Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization

by Saurabh Dube (Editor)

Overview

The notion of modernity hinges on a break with the past, such as superstitions, medieval worlds, and hierarchical traditions. It follows that modernity suggests the disenchantment of the world, yet the processes of modernity also create their own enchantments in the mapping and making of the modern world. Straddling a range of disciplines and perspectives, the essays in this edited volume eschew programmatic solutions, focusing instead in new ways on subjects of slavery and memory, global transformations and vernacular and vernacular modernity, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledge, cosmopolitan politics and liberal democracy, and governmental effects and everyday affects. It is in these ways that the volume attempts to unravel the enchantments of modernity, in order to approach anew modernity's constitutive terms, formative limits, and particular possibilities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415602891
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/13/2010
Series:	Critical Asian Studies
Pages:	522
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Saurabh Dube is Professor of History at the Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico.

Table of Contents

1. Modernity and its Enchantments: An Introduction Effects: Colony and Nation 2. North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492–1945 3. Coloniality at Large: Time and the Colonial Difference 4. The Space of Empire and the Territory of Nations 5. Sanitizing Modernity: Imperial Hygiene, Obscenity, and Moral Regulation in Colonial India 6. Conversion to Translation: Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity 7. The Moment of Criticism in Indian Nationalist Thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of a Hindi Responsibility 8. Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram 9. Illiberal Islam 10. Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture Affects: The Global and the Vernacular 11. Affect: What is it Good for? 12. The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism 13. The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism 14. The Martyrdom of Mosques: Imagery and Iconoclasm in Modern Pakistan 15. Mental Illness and the Urban Poor: Psychiatric Institutions and the Singularity of Lives 16. The Time of Slavery 17. Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism 18. The Beautiful Expanding Future of Poverty: Popular Economics as Psychological Defence