Questions Of Modernity

Timothy Mitchell

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2000
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816689064
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Modernity has always laid claim to universal certainty—which meant assigning a different and lesser significance to anything deemed purely local, non-Western, or lacking a universal expression. This book makes those very non-Western, non-universal elements the tools for fashioning a more complex, rigorous, and multifaceted understanding of how the modern comes about. Focusing on the making of modernity outside the West, eight leading anthropologists, historians, and political theorists explore the production of new forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco. Topics include the therapeutics of colonial medical practice, the multiple registers of popular film, television serials and their audiences, psychiatrists and their patients, the iconic figure of the young widow, and the emergence of new political forms beyond the grasp of civil society. Contributors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia U; Dipesh Chakrabarty, U of Chicago; Partha Chatterjee, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; Veena Das, U of Delhi; Nicholas B. Dirks, Columbia U; Stefania Pandolfo, UC Berkeley; and Gyan Prakash, Princeton U.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Stage of Modernity
• 2. Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the Non-Christian World
• 3. Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Modern Subject in Bengal
• 4. Modern Subjects: Egyptian Melodrama and Postcolonial Difference
• 5. The Thin Line of Modernity: Some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity
• 6. The Sovereignty of History: Culture and Modernity in the Cinema of Satyajit Ray
• 7. The Making of Modernity: Gender and Time in Indian Cinema
• 8. Body Politic in Colonial India
• Contributors
• Index