Prasenjit Duara
Institution: Duke University
Prasenjit Duara is a historian and holds the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He has worked on rural China, nationalism and imperialism as well as environmental history. He was Professor and chair of History at the University of Chicago (1991-2008) and Raffles Professor and Director of Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. He was awarded the doctor philosophiae honoris causa from the University of Oslo in 2017 following the publication of The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2015).
Reflections Upon 'Civilizationisms'
Towards the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked on the early and mid-20th century discourses of civilization, linking the late 19th century European ideas of civilization, the civilizational mission and Social Darwinism to non-Western, and especially the Japanese inversion of the discourse to declare that the ‘East’ possessed more spiritual and pacific values than the aggressive and Promethean West. The Japanese call for pan-Asian values was rapidly picked up in post-WW I Asia which tended to assert, like the Japanese version, superior Asian, especially Chinese and Indian, values that would, however, have to combine with selected Western material and Promethean values to achieve a balanced, peaceful and prosperous world. Japan, which saw its destiny to lead the colonized Asian world under the pan-Asian rhetoric of ‘East Asian Co-prosperity Scheme’, nonetheless soon became entangled in an imperialist war against both the West and its occupied territories, most notably, Republican China. With the end of WWII, the discourse of civilization came to be politically dormant although it continued to play a role in boosting the self-confidence of post-colonial nationalism.
The revival of civilizational discourse in 21st century China is a complexly layered one drawing on elements from the historical past and its intellectual traditions, from the 20th century legacy of civilizational discourse, including a formulation very similar to the Japanese East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere in the Community of a Common Human Destiny (人类命运共同体); as well as several novel features, such as environmental and technological dimensions in its conception of civilization.
Analytically, my early 20th century work was concerned with how ‘civilizationism’ addressed the temporal aporia of being timeless and revolutionary by mapping Asian civilizational ideas on the spatial binary of East vs/and West and incorporating a strong ideology of classicism and gender. In the contemporary version of a more outward-going China, analytically, I see a civilizationism that is both divided by and addresses the binaries of the inclusive and the exclusive as well as that between the domestic and the external. Ecological Civilization is a doctrine that is largely domestic but more recent statements from Chinese leaders have sought to apply the green civilizational ideal together with the Global Civilizational Initiative (and the Global Developmental and Global Security Initiatives) in its new and revised Belt and Road Initiative. I will be exploring the effects of this new Civilizational practice in the various BRI countries.