I was at the University of Chicago in the first half of the 1990s when I was privileged to have the historian Harry Harootunian as a colleague. Arif's name was constantly in the air, so much so that when I finally met him in the flesh, I felt I almost knew him.
Arif was not an intimate friend of mine, yet he was a dear acquaintance. Regrettably, we spent too little time together to be able to forge the bonds of a close friendship. I first met him in Madison, Wisconsin, at a workshop organized by the late Maurice Meisener; it was the spring of 1992 I believe. I can't remember its precise theme, but it was on Chinese modernity, or something along those lines. I recall a scene in a local restaurant where after lunch, Arif was "holding court" over coffee. It was the first time we talked. He was surrounded by a small group of colleagues and students who seemed mesmerized by his presence. Indeed, Arif was a very imposing and charismatic figure, almost daunting until you got to know him. I recall Rob Wilson complaining over coffee to Arif that he would never allow his work to be revised or edited, a stance I then sympathized with. That conversation took place in California at yet another conference, probably a little later.
The next time we met was some time in 1996 or 1997 when I was at the University of Hong Kong. I'd been invited to give a talk at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where Arif was spending some time. I cannot now recall the title of my talk. I had started working on Chinas Unlimited (2003) at the time, so it might have been on Chineseness and hybridity. Arif sat in the front row of the seminar room, nonchalantly reading his newspaper for the first ten minutes of my talk. Then, I must have said something that vaguely interested him because he unhurriedly put the newspaper down beside him and started to look like he was listening. After that, we met several times in Hong Kong. I recall once being with him in a Lebanese restaurant in Lan Kwai Fong, where we sat on low seats with huge cushions around a low table.
In the late spring of 1999, I invited Arif, along with Harry Harootunian, and Bruce Cummings to a conference I'd organized in Lyon, France where I had just been made Professor. Some of the well-known French historians of China were there, including the late Jean Chesneaux and Alain Roux. The conference was entitled "The Missing Chapter" and was aimed at addressing the absence of Asian history from the history curriculum of France's schools and universities. I remember it as a stunning event, how could it fail to be? But it was poorly attended, the very people it was aimed at - non-Asianist historians - conspicuous by their absence.
It was in Berlin that we next met. The audience was very different, and there was just the two of us. Arif had been invited to speak by the House of World Cultures in Berlin. And at Arif's instigation, I was also invited along to be his sparring partner. The format of the event was that of a short presentation given by each of us followed by a conversation between us, and then questions from the audience. The event had been billed "How Chinese is it? Chinese Diaspora and Transcultural Biographies." The event took place on June 5th 2001. At the time I was putting the finishing touches to Chinas Unlimited. I still have the notes of my own intervention, but I have no record of Arif's contribution. And yet, I seem to remember us being more or less on the same page, and re-reading recently Arif's Culture and History in Post-Revolutionary China (2012), I came across echoes of that evening in Berlin. After the event, we ate with the organizers and then had a drink at the hotel bar. Sadly, I'd only been booked in for a night and once again our time together was short.
There were perhaps one or two further occasions when we met. Arif was in Hong Kong, and I would have been passing through.
Arif's conversation was always gripping and infectiously exuberant, but it was once one sat down to read his words that the power and perspicacity of his intellect became truly striking.
Today, I find his work ever more pertinent to the things I am doing in my research and teaching. Recently I was asked to write a piece on Tagore and Yeats in China. Of course, Arif had been there before me. His article on Chinese history and Orientalism was invaluable. Tagore, who had an impact on Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Shuming, as Arif noted in his discussion of China’s auto-Orientalism, had himself been a consumer of modern Japanese thought and was “influenced deeply around the turn of the century by Okakura Kakuzo [1863 –1913]”(Dirlik, 1996, 105). Okakura, also known as Okakura Tenshin, was an artist and influential intellectual who travelled widely and promoted the importance of "Asian culture" to the modern world, who studied under Ernest Fenellosa in Tokyo, and with whose ideas both Ezra Pound and Tagore engaged. Then, as Arif reminds us, there was “the Theosophist Margaret Noble from Ireland (who helped Okakura with his influential book, The Ideals of the East)” (Dirlik, 1996, 105).
Arif succinctly summarized Tagore's impact on intellectual life thus:
In the end, ...Tagore's messages of pan-Asianism and Asian spirituality were received more favorably in Europe and the US, where they had originated in the first place, than in China or Japan (or, for that matter, India), which were caught up in the contemporary concerns of national formation (Dirlik, 1996, 105).
More recently, in Scotland I was asked to teach on a Masters programme entitled Global Social and Political Thought. And again I turned to Arif's work. The students had read Said's Orientalism，so I invited them to study "Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism" (1996). Again, Arif's focus on the "contemporary 'self-orientalization' of Asian intellectuals" as a manifestation "not of powerlessness but newly-acquired power" is even more pertinent today than it was 25 years ago.
Arif's voice has always carried beyond the somewhat circumscribed field of "China Studies". Re-reading his articles and monographs now, I am repeatedly struck by the breadth and depth of his erudition. His knowledge of China's culture in all its aspects was exceptional, and his writing incisive and prescient. That his words still speak to the contemporary situation of China and to studies about China is a testament to his intense analytical powers.
I have several regrets regarding Arif: not to have read him more attentively when he was alive, and to have had too few occasions to engage him in discussion about what he wrote. But I feel fortunate to have shared with him the moments I did, and grateful that his writing is there as vibrant as ever, so that if although we cannot talk to him, he is still talking to us and will be doing so for some time to come
Arif Dirlik, Culture and History in Post-Revolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity, Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press, 2011.
Arif Dirlik, "Chinese history and the question of Orientalism." History and Theory (1996): 96-118.
Gregory B. Lee, Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness, Honolulu Hawai'i University Press, 2003.
Jean-Luc Porquet, Jacques Ellul : L'homme qui avait presque tout prévu, Paris, Le Cherche midi, 2003, 2012.
Gregory B. Lee, “Tagore’s China, Yeats’ Orient” in Amrita Ghosh and Elizabeth Brewer Redwine, Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning, Leiden, Brill, 2022.