Thinking Modernity Historically: Is "Alternative Modernity" the Answer?

Dirlik, Arif The Asian Association of World Historians 2013 The Asian review of world histories Vol.1 No.1

This essay offers a historically based critique of the idea of "alternative modernities" that has acquired popularity in scholarly discussions over the last two decades. While significant in challenging Euro/American-centered conceptualizations of modernity, the idea of "alternative modernities" (or its twin, "multiple modernities") is open to criticism in the sense in which it has acquired currency in academic and political circles. The historical experience of Asian societies suggests that the search for "alternatives" long has been a feature of responses to the challenges of Euromodernity. But whereas "alternative" was conceived earlier in systemic terms, in its most recent version since the 1980s cultural difference has become its most important marker. Adding the adjective "alternative" to modernity has important counter-hegemonic cultural implications, calling for a new understanding of modernity. It also obscures in its fetishization of difference the entrapment of most of the "alternatives" claimed--products of the reconfigurations of global power--within the hegemonic spatial, temporal and developmentalist limits of the modernity they aspire to transcend. Culturally conceived notions of alternatives ignore the common structural context of a globalized capitalism which generates but also sets limits to difference. The seeming obsession with cultural difference, a defining feature of contemporary global modernity, distracts attention from urgent structural questions of social inequality and political injustice that have been globalized with the globalization of the regime of neoliberal capitalism. Interestingly, "the cultural turn" in the problematic of modernity since the 1980s has accompanied this turn in the global political economy during the same period. To be convincing in their claims to "alterity", arguments for "alternative modernities" need to re-articulate issues of cultural difference to their structural context of global capitalism. The goal of the discussion is to work out the implications of these political issues for "revisioning" the history and historiography of modernity.

CULTURE AGAINST HISTORY? : THE POLITICS OF EAST ASIAN IDENTITY

DIRLIK, ARIF Institute for Social Development and Policy Resear 1999 Development and Society Vol.28 No.2

Contemporary Perspectives on Modernity: A Critical Discussion

Dirlik, Arif 성균관대학교 동아시아학술원 2008 Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies Vol.8 No.1

This article argues for a revision of our understanding of modernity through an engagement with some recent work in Chinese history. These works(among others) have questioned the identification of modernity with European history. This article argues that while it is necessary to recognize the crucial link between Europe and modernity as phenomenon and concept, it is equally necessary to question the assumption that European modernity itself can be understood without reference to broader global relationships. European modernity, dynamized by capitalism, was one outcome among many of these relationships, which led to different economic and political formations across Eurasia. It suggests a periodization of modernity that retains the strategic role of modem Europe, but also seeks to recognize the complex interactions of which modem Europe itself was a product. European modernity emerged out of what we might describe as a Eurasian modernity, and subsequently asserted its supremacy over other alternatives in globalizing a particular form of modernity. That modernity itself has come under questioning as modernity has been globalized, resulting in what I have described as a third phase, Global Modernity.

[Articles]Globalization, Indigenism, Social Movements,and the Politics of Place

Arif Dirlik 부산대학교 한국민족문화연구소 2011 Localities Vol.- No.1

One of the most important and ironic products of the most recent round of economic globalization has been to enhance, foster, and render visible consciousness of place. The concern with places is evident in the proliferation of academic literature on the subject, in popular culture, and above all in the social movements that have become an increasingly powerful force in national and global politics. The concern comes in many guises, informed by different political visions. My interest here is in the way places are envisioned in relation-ship to two other paradigmatic phenomena of our times, indigenism and social movements. More than any other political and cultural orientation currently available, indigenism offers an indispensable critical perspective on the hegemonic assumptions that inform globalization. Social movements, on the other hand, offer a means to linking places in larger wholes that are important not only for overcoming the parochialism that is the predicament of place-based politics but also to answer to the demands of sustenance within political economic spaces that of necessity transcend places.

Transnationalism in Theory and Practise Uses, Mis-Uses, Abuses

( Arif Dirlik ) 서울시립대학교 도시인문학연구소 2010 Studies in Urban Humanities Vol.1 No.-

This discussion undertakes two tasks. First is to clarify several analytical issues connected with concepts vocabulary that appear insistently in contemporary urban and border studies: the nation-state, globalization. transnationalism, translocalism. These concerns are of great utility so long as they recognize the continued groundedness of contemporary life in the nation-state, even though there has been a weakening of the bonds between nation and state with the managerial role the state has assumed increasingly. Second is a discussion of problems in urban studies, especially a tendency to exaggerate the global and the transnational over the local and the translocal. The privileging of motion ignores that most people still lead stationary lives, and the solution of the problems of those in motion must be conjoined to solutions of those who are stationary. Especially important is the obliviousness in such studies to the proliferation of boundaries and even walls that constrain the motions of many. Secondly, it criticizes a tendency to stress inter-global city interactions t the cost of ignoring the relationship of cities to their hinterlands. The arguments draw on examples from the People`s Republic of China for illustration.

THEORY, HISTORY, CULTURE: CULTURAL IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF THEORY INTWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

ARIF DIRLIK 서울대학교 사회발전연구소 2000 Journal of Asian Sociology Vol.29 No.2

CULTURE AGAINST HISTORY? THE POLITICS OF EAST ASIAN IDENTITY

ARIF DIRLIK(아리프 덜릭) 서울대학교 사회발전연구소 1999 Journal of Asian Sociology Vol.28 No.2

Colonialism, Revolution, Development

Arif Dirlik(아리프 덜릭) 서울대학교 사회발전연구소 2010 Journal of Asian Sociology Vol.39 No.2

Intensified blending of populations through migrations, and the problem of citizenship in different national contexts, in recent years have foregrounded questions of culture and cultural difference in citizenship studies. These questions have been compounded by a pervasive suspicion of a universalistic understanding of citizenship for its possible Eurocentric implications. Citizenship studies in Eastern Asia partake of this general problematic of culture. The complication of citizenship through recognition of its cultural dimension is a salutary development, but one that also presents a new predicament: loss of coherence of the concept, as well as a bias to culturalism that disguises the radical challenge the idea of citizenship has presented to inherited notions of political belonging, most importantly, the remaking of subjects into citizens that has accompanied the globalization of the nation-form from the late 19th century. Struggles for citizenship also bear upon questions of democracy and human rights, which also disappear from sight in culturalist readings. This is the problem that is addressed in the essay. I argue that the preoccupation with culture, if unchecked, threatens to erase a century long history of struggles for citizenship, democracy and human rights in Eastern Asian societies. Discussions of citizenship need to be sensitive to these struggles which are still very much issues of Eastern Asian politics.

[원문]Mao Zedong Thought and the Third World

Arif Dirlik 가천대학교 아시아문화연구소 2010 아시아문화연구 Vol.20 No.-

Contemporary Perspectives on Modernity: A Critical Discussion

( Arif Dirlik ) 성균관대학교 동아시아학술원 2008 Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies Vol.8 No.1

This article argues for a revision of our understanding of modernity through an engagement with some recent work in Chinese history. These works(among others) have questioned the identification of modernity with European history. This article argues that while it is necessary to recognize the crucial link between Europe and modernity as phenomenon and concept, it is equally necessary to question the assumption that European modernity itself can be understood without reference to broader global relationships. European modernity, dynamized by capitalism, was one outcome among many of these relationships, which led to different economic and political formations across Eurasia. It suggests a periodization of modernity that retains the strategic role of modern Europe, but also seeks to recognize the complex interactions of which modern Europe itself was a product. European modernity emerged out of what we might describe as a Eurasian modernity, and subsequently asserted its supremacy over other alternatives in globalizing a particular form of modernity. That modernity itself has come under questioning as modernity has been globalized, resulting in what I have described as a third phase, Global Modernity.