Based on a wealth of archival material released after Mao's death, this book offers a revisionist account of the introduction and triumph of Marxism in China. Dirlik shows that, in 1919, at the outset of the May Fourth Movement, anarchism was the predominant ideology among revolutionaries and intellectuals and Marxism was virtually unknown. Three years later, however, the Communist Party of China had emerged as the unchallenged leader of the Left. Dirlik disputes long-held beliefs about the domestic origins of Chinese Communism to argue that Communist thought and organization were brought...

In Revolution and History, Arif Dirlik examines the application of the materialist conception of history to the analysis of Chinese history in a period when Marxist ideas first gained currency in Chinese intellectual circles. His argument raises questions about earlier interpretations of Marxist historiography by scholars who based their opinions primarily on post-1949 writings.

Arif Dirlik's latest offering is a revisionist perspective on Chinese radicalism in the twentieth century. He argues that the history of anarchism is indispensable to understanding crucial themes in Chinese radicalism. And anarchism is particularly significant now as a source of democratic ideals within the history of the socialist movement in China.

Dirlik draws on the most recent scholarship and on materials available only in the last decade to compile the first comprehensive history of his subject available in a Western language. He emphasizes the anarchist contribution to...

This ambitious work provides a unique statement on the question of place-based activism and its relationship to powerful forces of international capital. Arguing that specific places around the world are sites for the defense and enhancement of daily life in the context of rapidly expanding global technologies and investment options, the contributors reach for a vision of social development that supports sustainable, humane cultures. Bringing together the local and the global, this work provides the first sustained linkage of ethnic groups in diaspora to macrocosmic processes of world capital...

Challenges to the study of history have been raised by globalization and by new transformations linked to postmodernism and postcolonialism. This book puts forward new approaches in historical research that emphasize the dual processes of integration and fragmentation in a globalized world.

Representing a lifetime of research and writing by noted historian Arif Dirlik, the essays collected here explore developments in Chinese socialism and the issues that have occupied historians of the Chinese revolution for the past three decades. Dirlik engages Chinese socialism critically but with sympathy for the aspirations of revolutionaries who found the hope of social, political, and cultural liberation in Communist alternatives to capitalism and the intellectual inspiration to realize their hopes in Marxist theory. The book's historical approach to Marxist theory emphasizes its global...

The essays in this volume range from questions of cultural self-representation in China to more general problems of reconceptualizing global relationships in response to contemporary changes. Although the new era of global capitalism calls for the remapping of global relations, such remapping must be informed both by a grasp of contemporary structures of economic, political, and cultural power and by memories of earlier radical visions of society. Without these two conditions, Arif Dirlik argues, the current preoccupation with Eurocentrism, ethnic diversity, and multiculturalism distract from...

Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume's diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism.
Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock...

Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume's diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism.
Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock...

This pathbreaking, multidisciplinary work challenges our unthinking acceptance of such terms as 'Asia Pacific' and 'Pacific Rim.' Clarifying the hidden power relationships and hegemonic struggles that are disguised by ideological constructions of the region, the contributors uncover fundamental contradictions_including the human costs and consequences_that underlie the much-celebrated economic boom. In evaluating the idea of 'Asia Pacific, ' the book shifts our focus from abstract relationships between capital and commodities to the human interactions that have played a formative part in the...