Viren Murthy

Biography

Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution Combining popular and academic approaches, I examine 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 the issue of Asian unity, they have overlooked how the problem of capitalism was a central dimension of this movement from both the left and the right. I focus primarily on Chinese and Japanese intellectuals writing during the twentieth century; however, I draw on philosophers to show how pan-Asianists aimed to overcome the antinomies of modernity, such as the opposition between individual and community. 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.”