West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

In any event, Conroy’s American Hegelianism—the idea that America leads the way in the world—has waned. And yet, his later writings frequently attempt to rise to the level of big questions—toward a “cosmic” perspective, to use a term he later employed in his University of Pennsylvania “Seminar on Cosmic History”³—and in as much, he has never ceased, playfully at least, to look for the unfolding of a meaning in global events and to history as a kind of learning experience. A natural storyteller, his storytelling ability reflects his eye for meaning.

Finally, we get to the question of Conroy, the old, and the postmodernism. “Warm the old to arrive at the new,” to paraphrase Confucius. The strong suit of a work such as West Across the Pacific is not so much that it has the latest references or the most explicit application to the present situation; we leave that to the next generation. In fact, West Across the Pacific’s oldness may have some major advantages. For one, it allows us to return with new eyes to the still unresolved negotiation between standard and revisionist (or New Left) accounts of the Asia-Pacific narrative left over from the Vietnam War era, when Conroy framed much of his research. Conroy at his best helps us negotiate this dispute in a pragmatic way.

Beyond this, however, the book also lends itself remarkably well to twenty-first-century descriptions. In particular, such themes as global consciousness, the proliferation of vantage points, the situatedness of all observers, emphasis on identities and their shifting boundaries and flows, the uplifting of the previously marginal, pragmatism, aporeias, play, and the negotiation of truth all have important predecessors in Conroy’s humane, sensitive, and independent approach to understanding history. Take the twenty-first century’s new interest in geography, for example: whereas modernism gave us disputations or dialectics of so-called factual descriptions of moments in time, twenty-first-century methods give us dialectical unfoldings in descriptions of space. The geographically factual gives way to the geographically contested. In important ways, West Across the Pacific anticipates this.