Four years after his death and in a world significantly transformed by recent events, Arif Dirlik’s final thoughts carry a heightened urgency for discussions of critical theory and the actions they ...might inspire. Considering the panoply of topics that concerned his acute intellect, Arif identified two issues he deemed most important for the present state of humanity: an historical understanding of the construct of “China” and the legacy of the French Enlightenment. Other problems, as he saw it, depended on getting these two multifaceted and far-reaching cases of contested history right. Critical analysis employed in this exploration would by extension connect with and continue to animate current debates on race, environment, and democracy. In a concluding thought experiment intended to spin his theoretical history approach into future scholarship and activism, Dirlik explored the complexities of class and racism in a series of incidents from late Qing dynasty/US relations.
Four years after his death and in a world significantly transformed by recent events, Arif Dirlik's final thoughts carry a heightened urgency for discussions of critical theory and the actions they ...might inspire. Considering the panoply of topics that concerned his acute intellect, Arif identified two issues he deemed most important for the present state of humanity: an historical understanding of the construct of "China" and the legacy of the French Enlightenment. Other problems, as he saw it, depended on getting these two multifaceted and far-reaching cases of contested history right. Critical analysis employed in this exploration would by extension connect with and continue to animate current debates on race, environment, and democracy. In a concluding thought experiment intended to spin his theoretical history approach into future scholarship and activism, Dirlik explored the complexities of class and racism in a series of incidents from late Qing dynasty/US relations.
Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of ...Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.
The Mongol Empire opened intellectual exchange across the Eurasian expanse, generating a century of translocal creativity and cultural innovation. Major artistic centers under the Mongol Ilkhanate, ...including the workshops of Tabriz, evolved eclectic styles fusing elements from Iranian, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions among others. Sienese merchants and artists developed reciprocal contact with these centers and a growing awareness of Mongol cultural politics. Viewed in their Eurasian context, two frescoes by Sienese artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government and Martyrdom of the Franciscans, reframe and expand our understanding of the dynamic cultural pluralism that shaped our early modern history.
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