Arif Dirlik

Arif Dirlik
Dirlik speaking at the New School in New York City in September 2014
Born(1940-11-23)November 23, 1940
Mersin, Turkey
DiedDecember 1, 2017(2017-12-01) (aged 77)
Eugene, Oregon, United States
Education
Alma materRobert College, University of Rochester
Scientific career
FieldsHistory of China, postcolonialism, Marxism
InstitutionsDuke University
University of Oregon
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
University of British Columbia
Thesis Revolution and History: Debates on Chinese Social History, 1928–1933[1]
Doctoral advisorRalph Croizier[2]

Arif Dirlik (/ˈɑːrifˈdiːrlik/; 23 November 1940[3] – 1 December 2017) was a Turkish-American historian who published on historiography and political ideology in modern China, as well as issues in modernity, globalization, and postcolonial criticism. Dirlik received a BSc in electrical engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 1973.

Biography

Dirlik received his undergraduate degree in engineering and came to the United States to study science at the University of Rochester, but developed an interest in Chinese history instead.[4] His PhD dissertation on the origins of Marxist historiography in China, published by University of California Press in 1978,[5] led to an interest in Chinese anarchism. When asked in 1997 to identify the main influences on his work, Dirlik cited Marx, Mao, and Dostoevsky.[6] His closest academic collaborators included his mentor Harry Harootunian whom he befriended at Rochester,[7][8] Maurice Meisner,[7] and his partner Roxann Prazniak.

After his official retirement, Dirlik lived in Eugene, Oregon. In fall 2010, he served as the Liang Qichao Memorial Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. In fall 2011 he held the Rajni Kothari Chair in Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India. He held a brief appointment as Green Professor at the University of British Columbia in February 2016.

Career

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 Science, Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies until his retirement in 2006.[9] He has also served as visiting professor at the University of British Columbia, University of Victoria (BC), University of California, Los Angeles, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Soka University of America. He has been honored with distinguished adjunct professorships at the Center for Marxist Social Theory of Nanjing University, Beijing University of Language and Culture, and the Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou.

Dirlik served on the editorial boards of boundary 2, Interventions (UK), China Review (Hong Kong), Asian Studies Review (Australia), China Information (The Netherlands), China Scholarship (Beijing), Cultural Studies (Beijing), Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Taiwan and Singapore), Norwegian Journal of Migration Research, Asian Review of World Histories (South Korea), Research on Marxist Aesthetics (Nanjing), Register of Critical Theory of Society (Nanjing), International Critical Thought (Beijing), Pasaj (Passages in Literature) (Istanbul), and Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (Malaysia). He was the editor of two-book series, "Studies in Global Modernity" (SUNY Press) as well as co-editor of a series of translations from prominent Chinese official intellectuals, published by Brill Publishers in the Netherlands. Dirlik's works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Bulgarian, French, German and Portuguese.

Positions and critiques

Dirlik took an engaged and critical approach to scholarship, oriented by "political relations and their social consequences" and "history as the search for universals".[10] In his partner Roxann Prazniak's words, he "continued to the end to see Marxist historicism as the most compelling and comprehensive approach to understanding cultural entanglements in the political economy of global capitalism".[11]

Dirlik spoke on his approach to history and the theoretical issues of historiography in a 2002 interview. As a "practicing historian" Dirlik said, "I continue to practice history not just because it is a way to make a living, which is an important consideration, but because I think that there is some value and meaning to historical understanding." He goes on to say that "I am also appalled at the arbitrary magisterial judgments on history encountered frequently in contemporary literature; a kind of licence that postmodernism seems to legitimize: since we cannot know anything, anybody can speak about everything."[12]

The interview goes on to criticize the field of postcolonial studies, which he took up in such essays as "History Without a Center? Reflections on Eurocentrism,"[note 1] Prasenjit Duara in 2001 replied to Dirlik's charge that diasporic scholars from the former British colonial world had used the concepts of "postcolonialism" to become embedded in Western academic "strongholds" and that they did not represent the majority of the population in their former countries.[14] Likewise even a sympathetic review of the field objected to Dirlik's framing of post-colonial scholars as "agents of capital."[15]

Dirlik was also critical of the "Beijing Consensus" which presented China's economic development model as an alternative—especially for developing countries—to the Washington Consensus. Dirlik argued that this "Silicon Valley model of development" ignores the fact that "the exploitation of China's labor force by foreign countries was a major part of the Chinese development."[16]

Jerry Bentley's 2005 account in the journal World History provides a cogent summary of Dirlik's critiques of the field and his own disagreement. Dirlik, he says, has leveled a "challenging critique" of the field of world history, charging that it "naturalizes capitalist globalization by turning it into human fate" and that scholarship in the field "perpetuates Eurocentric knowledge even as it seeks alternatives to Eurocentric explanations of the global past." Bentley continues that Dirlik has identified genuine problems, but has "harnessed his scholarship to a political agenda." Dirlik "overstated the problems and overgeneralized his critique," falling into the "trap of an originary fallacy," in which he "confuses origin with fate," assuming that historical scholarship must inevitably follow lines established at the foundation."[17]

Po-hsi Chen distinguishes two phases in Dirlik's intellectual work. He sees Dirlik's focus shifting around the time of his 1991 book Anarchism in Chinese Revolution from "historicizing earlier-generation Chinese Marxists and their revolutionary practices and theoretical reflections" towards a critique of "newly emergent postcolonial studies in North American academe as complicit with globalization and neoliberalism".[18]

Personal life

Dirlik married fellow historian Roxann Prazniak at the Duke Chapel in 1984.[19] They both had children in previous relationships,[7] one of whom is Dirlik's son Nick.[20]

Selected publications

Books
  • 1978. Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1978. ISBN 0520035410. (reprinted 1990).
  • 1985. Culture, Society and Revolution: A Critical Discussion of American Studies of Modern Chinese Thought (Working papers in Asian/Pacific studies, 85-01), Durham, NC: Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University
  • 1989. The Origins of Chinese Communism, New York: Oxford University Press.
  • 1989. (edited, with Maurice Meisner) Marxism and the Chinese Experience: Issues in Chinese Socialism, Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe
  • 1991. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • 1991. (with Ming K. Chan) Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932, Durham: Duke University Press.
  • 1993. (edited) What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, Boulder, CO: Westview Press ISBN 0813385318 (2nd edition 1998).
  • 1994. After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
  • 1995. (edited, with Rob Wilson) Asia-Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
  • 1997. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • 1997. (edited, with Paul Healy and Nick Knight) Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's Thought, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press
  • 2000. (edited, with Xudong Zhang) Postmodernism and China, Durham, NC: Duke University Press = special issue of boundary 2 (2.3)
  • 2000. (edited, with Vinay Bahl and Peter Gran) History After the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
  • 2001. Postmodernity's Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
  • 2001. (edited, with Roxann Prazniak) Places and Politics in the Age of Global Capital, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
  • 2001. (edited) Chinese on the American Frontier, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
  • 2005. Marxism in the Chinese Revolution, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
  • 2006. (edited) Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press
  • 2007. Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press
  • 2008. (edited) Snapshots of Intellectual Life in Contemporary PR China, Durham, NC: Duke University Press = special issue of boundary 2 (35.2)
  • 2009. Kriz, Kimlik ve Siyaset: Küreselleşme Yazıları [= Crisis, Identity and Politics: Writings on Globalization], Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları
  • 2011. (edited) The National Learning Revival, special issue of China Perspectives (85.1)
  • 2011. Culture and History in Post-Revolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity (The Liang Qichao Memorial Lectures), Hong Kong: Chinese University Press
  • 2012. (edited, with Guannan Li and Hsiao-pei Yen) Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth Century China: Between Universalism and Indigenism, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press
  • 2012. (edited, with Roxann Prazniak and Alexander Woodside) Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers
  • 2013. "Quanqiu xiandaixing zhi chuang: Shehui kexue wenji"(Windows on Global Modernity: Social Scientific Essays),Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chuban she
  • 2017. Complicities: The People's Republic of China in Global Capitalism. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Representative articles

Notes

  1. ^ Interview in which Dirlik lays out his point of view.[13]

References

  1. ^ "REVOLUTION AND HISTORY: DEBATES ON CHINESE SOCIAL HISTORY, 1928–1933", University of Rochester Libraries, archived from the original on September 30, 2024, retrieved September 30, 2024
  2. ^ Arif Dirlik (1973), Revolution and History: Debates on Chinese Social History, 1928–1933, PhD dissertation: University of Rochester, p. i, ProQuest 302668726
  3. ^ International Who's who in Asian Studies. Asian Research Service. 1975. p. 66.
  4. ^ "Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism: An Interview with Arif Dirlik | libcom.org". libcom.org. Retrieved January 16, 2024.
  5. ^ Dirlik 1978.
  6. ^ Morse 2016.
  7. ^ a b c Karl, Rebecca E. (December 3, 2017), "In Memoriam: Arif Dirlik (1940–2017)", H-Net, archived from the original on December 6, 2017
  8. ^ Chen 2021, p. 537.
  9. ^ Coleman, William; Sajed, Alina (June 26, 2013). Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-16394-4.
  10. ^ Prazniak 2021a, pp. 466–467, 471.
  11. ^ Prazniak 2021a, p. 470.
  12. ^ Dirlik 2002a, pp. 247–271.
  13. ^ Dirlik 2002b, pp. 9–45.
  14. ^ Duara 2001, p. 81.
  15. ^ Loomba 1998, p. 250.
  16. ^ Dirlik, Arif. University of Oregon. "Beijing Consensus: Beijing 'Gongshi.' Archived February 2, 2014, at the Wayback Machine"
  17. ^ Bentley 2005, p. 70-71.
  18. ^ Chen 2021, p. 534.
  19. ^ Prazniak 2021b, p. 611.
  20. ^ Prazniak 2021a, p. 466.

Bibliography