History as a discipline faces a crisis of identity as Eurocentrism fades in a world where globalized visions compete to explain historical processes. Facing the challenge squarely, this volume_comprising specialists on Asia, Africa, and Latin America_explores the state of historical analysis in various world regions and appraises current views on what defines and challenges historical knowledge. It is widely accepted that Eurocentrism no longer seem acceptable in a world where others are reasserting their own notions of past and future. The postDWorld War II spatialities that guided both...

These essays consider the implications for Chinese socialism of the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and the legacy of Mao Zedong as well as the meaning of the new definition and direction Mao's successors have given socialism. The themes have been selected for conceptual coherence within a socialist problematic of social change. Representing anthropology, art history, economics, history, literature and politics, various inquiries point in a twofold direction - the meaning of socialism for China and the meaning of Chinese Socialism for socialism as a global phenomenon - "meaning" not in...

The essays in this collection address questions raised by a modernity that has become global with the victory of capitalism over its competitors in the late twentieth century. Rather than erase difference by converting all to European-American norms of modernity, capitalist modernity as it has gone global has empowered societies once condemned to imprisonment in premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity, on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization. Global...

"A compelling essay on the contemporary human condition." William D. Coleman, Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University "An unusually perceptive and balanced appraisal of the globalization hype and its relation to the reality of global capitalism." Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University In his provocative new book Arif Dirlik argues that the present represents not the beginning of globalization, but its end. We are instead in a new era in the unfolding of capitalism -- "global modernity." The fall of communism in the 1980s generated culturally...

The essays in this collection address questions raised by a modernity that has become global with the victory of capitalism over its competitors in the late twentieth century. Rather than erase difference by converting all to European-American norms of modernity, capitalist modernity as it has gone global has empowered societies once condemned to imprisonment in premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity, on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization. Global...

Chinese immigrants played a dynamic role in frontier America, yet scholars of Asian America have focused for the most part only on the Pacific Coast, especially California. This reader fills that gap by collecting memoirs, documents, and historical analyses from the other Western states--from the Cascades to the Great Plains--to provide a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in nineteenth-century America. Selecting among a wealth of primary and secondary material, Dirlik has chosen works that enlarge our understanding of the Chinese presence in the West and the development of Chinese...

Offering critical perspectives on a number of ideological issues that have figuredprominently 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. Arif Dirlik touches on a number of themes, including the repudiation of the revolutionary...

Within this text, the contributors provide a historical perspective on the development of anthropology and sociology since their introduction to Chinese thought and education in the early 20th century, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1980s. The authors offer different windows on theoretical and research agendas of anthropologists and sociologists of the PRC and Taiwan, shaped as much by their political context as by disciplinary training. In examining the careers of several individual scholars, they also make note not only of their creative contributions, but also of the resonance of their...

This book offers historical and comparative analyses of changes in agrarian society forced by the globalization of capitalism, and the implications of these changes for human welfare globally. The book gives special attention to recent economic development and urbanization in the People s Republic of China which have had a major impact on contemporary transformations globally. Case studies from South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in turn place these transformations in a comparative global perspective. The contributors include distinguished scholars from the UN, PRC, India,...

As the People's Republic of China has grown in economic power, so too have concerns about what its sustained growth and expanding global influence might mean for the established global order. Explorations of this changing dynamic in daily reporting as well as most recent scholarship ignore the part played by forces emanating from the global capitalist system in the PRC's failures as well as its successes.

China scholar Arif Dirlik reflects in Complicities on a wide range of concerns, from the Tiananmen Square tragedy to the spread of Confucius Institutes across more than four...