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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822369325 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2017 |
| Edition description: | 06 Out of stock indefinitely |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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CHAPTER 1
AMERICA'S ASIA
Discovering China, Rethinking Knowledge
[Established scholars have] been irresponsible because they've demanded they be apolitical, which is a very political action. Inaction is. You're being very political in your inaction, and this is the problem of the field, and this is why the China field is in such a rut, why good scholarship is not being done, why most of the things that appear in the journals are a lot of junk, more they are a lot of shit.
— Jonathan Unger, "Wither Chinese Studies: A Panel at the 1970 Convention in San Francisco"
Learning has to be grasped. As soon as they had grasped the truth the young founders of new schools embarked on discoveries, scorning the old fogeys. Then those with learning oppressed them. Isn't that what history is like? When we started to make revolution, we were mere twenty-year-old boys, while the rulers of that time, like Yuan Shikai and Duan Qirui, were old and experienced. They had more learning, but we had more truth.
— Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Chengdu Conference"
In 1971, Pantheon Books published America's Asia, a collection of "dissenting essays on Asian-American relationships." Edward Friedman and Mark Selden, the two editors, explained the title of the volume: "Asia is America's in three important ways," they began. "First, it is America's in the sense that we impose American categories to describe, evaluate and direct Asian experience. Our cultural chauvinism might mainly provide material for humorous self-analysis were it not for the overwhelming explosion of American economic and military might throughout Asia. For Asia is America's in this second tragic sense that American power has channeled, distorted, and suppressed much that is Asia."
This was, at the time, a very powerful statement and one that carried important implications, especially as it was pronounced within — and against — the entire field of Asian studies. America's Asia was not just the result of a conference or of a short-term collaboration among academics; it was the second volume to appear under the name of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, an organization of graduate students and young professors who had come together in 1968, united in their opposition to the Vietnam War, American policies in Asia, and the very structure of their field of study. The quote above summarizes well the layered and multifaceted criticism waged by the Committee at the time. The Committee proclaimed not only its unwavering condemnation of the Indochina War but also of the economic and diplomatic strategies of the United States in the entire region; Vietnam was just the most extreme example of policies that ultimately constituted Asia as an extension of America's strategic interests. Those policies, CCAS argued, were made possible and viable through the collaboration of American scholarship on Asia, that is, through the work of their own teachers, who had shaped the categories used to distort, obscure, and suppress the very humanity of Asian people.
In articles, conferences, and debates, the Concerned Asian Scholars described how the field — and all area studies — had come to be established in the period immediately following the war precisely as part of a government project, through grants, fellowships, and foundations; they traced the legacy of the McCarthy purges, which, they argued, had transformed Asian specialists into obedient experts, unable or unwilling to see the moral or political implications of their scholarship; finally, they hinted at the mutual imbrication of this scholarship with the actual genocide of Asians. The field of Asian studies was then directly responsible for the making of America's Asia, for the intellectual, economic, and military appropriation of Asia and Asian people by U.S. interests. As Leigh Kagan averred in the first issue of the CCAS Newsletter, "the field of Asian studies, neither as a scapegoat nor as a priesthood, but as part and parcel of American society and politics and of our individual lives, is due for a self-conscious probing, and uncompromising self-examination."
Yet CCAS's devastating critique of U.S. policies and scholarship on Asia had another, more positive goal: to highlight the new Asian realities that those policies and scholarship had made invisible. This was the third and most significant way in which Asia could and should be America's, Friedman and Selden continued: "The essays in this book suggest, moreover, that an Asia conceived in antagonistic or contemptible categories is an Asia where much that is humane, valuable, and worthy of emulation is ignored. This adds a final meaning to America's Asia. If we could change our relation to Asia we would be open to learning much from Asian people that could help us create a more decent and just society in the United States."
Asia was not just a site of oppression, the location of a carnage; rather it was truly "America's Asia" in the sense that it offered viable political alternatives to the United States, and potentially to the world. What was going on in Asia transcended its geographical and historical position, as it posed questions and proposed solutions that challenged the political assumptions of people globally. The very last sentence of the book — found at the end of Stephen Andors's essay on the Maoist factory — makes precisely this case: "Ultimately, however, this process of struggle and development going on in China transcends the Chinese situation, and poses critical questions of action and philosophy for all of us." For these concerned scholars, Asia and Asian people were no longer objects to be studied, but instead subjects with whom experiences could and had to be shared.
This chapter investigates the meanings of "America's Asia" in the early history of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. First of all, Asia here was a political signifier: unlike the "Asianisms" of the late nineteenth or the early twenty-first century, CCAS's discourse did not focus on unchanging ethnic or culturally based values, nor on the awakening of the sleeping giant. Rather, "Asia," and expressly Maoist China, once divested of the culturalist trappings that scholars and political strategists had created, appeared as one of the crucial motors of global change, and Asian peoples were leading the transformation that we now identified with the "global sixties": "national liberation movements against colonialism and imperialism; new extra-party and extra-trade union organizational forms and new forms of political subjectivity; radical critiques of capitalism in politics, activism, cultural production, and life; and radical forms of experimentation in everyday life." In this perspective, CCAS's "Asianism" (or even their Maoism of sorts) throws light onto the more general shift in the global, political, and intellectual frame of reference, the decentering of politics in the 1960s and 1970s, when what was happening in Asia acquired a new centrality for people all over the world. This was a time in which workers in France could call for "Vietnam in Our Factories," and Maoism was a shared, if perhaps misunderstood, reference of German students and Indian revolutionaries.
But CCAS was not just a political organization; it was also and primarily a group of young students of Asia, and such a radical shift in their position vis-à-vis the object of their studies had huge implications for their intellectual and professional lives. Within the field of Asian studies, the concept of "America's Asia," as framed by Selden and Friedman, involved a critique of "orientalism" before Orientalism, and without the support of Said's elaboration. But in addition, and more fundamentally, "America's Asia" — at least in its third meaning — suggested the need and the possibility of a post-orientalist praxis, as much in scholarship as in politics. It was not enough to criticize the existing epistemic structure of Asian studies and its very practical connections with U.S. foreign policy and militarism; an indispensable next step was to ask what the recognition of the previously inscrutable "Asian other" as a political subject signified for the academic, intellectual, and political practice in the United States and globally, and to act upon this recognition.
This chapter traces the founding of CCAS in 1968 and its activities of the first few years. I focus on the role that Asia in general, and China in particular, had in shaping and defining the organization's intellectual positions within the field. I show that it was the experience of Maoist China — reinterpreted, filtered, viewed from a distance — that provided the grounding for these scholars' concern but also for their criticism of the dominant scholarly paradigms. "China," and "Asia" in general, did not function as "models" to be replicated, nor did they provide ready-made answers. Rather it was because of the recognition of Asians as subjects capable of political and intellectual discoveries — and in dialogue with their experiences — that the Concerned Asian Scholars could frame their own intellectual and political contributions. In the latter part of the chapter, I trace how these contributions provided both a revisionist take on the major paradigmatic assumptions of Asian studies and original insights into possible new approaches to Asia. But I also highlight the theoretical limitations that confined the scholarly enterprise of the Concerned, which often prevented such insights to develop further, especially after the demise of the Asian subjectivities that guaranteed their political grounding.
These limitations can be connected in part to the peculiar character of global Maoism and specifically the ways in which the Chinese experience functioned outside China. As I show in the following pages, to both concerned scholars and French radicals, Maoism had configured itself as a theory that found expression and realization in localized practice, not as a set of rules to follow, nor as a model that could be exported and replicated. This was echoed in the famous dialogue between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in 1972, when the two philosophers (who had both looked closely at the Maoist movement in France) argued forcefully for a new understanding of theory as practice. In the words of Foucault, the intellectual's role was no longer to set himself aside and reveal truth to the benighted masses, but to join in the fight "against the forms of power that transform him into its object." In that, theory was part of a larger struggle: "This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to 'awaken consciousness' that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A 'theory' is the regional system of this struggle."
By the mid-1970s, because of a series of historical and political shifts of which China was a crucial part, we witness the demise of the larger struggle, the loss of a movement alongside which to fight, and the consequent re-separation of theory and practice. Then, without further rethinking, the radical practices that Maoism had animated could not be redeemed, repurposed, or reignited.
"Gentlemen, Shut up!" Speaking for Asia Scholars
In the 1960s, the centrality of Asia in political discourse and policymaking was reflected in the growth of Asian studies as an academic field. This was fueled by the mounting interest about that part of the world among Americans, but it was practically made possible by an unprecedented deployment of funds from the U.S. government (as well as from private donors). Crucial was the approval of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958, which "authorized a steady flow of federal funds into fellowships, instructional programs, library expansion, summer institutes and workshops, and research projects relating to language and area studies of the less well-studied regions of the world, particularly Asia." It is difficult to collect comprehensive data, but it seems that the NDEA (and specifically Title VI) funded a majority of doctoral students working on "critical languages" (such as Chinese, Hindi, or Japanese). The funding was allegedly very good, and promising scholars of Asia seem to have been comparatively well off: John Berninghausen recalls that he "could not afford to stop studying during the summer," as the fellowship money provided a living stipend way higher than what he could make at a temporary full-time job. Graduate students specializing in Asia constituted a small but rapidly growing cohort, and in the 1960s it probably looked possible that the expansion of the field would continue unabated, opening up plenty of possibilities for employment. Membership of the Association for Asian Studies more than quadrupled between 1958 and 1970 (from 1,022 to 4,708). One of the ironies behind the radicalization of graduate students working on Asia was that the relative safety of their funding might very well be one of the factors that allowed for the time and space for political activism, something largely unthinkable in today's academia.
The Vietnam War irrupted into this relatively rosy situation, and it was obviously the crucial factor behind the activism of the young scholars of Asia who gave birth to CCAS. "Vietnam was what did everything," Tom Engelhardt recalled. The war was a felt, lived presence on campuses and in communities, where young men were drafted or saw the draft as a very real possibility (a failed course, a lottery number). Male graduate students were thus strongly motivated to stay in school until age twenty-six, when "vulnerability to the draft became moot." But unlike other groups, the soon-to-be concerned Asian scholars had a different, more complex framework in which to express and channel their antiwar activism. For them, Asia was not just a real battlefield and the crucial hub of U.S. military and foreign policy; it was also their field of investigation. Moreover, the American discourse on Asia was partly shaped by their teachers and future colleagues, and within their professional organizations. It is precisely in the attempt to change the posture of the main professional group for Asia scholars (the Association for Asian Studies [AAS]) that we can locate part of the originating impulse behind the founding of CCAS.
In April 1966, about a dozen American graduate students and scholars studying in Taiwan sent a letter to the secretary and president of AAS expressing their "concern" and their "frustration with the persistent ignorance and lack of understanding throughout the United States concerning Asia." The signatories called for AAS to assume an active role in producing and disseminating information about Asia both to the government — for example, by providing "systematic and independent assessments of current and alternative Asia-related policies" — and, more importantly, as a substitute to the government. They recommended that AAS set up procedures so that the organization "could take a collective stand on public issues when it appeared such a stand might be a vital and constructive addition to public discussion." They called AAS to issue "authoritative background statements" on Asian-related problems and to critically evaluate teaching about Asian matters (textbooks, curricula, etc.). In the summer, they mailed the proposal to close to two hundred AAS members and an additional forty specifically to China specialists.
The responses from AAS leaders and other prominent scholars were generally not supportive and often outright dismissive. Charles Hucker and Karl Pelzer (respectively secretary and president of AAS) both objected to proposals that would, in their opinion, push AAS toward direct or indirect political action, leading to internal dissension and disruption, and, more significantly, to a possible loss of the association's tax-exempt status. This was not an unfounded fear, especially in the mind of scholars who had witnessed — in some cases, from the inside — the Institute of Pacific Relations being destroyed in part because of the revocation of its tax-exempt status in the McCarthy era. These were deep wounds that made anything which had even a remote echo of political advocacy unpalatable. The unfortunate implication was that this fear, however justified, de facto silenced any criticism of government policy and politics.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The End of Concern"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Of Ends and Beginnings; or, When China Existed 1
1. America's Asia: Discovering China, Rethinking Knowledge 23
2. To Be, or Not to Be, a Scholar: The Praxis of Radicalism in Academia 67
3. Seeing and Understanding: China as the Place of Desire 101
4. Facing Thermidor: Global Maoism at Its End 143
Epilogue. Area Redux: The Destinies of "China" in the 1980s and 1990s 175
Notes 195
Bibliograpy 241
Index 257
What People are Saying About This
“Fabio Lanza takes us into an almost forgotten moment in the history of Chinese studies. With precision, care, theoretical smarts, and an astonishing attention to detail, he shows how an engaged band of thinkers grappled with Maoism and the Cultural Revolution while collectively opposing the US war in Vietnam. This is not simply an exercise in rethinking a moment in the Cold War history of sinology. Rather, Lanza situates his study in the wider discursive and activist space of global Maoism, revealing the myriad ways in which Maoism was embraced as an alternative to the time’s capitalist modernity and imperialism. And he makes a compelling case for why revisiting and rethinking the global Maoism of the 1960s is more urgent than ever. The End of Concern is essential reading for our contested present and uncertain future.”
"Carefully reconstructing the documentary record of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, Fabio Lanza brings unknown, forgotten, and disavowed material to light. With superior research, compassionate critique, and clear, accessible writing, he has defined this period's intellectual history. A wonderful book."