Description
Book SynopsisFabio Lanza traces the history of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of politically engaged academics who critiqued the field of Asian studies while looking to Maoist China as an example of alternative politics and the transformation of the meaning of labor and the production of knowledge.
Trade Review"Lanza’s book is an important historical documentation of the beginning of a shift in the scholarly study of Asia in the United States and the move to critically assess the foundations of knowledge creation." -- Miriam Sharma * Critical Asian Studies *
"[A] thoughtful and meticulously researched study..." -- Perry Johansson * Sixties *
"Sheds vital light on an important US New Left intervention and constitutes necessary reading for scholars of modern China and the global 1960s. . . . Lanza’s sympathetic yet critical excavation of the endeavors of CCAS offers present-day scholars, especially scholars of East Asia working in US institutions, resources to critically evaluate aspects of our own practices." -- Maggie Clinton * Twentieth-Century China *
"Fabio Lanza has an extraordinary ability to find profound historical signiificances in student organizations' publications and records. . . . The contents of
The End of Concern are extremely relevant to the field [of Chinese studies] as a whole, and this book should interest all those interested in the Global Sixties, the intellectual histories of the American and French Left, fellow travelers of Maoist China, and the impact of Maoism globally." -- Patrick David Buck * China Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Of Ends and Beginnings; or, When China Existed 1
1. America's Asia: Discovering China, Rethinking Knowledge 23
2. To Be, or Not to Be, a Scholar: The Praxis of Radicalism in Academia 67
3. Seeing and Understanding: China as the Place of Desire 101
4. Facing Thermidor: Global Maoism at Its End 143
Epilogue. Area Redux: The Destinies of "China" in the 1980s and 1990s 175
Notes 195
Bibliograpy 241
Index 257
