Endorsements

This book thinks through modernity and its representations by drawing in critical considerations of time and space. Based in anthropology, history, and social theory, it explores the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. Here, such antinomies, enticements, and ambiguities are approached not as errors or lacks but as constitutive of modern worlds. Subjects of Modernity questions routine portrayals of homogeneous time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space by social subjects. In this way, instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory of the phenomena, the work discusses modernity as involving checkered, contingent, and contended processes of meaning and power, which have found heterogeneous historical elaborations over the past five centuries. Subjects of Modernity brings together the past and the present as well as theory and narrative, sowing the historical, the ethnographic, and the methodological deep into its critical procedures. Examining the idea of rupture that is central to modern imaginaries, it considers the overlaps yet distinctions between modernity, modernism, and modernization, further imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology. Drawing upon while carefully questioning historical anthropology, subaltern studies, de-colonial understandings, and post-colonial propositions, it at once offers an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively reassess critical perspectives, from South Asia through to Latin America. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, post-colonial studies, cultural geography, among other subjects, finding adoption in different courses/seminars across disciplines.