The Inaugural Lecture for the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai

The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future 
Prasenjit Duara  杜赞奇 

The physical salvation of the world is becoming the transcendent goal of our times, but this goal must transcend national sovereignty. Professor Prasenjit Duara (杜赞奇) will present a viable foundation for sustainability that might be found in the traditions of Asia, which offer different ways of understanding the relationship between the personal, ecological and universal. As revealed in his book, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2015)  [中文版], these traditions must be understood through the ways they have historically circulated and converged with contemporary developments. 

Participants include Joanna Waley-Cohen, Tansen Sen, Celina Hung, Lena Scheen, Li Tiangang (Fudan University).

Prasenjit Duara is Raffles Professor of Humanities at the National University of Singapore, where he also directs the Asia Research Institute. An eminent historian of China, he works on Asia in the twentieth century and issues of historical thought and historiography. Duara’s book, Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in the US.  Among his other books are: Rescuing History from the Nation (1995); Sovereignty and Authenticity (2003);  Decolonization: Now and Then (2004); and A Companion to Global Historical Thought (2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and several European languages.

The Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai

The Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai will serve as the hub within the NYU Global Network University system to promote the study of Asian interactions, both historical and contemporary. The overall objective of the Center is to provide global societies with information on the contexts for the reemerging connections between the various parts of Asia through research and teaching. This includes exploring how the polities and societies of Asia have interacted over time and are now beginning to interact again on broad fronts. The Center will also encourage the examination of Asia’s connections with the wider world, focusing specifically on how these connections have in the past and at present impact Asian societies. Collaborating not only with the various NYU campuses and portal sites, but also with other institutions across the world, the Center will play a bridging role between existing Asian studies knowledge silos. It will take the lead in drawing connections and comparisons between the existing fields of Asian studies, and stimulating new ways of understanding Asia in a globalized world.

This talk is co-sponsored by Cross Currents in the Humanities, a year-round lectures series from the Humanities program. The series invites distinguished international scholars to share cutting-edge scholarship and creative work on cross-cultural encounters and other pressing issues of our time.