Viren Murthy
Resident Fellow (2021-2022)
History, UW–Madison
Combining popular and academic approaches, I probe how prominent Japanese and Chinese intellectuals mobilized Asian culture and Asian unity to resist imperialism and struggle for a future beyond capitalism. While there have recently been works discussing Asian unity, they have overlooked how capitalism forms a context for both rightist and leftist forms of pan-Asianism. My project spans from the early twentieth century to the early twentieth first century and this allows me to track changes in pan-Asianist discourse amidst huge epochal changes, including the end of World War II, the rise of neo-liberalism and the end of the Cold War. Today’s presentation focuses on chapter five of my manuscript, which analyzes the postwar works of the Japanese public intellectual, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977).
Takeuchi is particularly interesting to us today because through interpreting revolutionary China, he constructs a critique of Eurocentrism that anticipates postcolonial discourse. Moreover, he developed this critique when socialism continued to be a powerful ideal. Takeuchi’s work provides a window onto contemporary debates between postcolonialism and Marxism and, in particular, the tension between universalism and particularism. While most works on Takeuchi have delved into his reading of the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936), they have generally overlooked how this work influenced his understanding of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution, which in turn became a standard from which to evaluate Japanese modernity. Consequently, the existing literature has failed to grasp the relevance of Takeuchi’s work for Marxist theory both theoretically and as it informed political practice in Asia. Takeuchi’s work anticipates recent postcolonial ripostes against the Eurocentric nature of Marxism, while at the same time rethinking concepts such as the people and the working class. Although his vision for Asia might seem obsolete today with the passing of Mao’s China, since Takeuchi’s death in 1977, scholars have built on elements of his legacy. Towards the end of my presentation, I touch on how Japanese sinologist Mizoguchi Yūzō (1932-2010) and the Chinese critical intellectual Wang Hui (1958-) each extend aspects of Takeuchi’s pan-Asianism.
Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and researches Chinese and Japanese intellectual history. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011) and co-editor with Axel Schneider of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (Brill, 2013), co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014), co-editor with Joyce Liu of East Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor with Max Ward and Fabian Schäfer of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique, Jewish Social Studies, Critical Historical Studies, Journal of Labor and Society and is currently working on a project tentatively entitled: “Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution.”