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This book examines prominent twentieth-century Japanese and Chinese pan-Asianists to bring to the fore issues related to anti-imperialism, socialism, subjectivity, and the search for a different future. The author combines popular and academic approaches. The various chapters closely read specific pan-Asian texts to reveal their internal logic as it relates to larger historical contexts. However, unlike most academic treatments of pan-Asianism, this project is not limited to narrowly defined periods. This book argues that pan-Asianists outlined a critique of capitalism, which they mobilized in different ways to question the historical structures they confronted from the early twentieth century to the present. Looking through the lens of pan-Asianist thought we see different images of China, throughout the socialist and postsocialist periods. These different images shed light on major problems in Asia today, including the problem of capitalist domination, the legacy of Hegel and Eurocentrism, the construction of Asian unity, and finally the issue of war memory in Asia. 

Speaker: Viren Murthy, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Viren Murthy, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaches transnational Asian History and researches Chinese, Japanese and Indian intellectual history. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011), The Politics of Time in China and Japan (Routledge, 2022) and Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (University of Chicago, 2023). He is 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, Positions: Asia Critique, Jewish Social Studies, Critical Historical Studies, and Journal of Labor and Society.

Organizer/Moderator: Ming-Bao Yue, Director, Center for Chinese Studies & Associate Professor, Dept of East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL), UHM.

Discussants: Ban Wang, William Haas Professor, Dept of Asian Languages & Comparative Literature, Stanford University; Andre Haag, Assistant Professor, Dept of EALL, UHM. 

Co-sponsor: Dept of East Asian Languages and Literatures, UHM.

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