Introduction: Enchantments of modernity

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 101, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 729-755

  Dube, Saurabh ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33750021932     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-101-4-729     Document Type: Editorial

References (59)

1. I discuss the Taliban and the responses to their actions of early 2001 in Saurabh Dube, "Historical Identity and Cultural Difference: A Critical Note," Economic and Political Weekly 36 (2002): 77-81
2. This is not to deny the complex pasts of the term modern, whose "conceptual history" in Western Europe, for example, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht traces in interesting ways - a history that makes clear the articulations of the modern with the ancient, the classical, and the romantic. Rather, it is to stay longer with the moment of Gumbrecht's understanding when the concept modern yields to the category modernity, while recognizing that a purely "internal" account of a concept can elide its multiple hierarchies, played out on distinct registers. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "A History of the Concept 'Modern,'" in Ulrich Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)
3. This pervasive, "metageographical" projection appears elaborated in several ways, from the evidently aggressive to the seemingly benign, embedded of course in "modernization" theory, yet also long lodged within the interstices of Western social and political thought. The way all this might come together is evident in the following statement of Gumbrecht: "From our perspective at least, modernization in the underdeveloped countries is ... taking place somewhere between decolonization and our own present." The "stagist" presumptions here are not so far apart from the wide-ranging elisions of authoritative accounts - for example, by Giddens and Habermas - that see modernity as a self-generated, European phenomenon. As I discuss later, the projection also finds contradictory articulations within discrete expressions of tradition that question modernity by reversing the moral import of its constitutive hierarchies and oppositions. To consider the enchantments of modernity is to think through such oppositions, hierarchies, and elisions. Gumbrecht, "A History of the Concept 'Modern,'" 108
4. Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)
5. and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987)
6. See also, Enrique Dussel, "Eurocentrism and Modernity," Boundary 2 (1993): 65-76
7. Even as prior enchantments can appear as an antidote to a disenchanted modernity, so too logics of "exclusion" and terms of "inclusion" bind each other within the hierarchies of modernity. Keeping this in view, works that have especially influenced my own emphases here include Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
9. and John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992)
10. See also, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness," in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard M. Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991)
11. and Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
12. Here two classics are Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan's Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998)
13. and, of course, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)
14. See particularly Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
15. See also, Russell McCutheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
16. See, for example, Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
17. Against the grain of what such assertions insinuate regarding the stipulations of secularization in everyday life, consider the implications of Vincent Crapanzono's explorations of the dense presence of " literalism" in religion and the law in the United States today. Vincent Crapanzono, Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench (New York: New Press, 2000)
18. Here the question is not just one of contending intimations of heterogeneous modernities questioning authoritative apprehensions of a singular modernity, but equally that of considerations of modernity exceeding sociological formalism and a priori abstraction. See, for example, Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
19. Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
20. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity. Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
21. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Introduction," in Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power Postcolonial Africa, eds. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xi-xiv
22. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
23. Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming)
24. Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
25. and Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearingsin China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
26. See also, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
27. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)
28. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
29. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)
30. Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
31. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
32. Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997)
33. To state matters in this way is not to foreclose the category of tradition, but to bring into view distinct horizons for carefully considering the possibilities of tradition as expressed, for example, in Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)
34. and Stephen Watson, Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
35. and Saurabh Dube, "Introduction: Terms That Bind," in Saurabh Dube, ed., Postcolonial Passages (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
36. I am suggesting that critical attributes of monumental history variously lie at the core of what Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat have recently classified as three "practical" Ianguages of governance and three "symbolic" languages of authority that are "particularly relevant" for understanding the state. (The former consist of the state's "assertion of territorial sovereignty by the monopolization of violence," "gathering and control of knowledge of the population," and "development and management of the 'national economy.'" The latter entail "the institutionalization of law and legal discourse as the authoritative language of the state," "the materialization of the state in series of permanent signs and rituals," and "the nationalization of the territory and the institutions of the state through inscription of a history and shared community on landscapes and cultural community.") Clearly, monumental history articulates the institution of the nation as an "imagined community," the labor of anticolonial nationalist difference, and everyday configurations of state and nation. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, "Introduction: States of Imagination," in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, eds. Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 7-9
37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)
38. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
39. and Prakash, Another Reason
40. My reference is especially to the disjunctions between prophecy and prediction, past and present, and eschatological visions and secular imaginings that, for example, Reinhart Koselleck considers critical to regimes of historicity under modernity. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), particularly 3-20
41. This is not unlike the manner in which Savi's paintings, graphics, and drawings combine distinct artistic influences - from the immediacy of varieties of expressionism, to the poet Rabindranath Tagore's critical drawings, to the "narrative movement" in Indian art that revisited questions of epic and modernity - which he then sets to work in a manner all his own. For discussions of the art worlds and contexts in which Savi's work took shape, see Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 325-38
42. and Ajay Sinha, "Envisioning the Seventies and Eighties," in Contemporary Art in Baroda, ed. Gulammohammed Sheikh (New Delhi: Tulika, 1997)
43. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Refections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255
44. Stephen K.White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3-4, a work whose influence should be evident in these pages
45. Consider too the move toward a "strategic practice of criticism" in David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3-10, 17-18
46. I borrow this notion from John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
47. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), ix
48. The term unrecuperated particulars also comes from McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics
49. The literature here is vast, and I provide a few (very few) examples from different terrains of scholarship that have influenced my own thinking: Shahid Amin, Event Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
50. Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
51. John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995)
52. Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
53. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
54. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
55. Consider too the works cited in notes 6 and 11 and Norman Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959)
56. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 269
57. For a discussion of the difficulties of apprehensions of modernity as an overarching, overwhelming, singular Western project of control and domination and of other understandings simply stressing the inherent difference of all modernities, see Saurabh Dube, "Introduction: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities," in "Critical Conjunctions: Foundations of Colony and Formations of Modernity," eds. Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee Dube, and Edgardo Lander, a special issue of Nepantla: Views from South 3.2 (2002): 197-219
58. For different expressions of such procedures, see White, Sustaining Affirmation; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; and William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)
59. See also the interview with Chakrabarty in this issue; and Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)