What Time is World Order? Globally and Locally Contested Temporalities in the mid-1900s

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A Temporalities and Periodizations in Global History

What Time is World Order? Globally and Locally Contested Temporalities in the mid-1900s

Event Details

Date

II. Thursday, 11th September, 08:30-10:30
Location
K1046
Theme
A Temporalities and Periodizations in Global History

Convenor

Harlan David Chambers (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

Chair

Dominic Sachsenmaier (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

Panelists

Hale Eroğlu (Boğazici University)
Mohammed Alsudairi (Australian National University)
Harlan David Chambers (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Liza Wing Man Kam (University of Vienna)

Papers

Hale Eroğlu

From "Peace" to "Just War": redefinition of Jihad and Citizenship in Modern China

From "Peace" to "Just War": redefinition of Jihad and Citizenship in Modern China

This paper investigates the factors behind the proliferation of debates on peace and jihad among Chinese-Muslim intellectuals in Republican and early Communist China. It explores the transformation of meanings attributed to these concepts in response to changing contexts. Chinese Muslims selectively adapted from the diverse interpretations of jihad circulating in the Islamic world. The study demonstrates how, in the early years of the Republic, many intellectuals expounded Islam as a peaceful religion to counter the stereotypical view of Muslims as belligerent and to respond to the missionary claim that Islam was spread by the sword. The establishment of the nation-state necessitated discourses on peaceful Islam, as Chinese Muslims had to devise new ways to guarantee their rights as equal citizens and prove their potential to contribute to China's progress and welfare. However, the war with Japan and the Communist victory in the Civil War altered the ways in which Chinese Muslim intellectuals interpreted jihad. During the Japanese occupation, the idea of "jihad as just war" replaced the emphasis on "peaceful Islam," and jihad was reinterpreted as the patriotic duty of Muslim citizens. Muslim intellectuals continued to promote this idea in the early years of the Communist Republic, this time framing it as the revolutionary struggle of Muslims against feudalism and American imperialism. Thus, the concept of jihad was constantly redefined as Chinese Muslims transformed themselves from imperial subjects into citizens of the nation-state in response to changing global geopolitical circumstances.
Mohammed Alsudairi

The Timeless Assault on culture. Chinese and Arab Thought on Cultural Reform

The Timeless Assault on culture. Chinese and Arab Thought on Cultural Reform

In Arab (Egyptian and Levantine) and Chinese intellectual spaces during the 1910s-20s, culture (thaqafa/wenhua) was conceived as the gordian knot upon which all other spheres, the political, social, and economic, were contingent upon; to rectify and modernize culture was to do so in all other possible spheres. What is unique in this context is the near simultaneous emergence of a distinctly militarized language surrounding culture -not simply as an ideological struggle unfolding within containable parameters (i.e., German kulturkampf or contemporary American culture wars) but as a bloody battlefield, defined by a temporality of wartime mobilization and populated with armies, strongholds, and fronts whose defeats/triumphs are intimately entangled with national survival and independence. The paper explores not only the conditions and forces that structured these similar articulations of the “culture question” in the Arab and Chinese intellectual spaces, but also the ways in which such discourses were reproduced by revolutionary regimes in the Middle East and China that have, ironically, made this war a temporally “timeless” one as can be seen in its continued invocation in Arab and Chinese political life.
Harlan David Chambers

The Guerrilla Philosophy of History: Narrating China’s Guerrilla Struggles in the Global 1930s

The Guerrilla Philosophy of History: Narrating China’s Guerrilla Struggles in the Global 1930s

This project interrogates the historical emergence of guerrilla warfare in China during the global 1930s as articulating new philosophy of history. Practices of guerrilla war demanded a re-narrativizing of the peasant and rural unevenness not as symptoms of historical “backwardness” but as dynamic vectors of historical change. This vision emerged in Chinese revolutionary bases against a developmental, historical materialist paradigm hegemonic amongst Soviet and Comintern-aligned thinkers. Rejecting such economic determinism, the guerrilla demanded an alternative narrative of historical “stages” and the social as the driving force of change. I begin by examining the global emergence of guerrilla warfare in the 1930s as a reimagining of the world’s temporal ordering, taking up Japanese narratives of the Chinese soviets as well as Chinese debates over Ethiopia’s resistance of Italian invasion. In the second part, I examine how the actual practice of guerrilla warfare challenged economic determinism, advancing social change as history’s operative force. The third and final part analyzes narratives of these guerrilla struggles, produced in fiction and reportage literature of the 1930s, to demonstrate the narrative patterns of “reversal” deployed in guerrilla war to argue that such reversals posited the social as upending a crudely developmentalist logic of historical progress.
Liza Wing Man Kam

Improvisations in Postcoloniality: Vibrant Reappropriations as Afterlives of Colonial Shinto Shrines in Taiwan

Improvisations in Postcoloniality: Vibrant Reappropriations as Afterlives of Colonial Shinto Shrines in Taiwan

This paper examines the Shinto shrines built in Taiwan during the Japanese colonisation (1895-1945), and their subsequent reappropriations to multiple forms: The grandest, which were turned into martyrs’ shrines for the Chinese Republican (Kuomintang) cause after their retreat to Taiwan in 1949; the others, which became different sacred spaces; and those that had been left derelict. Through historical and ethnographic analysis of selected case studies, namely the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei, the Taoyuen Martyrs’ Shrine and the Jiadong Shrine, this paper departs from viewing the shrines as mere constructs of the authorities, by investigating how contemporary users intervene and improvise in these formerly oppressive spaces. The article illuminates how the postcolonials have gradually appropriated the right to interpreting the code of the shrines: a mixture of authoritarianism, arbitrariness and sacredness. Beyond the binary perceptions of the shrines as either ‘eyesores’ or ‘heritage’, the colonial architecture manifests itself as a fulcrum where power and subjectivity shift between authorities and civilians. The transformation process of these shrines demonstrates that decolonisation is continuous, shared and bottom-up rather than momentary, controlled and top-down.

Abstract

The mid-twentieth century was marked by cascading crises in the global order of things; among them, the Second World War and subsequent struggles for decolonization challenged previously hegemonic forms of authority. Scholars of this era have long debated whether to characterize such transformations as marking temporal continuity or rupture. This panel challenges the very premise of the continuity/rupture debate by interrogating this era’s historical crises as a problem of temporality itself. Our papers interrogate how reformers and revolutionaries responded to crises of the mid-twentieth century in Asia and the Middle East by engaging temporality as a question for theory and practice. We focus on experiments in social and cultural practices that reconceptualized the past and its “traditions” as a generative problem of multiple temporalities within the present. Thinkers in these regions, historically consigned to a global “periphery” of “backwardness,” challenged the developmental logic of imperial expansion. We ask: how did their interventions break with a hegemonic temporality of development to locate transformative valence in temporal multiplicity? To what extent did they reconceptualize forms of temporal “backwardness” into resources for shaping the future? Mohammed Alsudairi (Australian National University) examines culture as a discursive battlefield in “The Timeless Assault on Culture: Chinese and Arab Thought on Cultural Reform”. Harlan Chambers (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) studies cultural discourse on China’s guerrilla fighters in “The Guerrilla Philosophy of History: Narrating China’s Guerrilla Struggles in the Global 1930s”. Moving from the Second World War to the early People’s Republic of China, Hale Eroğlu Sağer (Boğaziçi University) takes up the re-signification of “tradition” for state-making in “From Peace to Just War: Redefinition of Jihad and Citizenship in Modern China”. Finally, Liza Wing Man Kam (Universität Wien) interrogates the architectural (re)molding of Taiwan’s imperial past in “Improvisations in Postcoloniality: Vibrant Reappropriations as Afterlives of Colonial Shinto Shrines in Taiwan”.