This unique work opens a field of inquiry around place-based critiques of global capital as it focuses on the interactions between local issues and international financial flows. Framing their discussions around the concept of place-based imagination, the contributors examine such cases as indigenous movements against land degradation, ethnic pluralism and union organizing, ethnic diversity and the challenges of state and capital to cultural identity, and women's networks through non-governmental organizations. This ambitious study will be an invaluable resource and launching point for scholars and students in ethnic and identity studies and will interest all readers exploring the production of place and identification.

Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization

Politics & Social Sciences

Prazniak, Roxann

Dirlik author of Marxism in the Chinese Revolution, Arif

Social Sciences

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Challenges to the conventional study of history have been raised by the recent paradigm of globalization and by new intellectual transformations linked to postmodernism and postcolonialism. In this book the noted historian Arif Dirlik argues for a new approach to the practice of historical research. Moving beyond mere critique, he synthesizes traditional historical methods with new approaches that emphasize historical memory, indigenous writing, place based history, and the dual processes of integration and fragmentation in a globalized world.

Postmodernity's Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Culture and Politics Series)

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

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 relevance while avoiding dogmatic and Eurocentric limitations. These incisive essays range from the origins of socialism in the early twentieth century, through the victory of the Communists in mid-century, to the virtual abandonment by century's end of any pretense to a socialist revolutionary project by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. All that remains of the revolution in historical hindsight are memories of its failures and misdeeds, but Dirlik retains a critical perspective not just toward the past but also toward the ideological hegemonies of the present. Taken together, his writings reaffirm the centrality of the revolution to modern Chinese history. They also illuminate the fundamental importance of Marxism to grasping the flaws of capitalist modernity, despite the fact that in the end the socialist response was unable to transcend the social and ideological horizons of capitalism.

Marxism in the Chinese Revolution (State & Society in East Asia)

Asia

What Is in a Rim?

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 region's constitution. The contributors agree that it is these interactions that constitute the region, rather than the physical boundaries of the Pacific. This revised and updated edition brings in additional essays focusing on conceptualizations of the Pacific, considers more fully interactions among countries, and strongly emphasizes peoples within the Pacific, who are routinely ignored in most discussions of the 'Rim.'

Business & Money

Economics

Chinese on the American Frontier (Pacific Formations: Global Relations in Asian and Pacific Perspectives)

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 statesfrom the Cascades to the Great Plainsto provide a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in nineteenthcentury America.

Yeung, Malcolm

Americas