SUMMARY:

Chia Yin Hsu’s response to Choi Chatterjee’s “Manifesto” begins by clarifying its main critical arguments. Postcolonial critique did not prevent the emergence of new power hierarchies and did not result in alternative modes of life; it never sufficiently reflected on the “second” (socialist) world and the cost and consequences of socialist modernization; while postcolonial critique problematizes difference, is the sameness of societies across the modern world constitutes the real problem. It is to these obvious deficiencies of postcolonial theory and undeniable problems of contemporary life – Hsu argues – that Chatterjee reacts with a call for “cosmopolitanism from below.” Hsu summarizes Chatterjee’s message as a call for “a new going-to-the-people movement directed at academics and historians in particular.” Hsu is more inclined, however, to retain her commitment to interventions of postcolonial theory because they help to critically interrogate what we think we know. Hsu shares her experience of combining the postcolonial analytical repertoire with revisionist cultural interpretations in economic history. She applies this synthetic approach to the study of “monetary modernization” in Russian Manchuria in the early twentieth century not as an inexorable process, but as a trajectory rife with politics and cultural contestations. At the end of her essay Hsu wonders why hers and similar studies should be designated as special, transnational history, rather than just “history.”