Modernity

Abstract

Writing a short keyword piece on ‘modernity’ can be a foolhardy venture, given the numerous debates and connotations swirling around it. The term can refer to a historical epoch (though there is no consensus on when it began or ended); a condition arising out of processes of modernisation and the workings of global capital; a cluster of institutions and technologies; a set of norms and practices; an orientation of the self; a discourse of self-legitimation; an aspiration or a fantasy; an incomplete social and intellectual project; an intersection of the material changes wrought by processes of modernisation and the subjective experience of such changes; and a dialectic between the explosive energy of the new and forces that seek to contain it. The one thing common to these different notions of modernity is a sense of transformational rupture and disorienting change. Always notoriously imprecise, the conceptual contours of the term ‘modernity’ have become even blurrier under increased critical scrutiny and with the global turn across disciplines since the 1990s. Postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentric teleology and value-laden universalist assumptions embedded in dominant (read western) understandings of the modern have led to methods stressing difference and heterogeneity rather than the homogenising force of modernisation; to a pluralisation of the term into a range of ‘alternative’ or regionally specific ‘modernities’ across the world; and to a proliferation of prefixes pertaining to nation, region, subject positions and cultural politics (e.g., ‘colonial modernity’, ‘liberal modernity’, ‘regional modernity’, ‘subaltern modernity’, ‘the Bengali modern’, etc.). Instead of being taken for granted as a stable analytic category with a set of universally applicable meanings, ‘modernity’ is now widely seen as a contested category, or what anthropologists call a ‘native category’ (Ferguson, 2006, p. 177) – a term shared by heterogeneous groups but prone to changing colour on the ground, as it moves from one socio-cultural context to another and performs different kinds of cultural work in the hands of different social actors. However, as Timothy Mitchell points out, an emphasis on different historical trajectories shaping ‘alternative’ or ‘divergent’ versions of modernity does not necessarily dislodge the idea of an ‘underlying and fundamentally singular modernity’ originating in the imagined space of the west (Mitchell, 2000, p. xii). Nor does it dispel the whiff of belatedness or derivativeness clinging to manifestations of the modern elsewhere. How, then, does one write a post-Eurocentric account of non-western modernity that manages to make sense of its specificity – its distinctiveness, newness and connections with the past – as well as of Europe’s role in its history? Attempts to solve