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Commentary on "In the Scales of History" Commentary on John Fitzgerald's "In the Scales of History: Politics and Culture in Twentieth C"enturyChina" 29 Editor's Note: After reading the initial draft of Prof. Fitzgerald's manuscript , I felt that the issues it raised were thought-provoking and likely to stimulate a diversity of responses from readers. With Prof. Fitzgerald's permission, I therefore invited commentaries upon the final version of the manuscript from scholars with a range of different disciplinary approaches and research interests . These commentaries follow below, together with a response to them from Prof. Fitzgerald. -Stephen C. Averill, Editor Commentary by Prasenjit Duara John Fitzgerald begins by posing the very big questions about what might constitute China's particular "end of history" and about whether the twentieth century (or its historiography?) can be the possible site for answering such a question. He decides, however, that we are nowhere near being able to respond to such big questions and settles for the more restricted problem of the relations between politics and culture and the question of scale as a way to discuss the twentieth century as a whole. And yet the question of the "end of history" does not entirely disappear: it reappears, less as a real or ontological possibility, but as a moral ideal-history as the effort to capture the effort· of the individual for self-recognition. There is much with which I agree in Fitzgerald's analysis, particularly in regard to the six different models, and I have little to add there. But some of his own conceptualizations, although still preliminary, are very important and have provoked me to articulate my own thoughts about the problems he stirs up. First, I am sure it will be no great surprise that I heartily endorse Fitzgerald's effort to scale down history. and write in a way that eschews the national narrative. Yet Twentieth-Century China, Vol. XXIV No.2 (April 1999): 29-31 30 Twentieth-Century China for him, the nation-state remains the implicit framework of analysis. While the powerful reality of the nation-state can hardly be gainsaid for this century, even more powerful blinders have been established by its ideological hegemony, which seeks to contain and channel the shaping force of local, regional and global sources of modem history to its own project. Thus even the locality, which Fitzgerald identifies as an important scale for historical analysis, needs to be understood in relation to regional and transnational forces as much as to purely local or national ones. The transformation of the marketing system produced by the railroad, the new spatial practices resulting from new patterns of consumption and production, and the cultural representation of the locality as a site of lost authenticity, say among native place writers such as Shen Congwen or Han Shaogong, among ethnographers such as Fei Xiaotong, or among political movements such as in Yan' an or Zouping, have been shaped in each aspect by transnational forces. Yet our analysis of local tends to remain framed by the national when it exceeds the local. To be sure, I am not denying the importance of the local or even the national, but simply stating that it is important to see that if history is not only or even primarily shaped at the national level-and this is something with which Fitzgerald would probably agree-then it is difficult to imagine a "particular 'end of history'" for a nation. Fitzgerald also deliberately adopts a liberal understanding of the individual as a pre-existent subject seeking recognition from the state. From a more critical position, I would argue that liberal conception of the Individual seeking recognition is itself a modem import-a part of transnational production-and that subjectivities need to be understood in other terms such as locality, family and networks as well as more powerful ideological forces. Incidentally, this is a position toward which Fitzgerald himself moves at the end of his essay. There may well be an opportunity here that Fitzgerald has not yet explored: the imagining of the Individual as a new global ideology of subjectivity that has as much shaping force in our century (whether from inside...

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