Culture & History in Postrevolutionary China：The Perspective of Global Modernity

The essays in this volume grew from a series of talks delivered in late 2010 as the Liang Qichao Memorial Lectures at the Academy of National Learning (Guoxue yuan) of Tsinghua University, Beijing.

Offering critical perspectives on a number of ideological issues that have figured prominently in Chinese intellectual discourse since the beginning of the so-called “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) in the late 1970s, these essays range widely in subject matter, from Marxist historiography to sociology and anthropology in China to guoxue/national studies.

Together they are conceived as different windows into a basic problem: the deployment of culture and history in postrevolutionary Chinese thought. Dirlik touches on a number of themes, including the repudiation of the revolutionary past after 1978, which has led to a rise of cultural nationalism. He further places these developments within a global context, ultimately making a case methodologically for “worlding” China: bringing China into the world, and the world into China.

Arif Dirlik taught at Duke University for thirty years as Professor of History and Anthropology before moving in 2001 to the University of Oregon where he served as Knight Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies. After retiring from UO in 2006, he accepted a two-year appointment as Chair Professor of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he was also Honorary Professor of History and Cultural Studies, and Honorary Director of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Asia-Pacific Centre for Chinese Studies. He subsequently has held visiting positions as the Liang Qichao Memorial Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and, most recently, as the Rajni Kothari Chair in Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau in Beijing, and is an Honorary Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Marxist Social Theory in Nanjing University. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, USA.