scholarly journals From Religion to Revolution…and Nationalism

Asian Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-199
Author(s):  
Ady VAN DEN STOCK
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Chinese Intellectual ◽  
Religion And Ethnicity ◽  
Modern Chinese Intellectual History ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

The work of the Marxist historian Jamāl al-Dīn Bai Shouyi (1909–2000), a member of the Chinese Muslim Hui ethnic group, offers a window into the close and complex relation between the contested categories of politics, religion, and ethnicity in modern Chinese intellectual history, particularly with respect to the historical development of Chinese Muslim identity in its encounter with Marxist historical materialism. In this article, I provide a limited case study of this broader problematic by analysing Bai’s writings on Hui identity. In doing so, I attempt to contextualise his arguments with reference to the changing status of religion in contemporary Chinese Marxist discourse, and reflect on the entanglement of nationalism, religion, and ethnopolitics in modern China.

scholarly journals The “Learning of Life”

Asian Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-61
Author(s):  
Ady Van den Stock
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Mou Zongsan ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Chinese Intellectual ◽  
Modern Chinese Intellectual History ◽  
Philosophical Writings

While the twentieth-century Confucian thinker Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) has left behind one of the most thought-provoking and intensively studied bodies of philosophical writings in modern Chinese intellectual history, his own life and its relation to his philosophy (or “learning”), a theme at the centre of his Autobiography at Fifty from the mid-1950s, has so far remained largely unexamined. After some introductory remarks on the context and outlook of the Autobiography, my paper turns to the close relation between Mou’s conception of life and his approach to the “cultural life” of China as a nation. In doing so, I examine the notion of a distinctly Chinese (more precisely, Confucian) “learning of life” in his writing and explore the motif of “life in itself” running through the ­Autobiography. I argue that this motif is crucial for gaining a better understanding of Mou’s relation to his teacher Xiong Shili (1885–1968), his own father, the social conditions of his childhood in rural Shandong, as well as his overall approach to subjectivity as a space for articulating socio-political concerns.

Humanities Encounters Science: Confronting the Challenge of Post-humanism

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 344-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Wang
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Chinese Intellectual ◽  
Modern Chinese Intellectual History ◽  
First Offers ◽  
Post Humanism

Post-humanism has recently come to China and challenges traditional humanism and the humanities. The author first offers a reflection on the evolution of humanism in modern Chinese intellectual history. To the author, we are now in a ‘post-theoretical era’, in which the function of theory is no longer so powerful and ubiquitous as it used to be. It is then argued that the rise of the ‘post-humanist’ trend in the West during the past decades indicates that, in the present era, humankind is only one of many species on earth, whose existence and development, to a large extent, depend on natural law. At the same time, post-humanism tells us that humankind may no longer be able to control some of its own creations. The author concludes by calling for digital humanities to bridge the gap between science and humanities and to establish a new relationship between the two.

From Persianate pasts to Aryan antiquity. Transnationalism and transformation in Afghan intellectual history, c.1880–1940

Afghanistan ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-67
Author(s):  
Nile Green
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Archaeological Methods ◽  
Subsequent Rise ◽  
Intellectual Disciplines

This essay forms a case study of the transnational dimensions of Afghanistan's modern intellectual history through a focus on the practice of history. It traces the development of Afghan historical writing between around 1880 and 1940, with an emphasis on the revolutionary historiographical transformations of the 1930s. Prior to this decade, Afghan historians broadly continued the dynastic and genealogical traditions of the Persianate tarikh (‘chronicle’). After discussing several such texts, the focus turns to the new intellectuals associated with the Kabul Literary Society (Anjuman-i Adabi-yi Kabul) in its role as a crossroads for the importation and adaptation of European intellectual disciplines. Drawing on Anglophone and Francophone scholarship in their Dari-Persian publications, the Society's historians forged radically new conceptions of collective identity by adapting European linguistic and archaeological methods. An examination of the writings of two such historians, Ya‘qub Hasan Khan and Ahmad ‘Ali Kuhzad, documents the subsequent rise of the new historical ideology of Aryanism by which Afghanistan and its peoples were linked to the ancient Aryans and their homeland of Bactria qua Aryana.

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