Culture as history: envisioning change across and beyond "eastern" and "western" civilizations in the May Fourth era

This essay examines an influential debate that took place during China’sMay Fourth era (circa 1915–1927) concerning the character of ‘‘Eastern’’ and ‘‘Western’’ civilizations. In this debate, both moderates and radicals wrestle with a growing awareness that cultures have not only a spatial existence but also a historical career, which has encouraged the development of certain institutions and attitudes and discouraged others. Spatial terms mark not only the places where knowledge circulates, but also the particular pasts-and thus futures-toward which Chinese thinkers align themselves. This way of figuring ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’ enables May Fourth thinkers to do more than sort civilizational characteristics into categories of the inevitably universal and the irredeemably particular, as many commentators have assumed. It also facilitates the travel of cultural products and practices across the spatial as well as temporal boundaries originally seen to contain them

Introduction: thinking with the past: political thought in and from the 'non-west'

This special issue addresses the diverse ways the past may be used and perceived in different places for political purposes. Noting that histories of political thought have traditionally reproduced the parochial exclusions of the discipline, contributors to this special issue consider how the past matters for political thought and from a global perspective. This mandate does not entail the assumption that there exists some singular global vantage point from which historical ideas might be assessed or that Euro-American concerns and experiences should be projected ever more broadly across the world’s pasts. Rather, these contributors directly engage the globally diffuse, intellectually substantive confrontations of past with present, of tradition with modernity, and of heritage with necessity that erupted (and continue to erupt) as thinkers in diverse societies grapple with the specific dilemmas of their time and place

New pasts for new futures: a temporal reading of global thought

This paper draws upon the work of the syncretic Chinese Marxist Li Dazhao to elaborate an idea of “global thought” which is more than just a localized form of Western knowledge. Li’s work offers both an example, and also a theory, of global thought: his work emerges from the intersection of multiple trajectories of thought with diverse origins, and in the process offers a theory of agency to explain how action in the present renders those trajectories intelligible as lineages which can inspire future innovations. I argue that this opens the possibility for a global thought defined by a plurality of lineages, whose continuities stretch into the history and future of Asia as well as of Europe. I suggest two such lineages for Li’s work here: one links Li’s work to contemporary Chinese responses; the other to scholarship in political and social theory which emphasizes the vitalist role of time in the exercise of agency. These comparisons demonstrate the extent to which global thought such as Li’s transforms where (and when) thinking in the present and future might ground its arguments, and from which historical materials it might draw its resources

How should we use the Chinese past? Contemporary Confucianism, the 'reorganization of the national heritage,' and non-western histories of thought in a global age

In this essay I argue that recent philosophical attempts to ‘modernise’ Confucianism rehearse problematic relationships to the past that – far from broadening Confucianism’s appeal beyond its typical borders – end up narrowing its scope as a source of scholarly knowledge. This is because the very attempt to modernise assumes a rupture with a past in which Confucianism was once alive and relevant, fixing its identity to a static historical place disconnected from the present. I go on to explore alternative means of situating past thought to present inquiry, by examining a debate among early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals over the value of their past heritage in a modern age. Their diverse responses undermine the certainty of a singular or persistent Chinese past, enabling a creative presentism that encourages deliberate filiation with alternative ‘tracks’ of past practice and thought

Histories of thought and comparative political theory: the curious thesis of "Chinese origins for Western knowledge," 1860-1895

How is cultural otherness any different from the historical otherness already found in our existing canons of thought? This essay examines an influential Chinese conversation that raised a similar question in struggling with its own parochialism. Claiming that all “Western” knowledge originated in China, these Chinese reformers see the differences presented by foreign knowledge as identical to those already authorizing innovation within their existing activity of knowledge-production. Noting that current academic theory-production treats the otherness of past authors in a similar way, I argue that we must broach something like a China-origins claim if we are to see typically marginalized (“non-Western”) thought as part of what disciplines our thought, rather than serves simply as its target of inclusion. Doing so, we blur self/foreign binaries and enable future innovation of thought on radically new terms

What can a science fiction blockbuster teach us about China's worldview?

Professor Leigh Jenco shares her insights about the recent film screening and panel discussion of The Wandering Earth 2 at the British Film Institute

Overlapping histories, co-produced concepts: imperialism in Chinese eyes

Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty's territorial expansion was imperial and comparable to the imperial expansions of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the People's Republic of China, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term "empire"should be (re)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire that rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations that suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945 to the 1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative inquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states