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Imperialism and Education
in Twentieth Century
By Arif Dirlik
Arif Dirlik is
Knight Professor of Social Science and Professor of History and Anthropology at
the
As recently as two decades ago, it seemed quite
unproblematic to speak of imperialism in Modern Chinese history, and of the
extensive educational activities conducted by foreigners-most importantly
missionaries-as one of the most important media in the production and
consolidation of Euro/American cultural hegemony. Education in the hands of
missionaries seemed designed to complete the job begun by gunboats. For
nationalists in
It is remarkable how
problematic this view of education as a tool of imperialism has become over the
last decade. It is not that nationalist objections to foreign-sponsored
education have disappeared, or that historians are no longer concerned with
issues thrown up by the confrontation between nationalism and imperialism(or
colonialism). “De-colonizing the mind” still appears as an urgent task to
conservative as well as radical postcolonial intellectuals obsessed with
unfinished national projects, and conservatives globally (including the US) contemplate
with anxiety if not outright hostility any effort to introduce greater social
and ethnic complexity to the writing of national histories, which they feel
might weaken the nation ideologically. In the People’s Republic of
Nevertheless, there has
been a proliferation in recent years of doubts
concerning the historical status of both imperialism and nationalism.
What is most important in recent transformations, I would like to suggest here,
is the challenge presented by the progressive blurring of the distinction
between the inside and the outside that has been crucial over the last century
to the sustenance of the seemingly unbridgeable opposition between the national
and the colonial(or imperialist). The blurring of this distinction is not just
ideological, but social in a very significant sense. Structural transformations
in global relationships have endowed with a new significance social groups that
are the products of two centuries of global interactions between colonizers and
colonized, who long were objects of suspicion in nationalist ideology but find
themselves valorized in new ways as they increasingly occupy a strategic
position in the global economy. It is not very surprising that the education
that produced these groups is also subject to re-evaluation accordingly. As an
intense desire for incorporation in global capitalism replaces in Communist
Party policy the radical anti-imperialism of Maoist revolutionary socialism, it
is not very surprising that we should be witnessing in the People’s Republic of
In a provocative study of
cultural imperialism published in the early 1990s, John Tomlinson argued the
entanglement of cultural imperialism in issues of modernity, and urged that in
the assigning of “blame” for the ills of domination, a distinction be made
between “the critical discourse of modernity and the other discourses of
cultural imperialism.” He wrote,
"In the latter, some
clear, present, agent of domination was identified: the mass media,
There was the idea that
this agent was responsible-that criticism meant laying the blame at its door.
But here we have to think of a
situation being to blame and this is less satisfying to the
critical spirit. Thinking in terms of modernity seems to mean thinking in a rather
different critical mode from that employed in the discourse of cultural
imperialism. It seems to mean, for example, accepting
that our cultural
discontents have complex multiple determinations that have arisen over time and
thus that no present agent is
`responsible’ in any full
sense." 1
Tomlinson’s substitution
of modernity (a “situation”) for cultural imperialism (an “agency”) was
informed by a further distinction he made in the unfolding of modernity through
a period of imperialism to a present condition of globalization, beginning
roughly in the 1970s. “Globalisation may be distinguished from imperialism,” he
wrote, “in that it is a far less coherent or culturally directed process....the
idea of imperialism contains, at least, the notion of a purposeful project: the
intended spread of a social system from one centre of power across the
globe. The idea of `globalisation’
suggests interconnection and interdependency of all global areas which
happens in a far less purposeful way.” 2
I would like to bracket
here for the moment the possibility that Tomlinson’s questioning of “cultural
imperialism” at the moment of the fall of socialisms and the global victory of
capitalism is only one more example of an enthusiasm over a non-imperial
globality that was characteristic of the 1990s, that since then has been
rendered largely irrelevant by an intensified United States imperialism that
may well be unprecedented in its urge to “spread...a social system from one
centre of power across the world.” The idea of an empire without center or
boundary and, therefore, agency, would be argued even more forcefully by the
end of the decade by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their influential book,
Empire. 3 These
questionings of “imperialism” have been accompanied, most importantly in
postcolonial criticism, by questions concerning the relationship between
nationalism and colonialism that further have called into question the utility
of the concepts of colonialism and imperialism in understanding not only the
present, but the past as well. In some contemporary works, the colonial and
imperial pasts appear merely as stages of an inexorable globalization that has
presently replaced an earlier modernization discourse as a paradigm for
understanding the development of the modern world-of which Tomlinson’s own work
provides one example.4
It is possible also to
reverse the relationship here, as I will suggest below: that rather than the
history of colonialism disappearing into a new teleology of globalization,
globalization itself may be understood as the fulfillment of a modernity of
which colonialism and imperialism have been constituent moments: colonial
modernity. Contrary to Tomlinson, moreover, modernity is no more “just” a
situation than the capitalism which dynamizes it, which has its own agencies.
Colonialism has been a preeminent agency in the globalization of modernity. If
we seem today to live in a world where colonialism has been superseded by a
global modernity, in which the formerly colonized and dominated once again
assert their own political and cultural claims to modernity, this global
modernity is nevertheless one that has been marked indelibly by its origins in
colonialism; as is quite apparent in its unevenness, as well as the uneven
distributions of economic, social, political and cultural power that are the
legacies to it of modern colonialism and imperialism, distinguished
historically by their sources in capitalism and the nation-state.
I am concerned in this
discussion not with some vague idea of “globalization,” but with intellectual
shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the paradigm of globalization,
most notably, shifts in the understanding of colonialism(or imperialism) and
nationalism. First is the hybridization of colonialism in postcolonial criticism that
has shifted attention from the irreducible divide in earlier nationalist
thinking between the colonizer and the colonized to those “contact zones” where
new cultures were forged, in which the colonizer and the colonized were
partners, if not equal partners. If we are to imagine how ambiguous the
discourse of colonialism may appear to future generations, we need look no
further than postcolonial criticism as it has developed over the last decade or
so, bringing to the surface fundamental contradictions in an earlier discourse
on colonialism.5
The novelty of modern
colonialism, and its effects on either the colonizer or the colonized, have
been in dispute all along. Liberal and conservative development discourses,
most notably modernization discourse, have for the most part dismissed
colonialism as an important aspect of modernity, and where they have recognized
its importance, have assigned to it a progressive historical role.6 Marxists
have been more ambivalent on the question. Lenin’s interpretation of
colonialism as an indispensable stage of capitalism was to play a crucial part
in bringing colonialism into the center of radical politics globally. Still,
while mainstream Marxism has condemned colonialism for the oppression and
exploitation of the colonized, it, too, often has identified colonialism with a
progressive function in bringing societies “vegetating in the teeth of time,”
in Marx’s words, into modernity.7 Third World Marxists have shared in this
ambivalence.8
Nevertheless, if
colonialism as a historical phenomenon always has been in dispute, there was in
an earlier period some consensus over the meaning of colonialism.9 Well into the 1970s, colonialism in a strict
sense referred to the political control by one nation of another nation or a
society striving to become a nation. Where a colony had already achieved formal
political independence but still could not claim full autonomy due primarily to
economic but also ideological reasons, the preferred term was neo-colonialism.
These terms could be broadened in scope to refer also to relationships between “regions,”
as in the colonial or neo-colonial subjection of the Third to the
The issue of colonialism,
in other words, revolved mostly around the issue of capitalism, and was in many
ways subsidiary to the latter. To be sure, by the 1960s questions of the
relationship between colonialism and racism were on the agenda of postcolonial
discourses. This Third Worldism may be the most important source of contemporary
postcolonial criticism . But in the immediate context of national liberation
struggles, they appeared more often than not, not as problems in and of
themselves, but as distinguishing features of
capitalism in the setting of colonialism (the form class relations took
in colonial capitalism, sort of to speak) that could be resolved in the long
run only through the abolition of capitalism. Anti-colonial struggles derived
their historical meaning primarily from their contribution to the long-term
struggle between capitalism and socialism. V.I. Lenin, much more so than Karl
Marx, was the inspiration behind this view of the relationship between
capitalism and colonialism.
As oppression and
exploitation marked the political and economic relationships between the
colonizer and the colonized, the relationship appeared culturally as a
“Manichean” opposition between the two.10 There was all along a recognition of a
structural dialectic between the colonizer and the colonized. Structurally,
economic and political colonialism produced new practices and social
formations, including class formations, that bound the two together; just as
colonialism created a new native class that drew its sustenance from the
colonizer, the task of colonization was rendered much easier by the
collaboration of this class with the colonizers. Even where it was possible to
speak of a common culture shared by the colonizer and the colonized in the
“contact zones” of the colonies,11 this common culture enhanced,
rather than alleviated, the Manichean opposition between the two expressed most
importantly in the language of race, leaving no doubt as to where each belonged
economically, politically and culturally. In ideologies of national liberation,
native groups and classes which were economically and culturally entangled with
colonialism were viewed not as elements integral to the constitution of the
nation, but as intrusions into the nation of foreign elements that would have
to be eliminated in the realization of national sovereignty and autonomy. These
ideas were spelled out most forcefully in the work of Frantz Fanon, who stands
in many ways at the origins of a radical, critical and political
postcolonialism.12
Contemporary postcolonial
criticism is heir to this earlier discourse in reaffirming the centrality of
the colonial experience, but also parts ways with it in quite significant ways,
that ironically call into question the very meaning of colonialism. There were all along Third World voices dissatisfied
with the containment of the colonial experience within the categories of
capitalism, demanding a hearing for the psychological and cultural dimensions
of colonialism to which racism was of fundamental significance.13 These
are the voices that have come forward over the last two decades when there has
been a distinct shift in postcolonial discourse from the economic and political
to the cultural and the personal experiential.
The results where
colonialism is concerned are quite contradictory. The shift in attention to
questions of cultural identity in postcolonial discourse has been both a moment
in, and a beneficiary of, a more general reorientation in Marxist thinking
toward a recognition of at least the partial autonomy of the cultural from the
economic or the political spheres of life. Introduced into the colonial
context, this has resulted in a disassociation of questions of culture and
cultural identity from the structures of capitalism, shifting the grounds for
discourse to the encounter between the colonizer and the colonized, unmediated
by the structures of political economy within which they had been subsumed
earlier. The distancing of questions of colonialism from questions of
capitalism has in some measure also made possible the foregrounding of
colonialism, rather than capitalism, as the central datum of modern
history.
This centering of
colonialism, however, has also rendered the term increasingly ambiguous, and
raises serious questions in particular about modern colonialism. In many ways,
contemporary postcolonial criticism is most important as a reflection on the
history of postcolonial discourses(a self-criticism of the discourse, in other
words), bringing to the surface contradictions that were rendered invisible
earlier by barely examined and fundamentally teleological assumptions
concerning capitalism, socialism and the nation, but above all revolutionary
national liberation movements against colonialism, the failure of which has
done much to provoke an awareness of these contradictions. Recognition of these
contradictions also renders the concept of colonialism quite problematic.
Robert Young writes with reference to J.P. Sartre and A. Memmi that,
"Sartre’s insight
that the Manichean system of racism and colonization, apparently dividing
colonizer from colonized, infact generates dynamic mutual mental relations
between colonizer and colonized which bind them in the colonial drama, was
further elaborated by Albert Memmi in his demonstration that the dialectic also
involved what Hegel had called the `excluded middle’: the spectral presence of
the liminal, subaltern figures who slip between the two dominant antithetical
categories. Sartre’s response was to emphasize the dialectical aspect of his
own account, suggesting that Memmi saw a situation where he also saw a system."14
The difference between
Sartre and Memmi to which Young points may be symbolic of the shift that has
taken place in postcolonial criticism over the last two decades, with Memmi
having the last word-although contemporary postcolonial criticism arguably has
gone beyond what appears in Memmi’s work as a qualification and refinement of
the concept through personal experience to an explicit repudiation of systemic
understandings of colonialism. To the extent that colonialism has been
disassociated from capitalism, the understanding of colonialism as system has
retreated before a situational approach that valorizes contingency and
difference over systemic totality. The “contact zones,” which now appear as the
paradigmatic locations for colonial modernity, were also to serve, in
contemporary hindsight, as crucibles for the formation of a new global elite,
and for struggles over modernity as modernity itself was globalized through the
agencies of colonialism and imperialism.
This shift in the valorization of colonialism has been accompanied by
questionings concerning anti-colonial nation-building itself as a colonizing
activity. Nation-building as colonizing activity may characterize the history
of nationalism in general.15 Eugen Weber, who recognized the colonial
aspect of nationalism, nevertheless viewed it positively as part of the
civilizing function of the nation-state.16 For a
variety of reasons, the civilizing function attributed to the nation-state has
lost much of its plausibility over the years, drawing attention more to its
colonizing aspects. The following statement, somewhat reductionist in its
fundamentalism, nevertheless captures the colonial element in nationalism when
seen from the perspective of those on the ground:
"It is not so much
the pageant of imperialism that affects people’s lives, or the restrictions on
speech and political action, or the arrogance of foreign elites. The most
direct involvement of ordinary people with imperial rule is when their hard-won
food is removed from in front of them and taken right out of their family,
their community, and often their country. As well as the loss of livelihood,
there is the personal humiliation, the knowledge that they are being cheated,
if not by the tithe collector than certainly by the regime. It makes no
difference if the colonizer is a distant imperial power, a foreign landlord who
has been given ownership of their village, or a central government supporting
its bureaucrats and yes-men by sucking the peasants dry. They are all alien,
external, and they all survive by extracting food and labour from their
subjects. This is colonialism, as experienced by the great majority of people
who lived under it."17
The questioning of the
nation has a particular relevance in colonial societies, and
What do these changes in
perception imply for evaluations of cultural activity in general and education
in particular across the boundaries that separated the colonizer and the
colonized, or imperialists from imperial subjects? In the first place, while
current scholarship has problematized the colonizer/colonized relationship,
there is little reason therefore to abandon the concepts of colonialism or
imperialism in explanations of the formation of the modern world. On the
contrary, we need to think about what we may lose by way of explanation by
abandoning these concepts. We gain in understanding by closer attention to
“situations,” or “contact zones,” in understanding the local complexities of
colonialism or imperialism, but appreciation of their long-term historical
significance also demands that these situations be viewed in a perspective that
includes the structuring (or de-structuring, as the case might be) forces
emanating from larger configurations of political economy; in other words, to
use the example from Robert Young, Memmi and Sartre both had something
important to say about colonialism and imperialism, which is still crucial to understanding
their historical significance. This also makes irrelevant concepts such as
“semi-colonial,” which are not only marked by redundancy, but also ignore the
hermeneutics of structure and situations, the whole and the parts, and
totalities and constituents in grasping the dynamics of modernity. To recall
the revealing metaphor that Joseph Levenson used in his Confucian China and
Its Modern Fate to explain the consequences of the confrontation between
Levenson’s metaphors
pertain to cultural change in general, including education. Those who sought to bring modern
education(and, therefore, modernity)to
Within this overall
perspective of structural relationships, there was nevertheless a history to
missionary/educational activity, that points to variations of both place and
time. Missionaries in remote
On the other hand, some
missionaries/educators were also transformed by their experience. John Grant of
John Grant’s contribution
also draws attention to students trained by missionary medical schools, for it
was one of his students, C.C. Chen, who played the instrumental role in the
development of public health programs through Martin Yan’s Mass Education
Movement in Dingxian, Hebei. Chen, who is described by Bullock as “the father
of China’s rural health care delivery system,”24 was quite “elitist” in his approach to
medicine, having imbibed the lessons of PUMC which, modelled after the Johns
Hopkins University medical school, stressed modern scientific training for the
education of medical professionals. But he was, nevertheless, committed to
public service, and recognized the importance of adjustment to local needs and
learning. He wrote in a 1933 essay that, “instead of working out solutions of
our health problems on the basis of experimental studies, we have drifted into
an imposition of the Western pattern of private practice upon the millions of
people whose social and economic conditions are entirely different from those
of the West.”25 Chen, like many others of his fellow modern
physicians, was persecuted after 1949, and deprived of ability to conduct any
health care activities other than teaching at
Chinese anti-colonialism
appears in contemporary perspective as part of the process of nation-building,
where anti-colonialism at the cultural level served as the ideological
counter-part to the establishment of sovereignty at the political and economic
levels. Cultural anti-colonialism could be motivated by a variety of reasons,
ranging from the anti-Westernism of traditionalists to the anti-modernism of
radical indigenists to the liberal search for political sovereignty. While all
desired national cultural autonomy, their perceptions of the dimensions of such
autonomy varied greatly. In most cases, nationalization of or national control
over foreign institutions sufficed to fulfill the demands of national
sovereignty, perceived mostly in political terms. Foreign resistance to
nationalization would play no little part in the radicalization of Chinese
politics, including the radicalization of those who were products of those very
institutions.
The problem of sovereignty
was far more complicated in the case of Marxists to whom economic and
ideological sovereignty were prerequisites of political sovereignty, and who
perceived a social dimension to the question of sovereignty that cut across
divisions of inside and outside. Despite internal differences in their
diagnoses of the problems of national development, Chinese Marxist analyses
were uniformly inspired by V. I. Lenin’s
analysis of the contradictory role imperialism (understood as “the highest
stage of capitalism”) played in colonial and semi-colonial societies: that
while imperialism was responsible for introducing into these societies the
progressive forces of capitalism, it also created structural impediments to the
realization of capitalist development as in Europe and North America.
There were two major
aspects to these impediments. One was economic. Development in these societies
resulted not from the logic of the national economy, responding to internal
demand and needs, but rather followed the logic of a globalizing capitalist
economy, the search of imperialist powers for markets for commodities and
capital, as well as the conflict generated by the competition among them in
this search. As imperialists had little or no interest in the national
development of these societies, what development there was contributed not to
national economic integration, and an economic structure that answered the
various needs of the national economy, including subsistence needs of the
population, but to a bifurcated economy, with a modern capitalist sector
increasingly integrated to a global capitalist economy, and a much larger
sector that remained mired in premodern economic practices, and was subject to
the exploitative forces of the modern sector just as the national economy as a
whole was subject to the exploitative forces of global capitalism. Spatially
speaking in the case of the Chinese economy, this meant the lopsided
development of coastal areas, and a few coastal cities such as
The other aspect was
social; the creation of a new class structure. As capitalism was introduced
into
It is apparent in hindsight that this mode of analysis was applied also
to foreign educators, missionary or otherwise, as well as Chinese products of
foreign institutions. Marxism may have lent theoretical legitimacy in some
cases to already existing popular prejudices, visible from the late nineteenth
century-most notably during the Boxer Uprising-that Chinese might be tainted by
association with foreigners. By the 1920s, when nationalist criticism of
foreign cultural domination gained strength among a new intelligentsia, past
activities against foreigners such as during the Boxer Uprising were endowed
with a new significance as expressions of an incipient nationalism or popular
anti-imperialism. But we should not lose sight of the novelty of Marxist
theorization, which was most important in attaching cultural anti-colonialism
not just to foreigners or modernity, but most emphatically, to capitalist
modernity. This explains why Chinese products of foreign institutions,
themselves often nationalists and social reformers, were nevertheless subjected
to re-education after 1949, even as the new Communist government imported
another foreign educational model from the Soviet Union, even as it shut down
Euro/American educational institutions to and convert them into educational
institutions after the new model. Further radicalization followed in the 1960s
when the Soviet model itself was rejected, and a radical search was initiated
through the Cultural Revolution for an indigenous path to socialism to be
invented out of struggles against both capitalist and social imperialism, as
well as the Chinese past itself. It is important to underline that this search
for a Chinese socialism, that went back in its origins to the 1930s and 1940s,
also stimulated a search for new ways of knowing, new kinds of knowledge, and
new social and political practices, all of them required the overcoming of
intellectual and cultural prejudices that were the legacies of colonialism and
feudalism. Not very surprisingly, the inside/outside distinction was to acquire
during the years of the Cultural Revolution the power of a Manichean
distinction. And those who blurred the distinction-the intellectual products of
a modern education, especially those who were products of foreign
institutions-suffered for the cultural confusion they caused-or represented.
Since the “re-opening” of the PRC beginning in 1978, this situation has
changed significantly, so that a foreign education has gradually become a
highly-prized commodity. This has accompanied the incorporation of the Chinese
economy in the capitalist world-economy(or vice versa, depending on
perspective), culminating in
As we contemplate these changes wrought by globalization, we need to
resist being carried away by the novelty of contemporary changes, and forget
its origins, or the processes that brought them about. Neither modernity nor
globalization are “natural” processes that somehow happen without human
activity. Modernity itself may represent the product(s) of historical
conjunctures in which many origins may be identifiable, but it took a
recognizable form in Euro/America, was globalized through an imperialism and colonialism
dynamized by capitalism, and became hegemonic as its premises and promises were
internalized by the colonized and the subjects of imperialism. Some of the
latter have become successful participants in capitalism, which, therefore, no
longer appears merely European or American
but global, bringing with it a global modernity which finds expression,
unlike earlier, in a global multi-culturalism. The desire for traditions and
alternative ways of knowing have by no means disappeared, but appear presently
most importantly as “weapons of the weak” against marginalization in the global
economy. These are all signs, in different contexts of globality, not of a
clean break with the colonial past, but rather the normalization in global
modernity of the political and social relationships that are the legacies to
the present of a colonial past; in other words, of colonial modernity.
If the outside/inside distinction becomes highly problematic in the
understanding of the question of coloniality, moreover, imperialism in
education also needs to be re-evaluated, with due attention not just to the
agents but also the content of education. How, for instance, do we evaluate an
education which, though conducted by a native elite, is nevertheless complicit
in the perpetuation of colonial modernity, against an education that promotes
alternatives to colonial modernity, but is conducted by “outsiders?” This is an
all-too-common problem these days, when recalling socialism or ideologies of
liberation, appears as imperialism to elites of formerly socialist or Third
World societies who in their rush out of earlier experiments with new social
and cultural forms have embraced with the enthusiasm of new converts the
promises of capitalist and colonial modernity. Nationalism, pliant before the
demands of transnational capital, still serves as a strategy of ideological
containment when it comes to radical challenges to the existing order of
things, which in their very anti-colonialism now appear as a new form of
imperialism. In such a situation, the major challenge that confronts a
transformative pedagogy is how to achieve an anti-colonial radical
transnationalism in education that resists confusion with the transnationalism
of capital and the new transnational capitalist class.
Arif Dirlik
Notes
1. John Tomlinson, Cultural
Imperialism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp.
168-169.
2. Ibid., p. 175.
3. (
4.
See, for example, the essays collected in A.G. Hopkins (ed), Globalization
in World History(
5.
For a discussion of the transformation of postcolonial criticism from the 1960s
to the present, see, Aijaz Ahmad, "The Politics of Literary
Postcoloniality," Race and Class 36.3 (1995): 1-20.
6.
For a recent example of a cavalier dismissal of colonialism, see, Gilbert
Rozman, “Theories of Modernization and Theories of Revolution:
7.
Karl Marx, “History of the Opium Trade,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected
Works, Vol.16(New York: International Publishers, 1981), p.6. It is
interesting that in his “keywords” of modernity, Raymond Williams has no entry
for colonialism although there is one for imperialism. See, Raymond Williams, Keywords:
A Vocabulary of Culture and Society(New York: Oxford University Press,
1976). For a defense of imperialism as progressive, see, Bill Warren, Imperialism,
Pioneer of Capitalism(London: New Left Books, 1980).
8.
See the discussions of capitalism and imperialism by Chinese Marxists in the
1920s and 1930s in, Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist
Historiography in
9.
My description here of the understanding of colonialism that prevailed during
the two to three decades after World War II will be familiar to most who lived
through or study that period. A cogent illustration of the various points I
make may be found in the recent English language publication of essays on
colonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was one of the preeminent critics of
colonialism during the period in question. These essays, mostly written in the
late fifties and early sixties, were first published in French in 1964. See,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, tr. From the French by
Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams(
10.
Abdul R. Jan Mohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of
Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature," Critical Inquiry
12(Autumn 1985): 59-87.
11.
I borrow "contact zones" from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
12.
Chinese Marxists, for example, argued that national autonomy and development
could not be achieved without a simultaneous social revolution that would
eliminate the classes, bourgeois or “feudal,” who were allied to imperialism in
their interests. See, Arif Dirlik, “National Development and Social Revolution
in Early Chinese Marxist Thought,” The
13.
As Aime Cesaire put it, "Marx is all right, but we need to complete
Marx." Quoted in Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism(London:
Routledge, 1998), p. 133.
14.
Robert Young, Preface to Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialisn and Neo-Colonialism,
tr from the French by Azzedne Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry
McWilliams(London: Routledge, 2001), p.xiv. See also, Sartre on “Albert Memmi’s
The Colonizer and the Colonized,” in Sartre, pp.48-53, p.51n
15.
I
should note here that I am not one of those who celebrate the demise of the
nation in the name of globalization. I think that the nation is still important
in resistance to imperialism. Equally importantly, despite a great deal of
abstract talk about “global civil society” or “diasporic public spheres,”
democracy is still inconceivable without reference to the nation. Recognition
of the colonial moment in nation-building points to a fatal flaw at the very
origins of democracy. The colonial(and class)character of the nation-state has
been exacerbated in recent years as states have allied with transnational
capital, which has also required the deterritorialization of the state from the
nation, exposing the post-national state in its colonial guise. This
recognition points also to the urgency of placing on the agenda of radical
politics the recovery of democracy, which is crucial to the struggle for
social, economic and environmental justice.
16. Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The
Modernization of Rural
17.
Michael Given, The Archaeology of the Colonized(
18.
Joesph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), Vol.1, pp.156-163.
19.
20.
Bullock, p. 21. Chapter three discusses at length struggles over control of the
college.
21.
Karen Minden, Bamboo Stone: The Evolution of a Chinese Medical Elite(Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1994), p.28
22.
Ibid., pp.49-50
23.
Bullock, chapter 6.
24.
Ibid., p.163
25.
Quoted in Bullock, p.163.
26.
C.C. Chen, Medicine in Rural China: A Personal Account(Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1989), chapters 6 and 7.