This essay addresses the 'demand for humanism, with a nod toward Asia' (as Gayatri Spivak once put it) within current theory and global intellectual political culture. I argue that using humanism as a way to understand China (a habit inside and especially outside the PRC) keeps us within the...

How to make sense of “Asia,” an impossible object of study, and what it means today, in light of the rise of China after the age of opium wars and full-on imperialism. Asia as ASEAN 3 or a China-centered regional and global system. The “case” of the PRC poses a number of challenges to...