Fractured Modernity

The ten essays in this volume deal with the debates and conflicts about modernity in a period of American history when the tensions and strains caused by seemingly unrestrained change and the reactions to it were particularly severe and tangible. Partly concentrating on the margins or dark underworlds of modernity, such as racism and violence, partly focusing on the allegedly unlimited space to negotiate and create social order from scratch, the contributions to this volume show that, and discuss why, modernity was an issue in contemporary United States which seemed to have been even more hotly contested than in Europe at the same time, albeit sometimes in terms of “Americanism” rather than “modernism”. In this book, European scholars of the United States apply variations on the transnational discourse on modernity to unexpected dimensions of U.S. history, making this volume a fascinating example of the present-day enterprise of internationalizing American studies.

With special reference to Lucknow, India.

The ten essays in this volume deal with the debates and conflicts about modernity in a period of American history when the tensions and strains caused by seemingly unrestrained change and the reactions to it were particularly severe and tangible. Partly concentrating on the margins or dark underworlds of modernity, such as racism and violence, partly focusing on the allegedly unlimited space to negotiate and create social order from scratch, the contributions to this volume show that, and discuss why, modernity was an issue in contemporary United States which seemed to have been even more hotly contested than in Europe at the same time, albeit sometimes in terms of "Americanism" rather than "modernism". In this book, European scholars of the United States apply variations on the transnational discourse on modernity to unexpected dimensions of U.S. history, making this volume a fascinating example of the present-day enterprise of internationalizing American studies.

An indictment of the ideology of modernity, which has resulted in our leading incoherent and fragmented lives, Oliver and Gershman’s book explores the profound paradigmatic differences that exist among the world’s people and describes a rich theory of knowing and being, commonly called “process philosophy.” The promise of process philosophy is in its potential to allow us to participate more fully in the flow of all of time and nature. But what does it mean for a teacher and student in the learning situation to have a process point of view? The authors also discuss many of the various implications in regard to language, space, power relationships, and time as they place process philosophy in the educational context.

In The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self, Susan Harrow explores the fascinating interrelation of subjectivity, materiality, and representation in the poetry and related texts of four modern French writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, and Jacques Réda. She demonstrates the richness and the relevance of modern French poetry for today's readers, putting contemporary thought to work on the fractured self emerging in the post-Baudelairian lyric. Harrow addresses the widely perceived marginalization of poetry in the writing/theory debate, demonstrating that the emergence of a self at once shaped by and straining against material, historical, subjective, and cultural impediments reveals fertile relations between theory and poetry. Where purer forms of postmodernist thinking have stressed the dissolution and dispersal of the human subject, new approaches informed by cultural studies, autobiography theory, and gender studies work to recover fictions of experience and retrieve submerged narratives of the self. Probing the activity of textual self-recovery among the debris of history and fantasy, visuality and desire, and culture and corporeality, The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self imparts something of the startling beauty and the raw urgency of poetry writing across the broad modern period.

The contributors question the current academic understanding of what is known as the global middle class. They see middle-class formation as transnational and they examine this group through the lenses of economics, gender, race, and religion from the mid-nineteenth century to today.

The advent of colonialism and its associated developments has been characterized as one of the most defining moments in the history of South Asia. The arrival of Christian missionaries has not only been coeval to colonial rule, but also associated with development in the region. Their encounter, critique, endeavour and intervention have been very critical in shaping South Asian society and culture, even where they did not succeed in converting people. Yet, there is precious little space spared for studying the role and impact of missionary enterprises than the space allotted to colonialism. Isolated individual efforts have focused on Bengal, Madras, Punjab and much remains to be addressed in the context of the unique region of the North East India. In North East India, for example, by the time the British left, a majority of the tribals had abandoned their own faith and adopted Christianity. It was a socio-cultural revolution. Yet, this aspect has remained outside the scope of history books. Whatever reading material is available is pro-Christian, mainly because they are either sponsored by the church authorities or written by ecclesiastical scholars. Very little secular research was conducted for the hundred years of missionary endeavour in the region. The interpretations, which have emerged out of the little material available, are largely simplistic and devoid of nuances. This book is an effort to decenter such explanations by providing an informed historical and cultural appreciation of the role and contribution of missionary endeavors in British India.

MacNamara reveals how ordinary women and men legitimized birth control through private moral action, as opposed to public advocacy, in the early twentieth century.