • Legacies of the Future

    Legacies of the Future

    On the Life and Work of Edward Said
    – November, 2013:

    Video coverage of boundary 2‘s Fall conference, featuring Joseph Cleary, Aamir Mufti, Nuruddin Farah, Wlad Godzich, Stathis Gourgouris, RA Judy, QS Tong, Jonathan Arac, Donald Pease, Bruce Robbins and Paul Bové.

  • Now OnLine: China after Thirty Years of Reform: Critical Reflections Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2011

    Check out the new issue edited by QS Tong in Hong Kong.  PDFs of the entire issue are here.

    Includes essays by Arif Dirlik, Wang Hui, Wang Ban, Jiwei Ci, and many others.