Unbecoming Modern

Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities

Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee-Dube

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367135737
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429648694
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian Art
• Index: History

In this volume well-known scholars from India and Latin America – Enrique Dussel, Madhu Dubey, Walter D. Mignolo, and Sudipta Sen, to name a few – discuss the concepts of modernity and colonialism and describe how the two relate to each other. This second edition to the volume comes with a new introduction which extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. It explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and even the Unites States, on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique, as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India.

chapter one
Introduction

Critical Questions of Colonial Modernities

Saurabh Dube Ishita Banerjee-Dube

Over the past two decades, a variety of critical perspectives have addressed and questioned the place of the West as history, modernity, and destiny. In the context of Unbecoming Modern three examples should suffice. But two clarifications are in order. The particular critical dispositions to follow often overlap. If they are presented separately here, this is primarily on heuristic grounds. Moreover, these orientations have been expressed in a variety of ways, constituting an enormous corpus. Our bibliographical citations provide only a few representative examples.

Initial Issues

First, recent years have seen vigorous challenges to univocal conceptions of universal history under the terms of modernity. Imaginatively exploring distinct pasts that were forged within wider, intermeshed matrices of power, such emphases have queried pervasive imperatives of historical progress and the very nature of the academic archive, both closely bound to aggrandizing representations of a reified Europe/ West (Amin, 1996; Chakrabarty, 2000; Chatterjee and Ghosh, 2002; Dube, 2004a, 2004b; Fabian, 2000; Florida, 1995; Hartman, 1997; Hunt, 1997; Klein, 1997; Mignolo, 1995; Price, 1990; Rappaport, 1994; Skaria, 1999; Thurner, 1997; Thurner and Guerrero, 2003; Vergès, 1999; White, L., 2000. See also, Axel, 2001; Banerjee-Dube, 1999; Mehta, 1999; Trouillot, 1995; and White, L., 2003).

Second, close to our times, dominant designs of a singular modernity have been increasingly interrogated by contending intimations of heterogeneous moderns. Such explorations have critically considered the divergent articulations and the discrete representations of the modern and modernity, which have shaped and sutured empire, nation, and globalization. As a result, modernity/modernities have been themselves revealed as contradictory and contingent processes of culture and control, as checkered, contested histories of meaning and mastery—in their formation, sedimentation, and elaboration. It follows, too, that questions of modernity increasingly often escape the limits of sociological formalism and exceed the binds of a priori abstraction, emerging instead as matters of particular pasts and attributes of concrete histories—defined by projects of power, and molded by provisions of progress (Asad, 2003; Chakrabarty, 2002; Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Coronil, 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997; Dube, 2002, 2004a; Ferguson, 1999; Gilroy, 1993; Hansen, 1999; Mitchell, 2002; Prakash, 1999; Price, 1998; Silverblatt, 2004; Taussig, 1987. See also, Appadurai, 1996; Chatterjee, 2004; Escobar, 1993; Gupta, 1998; Harootunian, 2000; Moore, 2003; Piot, 1999; and Rofel, 1999).

Third and finally, for some time now critical scholarship has contested the enduring binaries—for example, between tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, and East and West—that have shaped influential understandings of pasts and key conceptions of cultures. On the one hand, such theoretical accounts have derived support from critiques of a subject-centered reason and a meaning-legislating rationality, critiques that have thought through the dualisms of Western thought and post-Enlightenment traditions. On the other hand, critical discussions of cultures and pasts have equally challenged the analytical binaries of modern disciplines, interrogating essentialized representations of otherness and questioning abiding representations of progress that are variously tied to the totalizing templates of universal history and the ideological images of Western modernity (Asad, 1993; Bauman, 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992; Dube, 1998; Errington, 1998; Gray, 1995; Lander, 2000; Mbembe, 2001; Mignolo, 2000; Said, 1978; Sears, 1996; Taussig, 1997. See also, Lowe and Lloyd, 1997; Rorty, 1989; Scott, 1999; and White, S., 2000).

At the same time, the reflections of a singular modernity, the representations of universal history, and the reifications of overriding oppositions are not mere specters from the past, now exorcised by critical epistemologies and subversive knowledges. Rather, such lasting blueprints continue to beguile and seduce, palpably present in the here-and-now. Both the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, including Operation “Enduring Freedom”—as phrase and program—are striking examples. Articulating dominant traditions of social theory and animating inherited terms of everyday discourse, these resilient mappings and their determinate re-drawings lead a charmed life in academe and beyond in both Western and non-Western contexts.

This book does not propose a general solution to such problems. Rather, it is better understood as hinging on a more modest proposal. The effort of Unbecoming Modern is to address a few of the issues outlined above by bringing into focus some of the critical questions at stake in thinking through colonial modernities—a vogue phrase that indicates a horizon and a perspective, containing problems as well as possibilities. We will have more to say about colonial modernities and the specific orientations of this volume very shortly. For the moment it is important simply to register that this Janus-faced neologism bids us to ask: Are attempts to pluralize colony, modernity, and history mere exercises in scholarly refinement of these categories-entities? Or can such efforts equally, critically engage dominant understandings of the contemporary world, also containing alternatives to newer critical orthodoxies that render such categories as “dystopic” totalities? Conversely, what are the key differences of meaning and power that can be underscored through the elaboration of tradition and community, the local and the subaltern as oppositional categories? Must such contending concepts inhabit the locus of “unrecuperated” particulars, as a priori antidotes to authority, in the mirrors of critical understandings?

To pose matters in this manner is to bring into play at least two possibilities, entailing imperatives of theory and the politics of knowledge. The first concerns the importance of drawing on and going beyond—of extending and exceeding—earlier examinations and contemporary critiques of dominant knowledge(s), including the central place of a spectral yet palpable West in authoritative mappings of the world. The second involves the salience of recognizing the impossibility of easy escapes from modernity and history through the means of talking cures and the ruses of writing remedies. This especially means to cautiously keep in view the seduction of lurking nativisms, the lure of third-world nationalisms, and the enticement of endeavors that wish to flee from the present by turning their backs on the here-and-now. Taken together, these two sets of considerations bring into relief the significance of discussing dominant knowledges without turning these into totalized terrain and of exploring the possibilities of alternative understandings that eschew the snares of unrecuperated particulars.

Key Questions

The concerns sketched above are better understood as constituting the wider theoretical context to the essays comprising Unbecoming Modern, as horizons that these writings engage in inherently different ways. Indeed, it is through critical considerations of colonial modernities that this book attempts to articulate questions of difference, power, and knowledge. At the same time, it would be a mistake to claim either a transparent connotation or a precise status for colonial modernities as a category. To be sure, this current coinage highlights the acute enmeshments between foundations of colony and formations of modernity. This is particularly the case when colonial modernities are regarded as a broad rubric that at once indicates historical processes and critical perspectives—a rubric that entails particular locations of enunciation, interrogating the disembodied view-from-nowhere that becomes the palpable view-for-everywhere. Yet, precisely for this reason, colonial modernities indicate both a contentious theoretical terrain and a contending analytical arena. And it is exactly such contention that can turn this concept-metaphor into an enabling resource for dialogue and debate. Therefore, it is useful to raise two distinct sets of questions, overlapping points for discussion, in order to think through colonial modernities.

First, what is at stake in conjoining questions of colonialism with issues of modernity to produce and endorse the hybrid figure, colonial modernities? What marks of difference and which lineaments of power are underscored through such moves? Indeed, in what ways are we using the term modernity and its plural modernities here? In speaking of modernity is the reference to an overarching ideology that accompanied, say, Western elaborations of democracy and nation and European expansion of capital and empire over the last three to five hundred years? Or, are the terms modernity/modernities also to be understood as particular historical processes predicated upon distinct but wide-ranging intersections of the metropole and the margins, upon discrete yet critical encounters between the colonizer and the colonized?

Clearly, these different orientations can actually come together, each questioning dominant representations of the modern, both challenging singular images of modernity, including in the writings in Unbecoming Modern. The point is simple. Rather than imagining and instituting a facile synthesis between contending understandings of modernity and modernities—and, indeed, between competing conceptions of colonialism and history—consciously recognizing such distinctions and differences as productive tensions can be a source of strength in thinking through colonial modernities. Such acknowledgements entail the admission that we already labour in the light of anterior understandings, always work in the shadow of prior categories—in order to revisit the binds and exclusions between globalization and colonialism, modernity and “coloniality”, and world-system and colonial modernities, the one set engaging and extending the other copula.

Second, what are the critical imperatives of reading and writing— of dialogue and debate—as we consider stipulations of difference and provisions of power? The question is salient. In a wide variety of contemporary scholarly endeavors both power and difference can appear as pre-fabricated entities, already given categories, a priori terms of discussion. This suggests that much more than bouts of hasty critique and fits of academic absentmindedness are at stake here. In such a scenario, if it is significant to specify the ways in which we put forward notions of difference and premises of power, two other considerations also stand out.

On the one hand, it is important to be vigilant of the manner in which difference is inflected by power. On the other hand, it is salient to recognize the way in which power is shot through with difference.¹ None of this is to indulge in sophistry. Take the example of that plural of modernity—modernities. In speaking of modernities are we merely saying that Indian modernity is different from German modernity which is then different from, say, Mexican or Venezuelan modernity? If this is the primary import of our statements, what modalities of power are occluded here, not only in relation to authoritative grids of empire and globalization but also within non-Western formations of state and nation? Equally, by invoking a bloated and singular modernity centered on the West, in order to interrogate the homogenizing impulses of projects of power, do we perhaps succumb to reified representations of an imaginary but tangible Europe that overlook the labor of difference within the work of domination?

In other words, what understandings of prior traditions/pasts and which conceptions of present history/progress do we bring to bear upon our renderings of power and difference? What anterior idea animates our appropriation of history, universal or provincial? Which immediate image articulates our apprehension of modernity, singular or plural? Can we bring into play forms of reading in which power is not construed as totalized terrain? Can we work through practices of writing where difference does not constitute a ready antidote to power—whether as insurgent identity, or as ecstatic hybridity, or as pre-configured plurality?

Critical Conjunctions

The nature of the questions we have just raised indicates our intention in this Introduction to generate debate rather than to garner consensus. This is in keeping with the tenor of Unbecoming Modern in which contending positions access and exceed each other, the exchange and the surplus intimating newer directions. At work here are particular terms of interaction between distinct bodies of scholarship, especially writings on and readings out of Latin America, and South Asia, as they converge on the critical conjunctions at the heart of colonial modernities.

In authoritative apprehensions and commonplace conceptions flowing from Latin America, intimations of modernity have been long present in the region, generally reflected in the image of a reified Europe. Here Latin America has itself been envisioned as part of the Western world, albeit with specific lacks and within particular limits. All of this is a result of dominant mappings and authoritative “metageographies”, which have split the world into the Occident and the Orient, the East and West. A handful of exceptions apart, questions of colonialism have been often understood in Latin America as occupying the locus of a dim and distant past.² Not surprisingly, issues of empire, themselves narrowly conceived, continue to be widely considered as the distinct domain of specialist scholars of a long-forgotten period in Latin American history. In such dispositions the salient traces of colonial cultures in modern Latin America can chiefly consist of the monumental architecture and the grand art of a distinctive, bygone era.

Against the grain of these dominant orientations toward the presence of modernity and the past of colonialism, an important body of critical thought on Latin America today focuses on the subterranean schemes and the overwrought apparitions of the modern and the colonial—in the past and the present. In other words, this corpus critically considers the spectral place and tangible presence of colonial stipulations of knowledge/power within modern provisions of power/knowledge. Consequently, such moves, acutely represented in this volume, have also held a mirror up to modernity as a deeply ideological project, a ruse of history, a primary apparatus of domination, here- now-and there tomorrow (Dussel, 1995; Lander, 2000; Mignolo, 1995, 2000; and Castro-Gómez, 1998).

Concerning South Asia, colonial questions have occupied a critical place in writings on the region’s history, economy, and society for several decades now. The immediacy of empire and the force of nationalism— the latter as anti-colonial movement and nation-building project— have both played an important role here. Over time, this has resulted in the accumulation of distinct perspectives on colonial processes in South Asia. These developments have extended from revisionist histories of colonial transitions, to historical ethnographies of imperial formations, to postcolonial perspectives associated with the Subaltern Studies project and critical literary analyses.³

It is also the case, however, that in general the import of modernity has been critically considered in scholarship on India only in recent years.⁴ Here there have been different understandings of the distinctions and dynamic and the determinations and direction of modernity in South Asia. Such analyses have variously presented modernity as an enlightened trajectory of social transformation, an overweening project laboring against creative difference, an authoritative apparatus ever engendering critical alterity, and a historical process productive both of exotic exceptions and historical sameness.⁵ At the same time, in several of these readings, current reflection on modernity has followed upon the prior presence of the colony. Not surprisingly, newer critical writin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Coloniality, modernity, decoloniality: a new introduction to the second edition
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: critical questions of colonial modernities
• 2. Reading a silence: the "Indian" in the era of Zapatismo
• 3. Between anthropology and history: Manuel Gamio and Mexican anthropological modernity, 1916-1935
• 4. Mapping oppositions: enchanted spaces and modern places
• 5. Postmodern geographies of the U.S. South
• 6. Orientalism, anti-Orientalism, relativism
• 7. Henry S. Maine: history and antiquity in law
• 8. Uncertain dominance: the colonial state and Its contradictions
• 9. World-system and "trans"-modernity
• 10. Eurocentrism, modern knowledges, and the "natural" order of global capital
• 11. The social sciences, epistemic violence, and the problem of the "invention of the other"
• 12. The enduring enchantment (or the epistemic privilege of modernity and where to go from here)
• Contributors
• Index