MCLC: Weigelin-Schwiedrzik on Fogel review

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Weigelin-Schwiedrzik on Fogel review
As the co-editor of the Brill monograph series "Leiden Series of Comparative Historiography" in which the book by Murthy and Schneider was published I consider it my duty to say a few words about what we intend to do with our monograph series and how the Murthy/Schneider volume fits into this. First of all, I feel ashamed to see that the book under discussion is deficient in terms of editorial diligence and rigorosity. I agree with Joshua Fogel that the making of a book should be given the adequate time to prove that the editors as well as the authors control their scientific reasoning also by way of diligent author- and editorship. We all know that this is difficult to stand up to nowadays, but I think we should thank Joshua Fogel for the wake-up call and re-think some of the organizational procedures of our editorial board in order to avoid something like this happening again in future.
So far our monograph series has been quite well accepted. One of the reasons why this is so seems to be that we are doing something most other publishing houses I am aware of do not do. We provide a platform for publications on historiography, historical thought and connected topics in East Asia and beyond. We give room for debate and emerging ideas which are not assessed according to the degree by which they conform to readers’ expectations and mainstream academia. We want this series to be a multilingual, diverse and fair platform for debate which is why we are very interested in having colleagues from all around the world take part on an equal footing. This implies that we try to understand each other and each other’s arguments including those we do not agree with. This is a very risky undertaking, but it is something we urgently need in a world of academia which is more and more hijacked by economic, political and performance considerations. In order for these multiple risks to be controllable we need a peer review system which is rigorous both with the object of review and the reviewer. I think there is room for improvement, and a chance for our monograph series to explore how we can make a contribution to inventing a new culture of scholarly debate in times when the peer review system is so overloaded that its quality is diminishing dramatically.
The authors who have so far published their work in our monograph series seem to have one idea in common which Joshua Fogel does not appreciate. We hold the opinion that the quality of research in the field of Chinese or East Asian Studies is not only decided by the number or sources we uncover. While new sources and our ability to understand them are important indicators of quality in our field, we argue that our discipline is lacking in theoretical interest. This is at least according to my assessment one of the reasons why we are somewhat isolated from other disciplines with a higher demand for theoretical reasoning. And that is why those among us who take the time to reflect on what we are doing sometimes tend to fall into depression. As long as Chinese colleagues were unwilling or unable to do research on their own country which contributed to the understanding of China also by people from outside China we did not have any difficulty to explain what we non-Chinese researchers were doing. However, colleagues in Japanese Studies felt earlier than colleagues in the China field that times were changing and our contribution to the field losing in prominence. Colleagues in French Studies are discussing why someone who is not French should actually do research on France, French literature, culture, politics etc. in a united Europe where we should be able to understand France by translating what French researchers write about France for a German speaking academic readership. We do not need a German form of French Studies to understand a friendly neighboring country. Is this not also true for those of us who can read and understand Chinese, Japanese, Korean or some other Asian languages? Is it not enough to simply translate or introduce research from East Asia to English language academia? My answer to this question is: no! I argue that we need to integrate what we know about China into what we know about the world at large. And this implies that both Chinese and non-Chinese researchers need to participate in this complicated endeavor which needs more sources as well as more theoretical reasoning in order to be successful. Our disciplines have long held the opinion that they survive because East Asia is different from the rest of the world. I argue : No matter whether it is different or not, we need to integrate our understanding and knowledge about Asia into our world knowledge. So far neither those of us of non-Asian background nor our colleagues from Asia have been utterly successful in achieving this aim.
The book Murthy and Schneider edited is the outcome of a very interesting and challenging conference many years ago in Leiden. I was part of this conference, and my contribution is included into the volume. It was the aim of the conference, if I understand the organizers’ intention correctly, to approach the idea of modernity from a specific notion of time. It was their hypotheses that modernity is to be understood also in terms of globalizing the idea of linear time. The contributors to the conference had very divergent ideas of how to tackle this question. Some - as f.e. Viren Murthy – saw the necessity to use Marxist ideas and confront them with non-Marxist thinkers in Asia in order to find an answer to the question how Asian intellectuals react to the challenge of linear time as the framework of reasoning. Contributors like Naoki Sakai developed their own theoretical framework and presented their ideas according to the format they feel comfortable with. Axel Schneider and Sun Ge – only to name those who were criticized by Joshua Fogel - presented thinkers who according to their understanding were trying to resist the dominance of the linear time paradigm in 20th century East Asian thought. Myself - also criticized for my contribution by Joshua Fogel – was intrigued by the paradox that even those intellectuals who opted for revolution as the mode of “changing” China and thus opted actively for the adoption of a world view based on a linear time concept had difficulties in resisting against the attempt to fall back into a circular view on history. My examples come from the campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius. Heuristically speaking this is to my mind an extremely interesting and under researched period of PRC intellectual history which helps us to understand this paradox. I actually refrained from theorizing my observations and only presented an explanation for this particular case. All in all, I think that we did a more or less good job in looking at the problem the organizers of the conference and editors of the volume attracted our attention to. But we the contributors as well as the editors have not yet reached the point where we can put a theoretical concept in front of our readers.
Does this mean that the book cannot be published? I think that the on-going debate shows that we were right in publishing this book, and hope that after an initial round of exchanging criticisms on a more formal and political level we can now move on and exchange ideas on the contents of what this book is about.
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
University of Vienna, Austria
Vienna, 5 June 2015
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 5, 2015
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