Subjects of modernity: Time-space, disciplines, margins (Theory for a Global Age) - Softcover

Dube, Saurabh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1526140276 ISBN 13: 9781526140272

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2019

Synopsis

 

In this book, Saurabh Dube thinks through modernity and its representations by exploring critical considerations of time and space. Drawing on anthropology, history and social theory, he investigates the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. Crucially, he understands the antinomies of modernity not as analytical errors, but as constitutive elements of modern worlds.

Dube questions routine portrayals of homogeneous time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space by social subjects. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory for the phenomena, he views modernity as involving checkered, contingent and contended processes of meaning and power, which have found heterogeneous historical elaborations over the past five centuries. Bringing together past and present, theory and narrative, he sows the historical, ethnographic and methodological deep into his critical procedures, offering an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology.

About this title

Review:

Dube ranges widely and globally - from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India - to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies.' Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago 'Saurabh Dube, a distinguished scholar of the "enchantments of modernity", turns his attention here to the various "subjects" to which modernity has given rise: to its agents, its subalterns and its narrators; to the particular sort of space and time it produces and presumes; above all, to the disciplined and undisciplined forms of knowledge it has spawned. At a time when the tenets of modernity are increasingly being called into question, he offers us a meditation of unusual insight and critical value.' Jean and John Comaroff, Harvard University 'Saurabh Dube has crafted an elegantly essayistic critique of the simplistic (and single-stranded) evolutionism that inspires the pretensions of self-proclaimed global and hegemonic modernity. He shows how even progressive and well-meaning scholars conflate heterogeneous complexities, thereby imbuing this all-encompassing conceptual structure with seemingly ineluctable reality. His provocations offer a challenging break with frameworks that for too long have carried colonialism's intellectual heritage forward even after its political demise.' Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University 'Saurabh Dube's elegant and insightful meditation on modernity, with a focus on the academic and aesthetic trajectories of the phenomenon, as well as on historical actors who both shaped and were shaped by these processes, constitutes an important revisionist take on the subject. Dube's exploration of modernity, through a scrupulous attention to its temporal-spatial imperatives, poses a challenge at both the empirical and conceptual level to the exemplary status of the West. The book models a form of critical scholarship that is generous in its engagement with the work of its interlocutors even as it pushes against the latest clichés to chart new directions. Subjects of modernity deserves to be read very widely across a variety of overlapping fields and subfields, from history to anthropology and from subaltern studies to postcolonial theory.' Mrinalini Sinha, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 'Dube's book is an excellent reminder of the possibilities as well as the perils of modernity.' Projit Bihari Mukharji, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania, Postcolonial Studies 'Dube brings an electric urgency to the task of historiography of modernity, a need to look for a way out and away from the exigencies of modernity. The book is disguised as a thesis. But Dube has obviously penned a manifesto. It has its academic credentials -- and he is happy to invite readers to skip and scan, reading the book as six essays rather than as a monograph. But at heart, this book is a call for action. And it is this urgency to act that makes this book a benchmark by which we look at the future investigators of modernity and their ethical and privileged respon sibilities for naming and changing the scripts that bind the subject of modernity.' Nishant Shah is Dean, ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands and teaches at the Leuphana University, Germany, Economic and Political Weekly, June 2018

About the Author:

Saurabh Dube is Research Professor at the Centre for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City -- .

About this edition

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1526140276
• ISBN 13: 9781526140272
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248