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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Culture & History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity by Arif Dirlik Viren Murthy Dirlik, Arif. Culture & History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011. 356 pp. $52.00 (cloth). Those who have been following changes in China from the 1970s to the present cannot help but be confused by the ideological contradictions, the strange commingling of new forms of thought and culture with various imaginations of the old or traditional. The cover of Arif Dirlik's Culture and History in Post-Revolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity expresses this temporal disjuncture embodied in contemporary Chinese ideology, with a photograph that juxtaposes stone statues of Confucius and Mao, seating the two side by side as if in conversation. This juxtaposition adumbrates a key theme in Dirlik's book, namely how modern China has been dealing with the past and how the more traditional past (represented here by Confucius), which the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement attempted to get rid of, has now returned in full force and threatens to retire Mao and the memories of revolution to the museum or even the dustbin of history. But the problem of this book and Dirlik's cover is more complex. On the book, Confucius and Mao inhabit the same space, but both are reified in stone and then represented photographically. We see here how the dual temporalities of Confucius and Mao appear in the same space through multiple mediations. Dirlik's book uncovers the global mediations that give rise to the cultural contradictions that pervade contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual life. More specifically, Dirlik suggests that behind the appearance of conflicts between cultures, such as Confucian and Maoist-revolutionary culture, lie deeper structural dynamics related to global capitalism. Indeed the subtitle of his book, "the perspective of global modernity," indicates that this book will go beneath the surface appearances of the rise of Chinese culture and the ideological conflicts between Maoism and Confucianism and attempt to grasp such phenomena in relation to larger trajectories and dynamics, which are not restricted to China. The book consists of a preface and eight chapters. The first chapter, the introduction on "Modernity, Globality, History: Methodological Reflections," along with the next chapter, "Our Ways of Knowing," and last chapter, "Further Reflections on Global Modernity," each tackle the issue of how to understand modernity in relation to global capitalism, a problem that any serious study of China must confront. The rest of the essays could be understood as case studies that exemplify Dirlik's methodological points. The topics covered include Chinese Marxism and social history, contemporary Confucianism, the issue of Chinese culture, sociology and anthropology in twentieth-century China, and problem of national learning. The chapter on national learning (guoxue) is especially relevant, given that the book is based on the "Liang Qichao Memorial Lectures," which Dirlik delivered at the Academy of National Learning at Tsinghua University in November, 2010. I am going to focus on Dirlik's theoretical contribution because the question of how to think about Chinese modernity in a global context runs through the various individual chapters. Dirlik poses the key theme of the book by invoking Liang Qichao. He writes: "My invocation of Liang Qichao's call for a 'new history' a century ago is intentional, as I think that there are significant parallels between the conceptual challenges presented by our contemporary situation, and the globalizing world faced by Liang Qichao and his contemporaries" (p. 4). By comparing China during the late Qing and in the contemporary world, Dirlik highlights two versions of globalization. During the late Qing, Liang Qichao attempted to develop a "new history" to move away from the dynastic system and embrace the national form. However, today, calls for "new history" aim to rescue cultures from the nation-form (p. 4). In the contemporary world, people can no longer agree on what it means to be modern. In this context, societies such as China, which used to be part of the Third World, "make their claims on what it is to be modern" (p. 5). With the last sentence, we see that Dirlik works on two levels, historical existence...