The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order
This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of thought and practice that has animated radical politics across Myanmar’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From anti-colonial struggle to decolonization, and from communist insurgency to left feminism, eth...
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
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2024
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/178728 |
| _version_ | 1811692700873785344 |
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| author | Aung, Geoffrey Rathgeb Campbell, Stephen |
| author2 | School of Social Sciences |
| author_facet | School of Social Sciences Aung, Geoffrey Rathgeb Campbell, Stephen |
| author_sort | Aung, Geoffrey Rathgeb |
| collection | NTU |
| description | This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of thought and practice that has animated radical politics across Myanmar’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From anti-colonial struggle to decolonization, and from communist insurgency to left feminism, ethnic rebellion, and today’s revolutionary upsurge following the 2021 coup d’état, this radical tradition is best understood not as something bounded or solitary. Rather, it names a productive conjoining of radical thought and practice from within Myanmar, as well as from other times and places, beginning in the imperial world order of the early twentieth century. Revisiting scholarship on transatlantic and transpacific radicalisms, we argue that attention to imperialism offers important insights into Myanmar’s modern history and contemporary dynamics, including the Myanmar radical tradition. Yet, the Myanmar radical tradition—heterogeneous and internally conflictual, a site of historical dispute—also sheds light on the changing imperial world order, which we show has a fundamentally reactive, counter-revolutionary quality. Today’s late imperialism, we argue, can be seen as a retaliatory response to the long arc of decolonization, a story within which Myanmar’s contemporary revolutionary struggle renders the Myanmar radical tradition very much a living tradition. |
| first_indexed | 2024-10-01T06:39:58Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | ntu-10356/178728 |
| institution | Nanyang Technological University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-10-01T06:39:58Z |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | ntu-10356/1787282024-07-07T15:30:23Z The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order Aung, Geoffrey Rathgeb Campbell, Stephen School of Social Sciences Social Sciences Imperial world order Myanmar This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of thought and practice that has animated radical politics across Myanmar’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From anti-colonial struggle to decolonization, and from communist insurgency to left feminism, ethnic rebellion, and today’s revolutionary upsurge following the 2021 coup d’état, this radical tradition is best understood not as something bounded or solitary. Rather, it names a productive conjoining of radical thought and practice from within Myanmar, as well as from other times and places, beginning in the imperial world order of the early twentieth century. Revisiting scholarship on transatlantic and transpacific radicalisms, we argue that attention to imperialism offers important insights into Myanmar’s modern history and contemporary dynamics, including the Myanmar radical tradition. Yet, the Myanmar radical tradition—heterogeneous and internally conflictual, a site of historical dispute—also sheds light on the changing imperial world order, which we show has a fundamentally reactive, counter-revolutionary quality. Today’s late imperialism, we argue, can be seen as a retaliatory response to the long arc of decolonization, a story within which Myanmar’s contemporary revolutionary struggle renders the Myanmar radical tradition very much a living tradition. Published version Open access funding provided by University of Vienna. 2024-07-03T08:12:49Z 2024-07-03T08:12:49Z 2024 Journal Article Aung, G. R. & Campbell, S. (2024). The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order. Dialectical Anthropology, 48(2), 193-219. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10624-024-09716-0 0304-4092 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/178728 10.1007/s10624-024-09716-0 2-s2.0-85185139030 2 48 193 219 en Dialectical Anthropology © 2024 The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. application/pdf |
| spellingShingle | Social Sciences Imperial world order Myanmar Aung, Geoffrey Rathgeb Campbell, Stephen The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order |
| title | The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order |
| title_full | The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order |
| title_fullStr | The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order |
| title_short | The Myanmar radical tradition: revolution, reaction, and the changing imperial world order |
| title_sort | myanmar radical tradition revolution reaction and the changing imperial world order |
| topic | Social Sciences Imperial world order Myanmar |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/178728 |
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