Sustainability and the Crisis of Transcendence: The Long View from Asia

The rise of Asia and China has been accompanied by the need to project a new, more just vision of the world that is not simply a new hegemony. Many Chinese intellectuals have sought to find inspiration in their historical and transcendent universalisms such as ‘all-under-heaven’ (tianxia).

Prasenjit Duara is a historian of China and more broadly of Asia in the twentieth century. He  is Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director of Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.  Professor Duara’s lecture is drawn from the first chapter of his book The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future due out from Cambridge University Press in November 2014. In his lecture he will also lay out the over-all argument that is developed in the book