Radical history is unearthing, intervening, and empowering. While radical history approaches often align with emancipatory movements, organizations, and groups of people, one of its key demands is recognizing hitherto silenced and repressed history. And while radical history often demands clear political positionality of author and audience, its particular strength is focusing on marginalized peoples and ideas, analyzing any form of discrimination, oppression, and exploitation, and critically questioning why certain histories, practices and experiences have been suppressed. In doing so, radical history is unsettling yet engaging, includes perspectives from below, and offers an undogmatic critique of the ruling conditions—past and present. It is attentive to and critical of asymmetries of power and established narratives. Hence, radical history confronts a double marginalization as it center-stages marginalized historical agents, practices, and ideas as well as their marginalized position in historiography.

Radical history approaches have become increasingly popular in the study of East Asia.They help deconstruct persisting racist stereotypes of Asians’ alleged obedience and lack of creativity, and they reveal East Asia’s long and rich tradition of dissent, including anarchism, communism, feminism, and socialism. Dissent encompasses revolutionary action, organization, and theorization, but it is not limited to it. It demonstrates, for instance in the case of anarchists’ intellectual exchange in the late Meiji period, the development of an anarchist discursive space that enabled people to act and think in different and more egalitarian sociabilities and temporalities along notions of cooperation and mutual aid that have been completely ignored in liberal and national historiography dominated by state building and capitalist development. The same holds true for experiencing and narrating China’s modern revolutions, the fantasies and fears of modern life in early twentieth century Japan as well as struggles against Japan’s colonial rule and military occupation in China, Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia and other places in East and Southeast Asia. As much as these experiences manifested in their specific locality, they were simultaneously and inevitably global. However, if recognized at all in the alleged success stories of capitalism, liberalism, and modernity, such experiences are mostly told in a framework of national history. Therefore, narrating radical history often deviates from the well-trodden paths, and is much more attentive to historical agents' own actions, experience, and epistemologies.

In doing so, the workshop Radical East Asia gathers histories, interventions and perspectives that challenge and disrupt the grand narratives of capital, empire, and state power–then and now. We acknowledge radical vocabulary and concepts, and take radical activists and theoreticians seriously in their own right. In addition, seeking to disrupt and decolonize the epistemology of our hegemonial present days’ historical narration, radical history is in crass opposition to many established ethnocentric perspectives as well as neoliberal transnational and global history approaches that oftentimes exhaust in uncritical repetitions of connections, easy flows, and smooth transfers. Hence, by highlighting ruptures and disrupting established narratives of East Asia and global history, this workshop tackles the double marginalization of radical history and its historical actors and their experiences, and elucidates their contribution to the making of the modern world.