Abstract
On 1 December 2017, Arif Dirlik, a great scholar and unorthodox thinker, passed away at the age of 77 at his home in Oregon, USA. A distinguished researcher and scholar of Chinese and global intellectual history with a compassion for revolutionary and critical thought, Dirlik ventured into many new fields of inquiry. He published more than 20 book-length studies which were translated into many languages and innumerable articles in a myriad of academic journals. He gave many lectures and interviews, trained numerous young scholars, and inspired even more. We will miss him, and this is true not only for those of us who were his close colleagues, but also for those who did not share his opinions and assessments. Dirlik was among the very few to push his colleagues and younger generations of scholars and students alike into unknown territory. The theories and perspectives he introduced to the field of Chinese studies were compelling, disturbing and subversive, yet fruitful, innovative and ingenious.
Born in Mersin, Turkey, Dirlik obtained a BSc in electrical engineering from Robert College, Istanbul, in 1964. First trained as an engineer, he was later awarded a Fulbright scholarship and switched to the humanities, earning a PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 1973. He was a staff member in the History Faculty at Duke University in 1971 and moved to the University of Oregon in 2001, where he was Knight Professor of History and Anthropology, Director of the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Comparative Literature Program.
The first of many books written by Arif Dirlik which I read was on Chinese historiography. Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) had just appeared when I started my academic career and was keenly interested in the ‘Chinese’ way of writing history. At the time, only very few scholars studied Chinese historiography, and those of us who ventured into this field were desperately looking for a way to move forward in our study. We found Arif Dirlik and learned how to take Chinese historians and Marxist historians in China seriously, how to read their texts and decipher their discourses, and how to look at the writing of history as a modern endeavour. At the time, Dirlik viewed China as a space of unprecedented developments, social experiments and unusual solutions. However, he started to doubt the Maoist version of Chinese communism, and in his book The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) and his deliberations discussed in Culture, Society and Revolution (Durham, NC: Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University, 1985), he started exploring alternative intellectual possibilities. At the zenith of his earlier works was Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). It was here that he found a new orientation in a form of Marxist-inspired ideology which included human rights, democracy and respect for the individual. This was what he would continue to adhere to for the rest of his scholarly life.
I for one was disappointed with Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. It was only half the story – a realization that would dawn on anyone reading Peter Zarrow’s narrative on Chinese anarchism (Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Dirlik had chosen to focus on the European version of anarchism, and he did so because he had lost hope in China as an alternative model of modernity and socialism. This turning away was based on what he would later call Mao’s betrayal of the Cultural Revolution, the effects of which gave impetus to China’s policy of reform and opening up in 1978. The ‘Tiananmen tragedy’ stayed close to his heart for many years to come, and the relationship between economy and politics became his new focus once he realized that the developments in China would create a whole new world. Globalization and its implications for the world at large as well as for China was his new field of inquiry. His last publication, Complicities: The People’s Republic of China in Global Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), based on a lecture, testifies to many years of trying to understand the role of the PRC in the globalization process as well as the implications of astounding economic, social and political developments in the PRC for the world.
In what must have been one of his last lectures delivered in Vancouver in February 2017, Dirlik shared with us what he saw as the central issue in the field of China studies in the decades to come. He postulated that ambivalence is the only possible attitude towards developments in the PRC today. On one side, there is the irrefutable success which the CCP and the people in China have achieved and, on the other, the enormous ecological and social crisis that this success has precipitated. Both sides of the coin have one common starting point, and this is, according to Dirlik, the ‘world’s highway to hell’ paved by the good intention of unending developmentalism and driven by economic growth. The consumerism that was unleashed by millions of peasants in the PRC overcoming poverty and by millions of the ‘new middle class’ yearning for what their counterparts around the world consume has led the world to a point where in the not so distant future it will no longer meet our incessant demand and hunger for all kinds of consumer goods; our world will become dysfunctional, ‘out of order’ as Dirlik put it. Dirlik’s warning to those who hope that the PRC will solve the problems it has created for itself and the world: the PRC is not equipped to occupy a dominant position in the world because it lacks a convincing identity. One of the reasons is China’s revolutionary legacy which is like a thorn in its flesh, making governing China a continuously precarious undertaking. To quote Dirlik, ‘What is at stake is [that] the world as we know it … is falling apart under the weight of its contradictions.’ With his passing, we will have to carry on our inquiry and research without his inspiration and advice.