Countering Modernity

This volume highlights and examines how Indigenous Peoples continue to inhabit the world in counter-modern ways. It illustrates how communalist practices and cooperative priorities of many Indigenous communities are simultaneously key to their cultural survival while being most vulnerable to post-colonial erasure. Chapters contributed by community collectives, elders, lawyers, scholars, multi-generational collaboratives, and others are brought together to highlight the communal and cooperative strategies that counter the modernizing tropes of capitalist, industrialist, and representational hegemonies. Furthermore, the authors of the book explicitly interrogate the roles of witness, collaborator, advocate, and community leader as they consider ethical relations in contexts of financialized global markets, ongoing land grabbing and displacement, epistemic violence, and post-colonial erasures. Lucid and topical, the book will be indispensable for students and scholars of anthropology, modernity, capitalism, history, sociology, human rights, minority studies, Indigenous studies, Asian studies, and Latin American studies.

Cauca, located in southwestern Colombia and home to the largest indigenous population in the country, is renowned as a site of indigenous mobilization. In 1994, following a destructive earthquake, many families in Cauca were forced to leave their communities of origin and relocate to other areas within the province where the state provided them with land and housing. Noting that disasters offer communities the opportunity to remake themselves and their priorities, David D. Gow examines how three different communities established after the earthquake wrestled with conflicting visions of development. He shows how they each countered traditional notions of development by moving beyond a myopic obsession with poverty alleviation to demand that Colombia become more inclusive and treat all of its people as citizens with full rights and responsibilities. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted annually in Cauca from 1995 through 2002, Gow compares the development plans of the three communities, looking at both the planning processes and the plans themselves. In so doing, he demonstrates that there is no single indigenous approach to development and modernity. He describes differences in how each community defined and employed the concept of culture, how they connected a concern with culture to economic and political reconstruction, and how they sought to assert their own priorities while engaging with the existing development resources at their disposal. Ultimately, Gow argues that the moral vision advanced by the indigenous movement, combined with the growing importance attached to human rights, offers a fruitful way to think about development: less as a process of integration into a rigidly defined modernity than as a critical modernity based on a radical politics of inclusive citizenship.

The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies contains essays by both leading figures and younger scholars engaged in the field of postcolonial studies. In this state-of-the-field reader, editors Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks have created a dynamic forum for contributors from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary vantage points to question both the limits and the limitations of postcolonial thought. Since it burst on the academic scene as the "hot" new disciplinary field during the final decade of the twentieth century, postcolonial studies has faced criticism from those who question its "troubling" trajectories, its sometimes suspect epistemological and pedagogical methods, and its relatively narrow focus. With diverse essays that emerge from such disciplines as South Asian, Latin American, Arab, and Jewish studies, this volume responds to skeptics and adherers alike, addressing not only the broad theoretical issues at stake within the field but also the position of the field itself within the academy, as well as its relationship to modern, postmodern, and Marxist discourses. Contributors offer critiques on ahistorical and universalizing tendencies in postcolonial work and confront the need for scholars to attend to issues of class, ideology, and the effects of neocolonial practices. Seeking to broaden the field's traditionally literary spectrum of methodologies, these essayists take up large thematic issues to examine specific sites of colonial activities with all of their historical, political, and cultural significance. Closing the volume is an insightful interview with Homi Bhabha, in which he discusses postcolonial studies in the context of contemporary cultural politics and theory. The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies not only offers an overview of the discipline but also pushes and pulls at the edges of postcolonial studies, offering a comprehensive view of the field's diversity of thought and envisioning clear pathways for its future. Contributors. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Ali Behdad, Homi Bhabha, Daniel Boyarin, Neil Larsen, Saree Makdisi, Joseph Massad, Walter Mignolo, Hamid Naficy, Ngugi Wa Thingo, Timothy B. Powell, R. Radhakrishnan, Bruce Robbins, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Ella Shohat, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Lesslie Newbigin was one of the most significant missionary strategists and theologians of the twentieth century. With the breakdown of confidence in some of the central philosophical and theological paradigms that have been shaped and sustained by the culture of modernity, Newbigin's approach to a genuinely missionary theology offers fresh insights and approaches, providing something of a prophetic model for the global Christian community in new and challenging times. In this collection of essays, scholars and practitioners from around the world engage with aspects of Newbigin's continuing legacy. They explore Newbigin's approach to theological method, his theological and philosophical account of Western culture in the light of the gospel, and some of the implications of his thought for global mission in the third millennium. This collection is essential reading not just for Newbigin enthusiasts but also for all who are concerned to develop a genuinely missionary encounter with contemporary culture. Contributors: Ian Barns, John G. Flett, Michael W. Goheen, Kenneth D. Gordon, Eleanor Jackson, Veli-Matti Karkkainen, David J. Kettle, J. Andrew Kirk, Mark Laing, Murray Rae, Jurgen Schuster, Wilbert Shenk, Jenny Taylor, Geoffrey Wainwright, Ng Kam Weng, and Paul Weston.

This important new book argues that at the root of the contemporary crisis of climate, energy, food, inequality, and meaning is a certain core presupposition that structures the ways in which we live, think, act and design: the assumption of dualism, or the fundamental separateness of things. The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists – what they refer to as relationality. This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large. The book follows two interwoven threads of argumentation: on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life. The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable 'toxic loops' of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within 'relational weaves' which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.

An exploration of the role of the book, the map, and the European concept of literacy in the conquest of the New World

Examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s, with particular focus on Roberto Arlt and Mrio de Andrade. The movement developed on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with European movements, critiquing modernity itself, and developed a geopolitical awareness that bridged postcolonial and postmodern culture and continues its influence today.

This book focuses on the competing legacies of modernity/modernism and countermodernity/countermodernism. More diagnostic than curative, this book uncovers the legacies of the distortion of difference, or centrism, in modernity and modernism, exercised especially in Euro-Western history, and legacies of countermodern tendencies that opposed them.