Questions Of Modernity
Well-known contributors offer an illuminating look at how modernity develops in non-Western contexts.
260 Pages, 6 x 9 in
- Paperback
- 9780816631346
- Published: October 3, 2000
- Series: Contradictions of Modernity
Details
Questions Of Modernity
Series: Contradictions of Modernity
ISBN: 9780816631346
Publication date: October 3rd, 2000
260 Pages
9 x 5
Well-known contributors offer an illuminating look at how modernity develops in non-Western contexts.
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.
Timothy Mitchell is associate professor of politics and director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York University.