Unbecoming Modern

In this volume well-known scholars from India and Latin America – Enrique Dussel, Madhu Dubey, Walter D. Mignolo, and Sudipta Sen, to name a few – discuss the concepts of modernity and colonialism and describe how the two relate to each other. This second edition to the volume comes with a new introduction which extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. It explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and even the Unites States, on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique, as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India.

Like Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Fielding's Tom Jones, Modern Chivalry is a tale of adventuring, episodic and exciting. Despite the author's European inspirations, it is a distinctively American book, not just because of its homespun, native characters and slapstick humor, but also because it is a narrative of journeying and questing. As it follows Captain Farrago and his sidekick on their travels, the book's premise becomes clear--that democracy as practiced in America is valuable and worthy, but that it is subject to malfunctions when tinkered with by unfit men. A pointed caricature of American life, Modern Chivalry will be of great value to all interested in American history and literature.

This collection brings together academics from a range of disciplines to examine modern slavery. Providing a platform to critique the legal, ideological and political responses to the issue, experts interrogate the construct of modern slavery and the anti-trafficking discourse which have dominated contemporary responses to exploitation.

Bracketed by global financial crises and economic downturns, the modern age has been defined by debates about, and transformations of, money. The period witnessed the consolidation of national currencies and monetary policies as well as the diversification of payment technologies and the proliferation of financial instruments. Throughout, even as it appeared abstracted by finance and depoliticized by expert ideologies, money was revealed again and again to be a powerful medium of cultural imagination and practical inventiveness as well as the site of public and political struggles. Modern money - both as a form of liquidity and as a claim on wealth - remains deeply unsettled, caught between private and public interests and subject to epic struggles over the infrastructures of value creation and circulation and their distributional consequences. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.

'Cultural History Of Modern India Edited By Dilip M. Menon Definitely Qualifies For Interesting Reading&The Different Approach Attempted Through The Book Indubitably Is A Fresh Endeavour For A Multidisciplinary Approach With Sociologists, Art Historians And Music Theorists Working Within A Historical Paradigm.' The Statesman, 9 December 2006 The History Of Modern India Has Been Narrated Largely In Terms Of The Nationalist Movement, Personalities And What Has Been Seen As The 'High' Politics Of The State. Recent Shifts In History Writing Have Tried To Bring In Subordinated Histories Of Regions And Of Groups. We Are Moving Towards A Wider Understanding Of Politics, History And Of The Ordinary People Who Make History. This Collection Tries To Push The Emerging Paradigm Further By Moving Away From Conventional Notions Of The History Of The Nation And Indeed Of The Political. The Six Essays In This Collection Present Original And Pioneering Forays In The Study Of Cricket, Oral History, Gender Studies, Film, Popular Culture And Indian Classical Music. Whether Looking At Issues Of Caste On The Seemingly Level Playing Field Of Cricket In Early Twentieth Century India; Or How A Nineteenth Century Housewife Comes To Pen The First Autobiography By An Indian Woman; Calendar Art Reflecting Deeper Notions Of Religion And Community; Or How An Idea Of Pure Classical Music Faces The Challenge Of Technology, These Essays Show How Ideas Of Self, Community And Art Are Formed Within A Larger Politics. Moreover, Culture Far From Being A Refuge From The Political Is Also The Space Within Which Politics Comes To Be Worked Out.

French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed shifting concepts of identity, including varying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward “modernization,” and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers worked to realize ideas of a “modern” city and empire, they undertook a program to significantly alter the physical and social realities by which the people of Tunisia lived, often in ways that continue to influence life today. Medical Imperialism in French North Africa demonstrates the ways in which diverse members of the Jewish community of Tunis received, rejected, or reworked myriad imperial projects devised to foster the social, corporeal, and moral “regeneration” of their community. Buttressed by the authority of science and medicine, regenerationist schemes such as urban renewal projects and public health reforms were deployed to destroy and recast the cultural, social, and political lives of Jewish colonial subjects. Richard C. Parks expands on earlier scholarship to examine how notions of race, class, modernity, and otherness shaped these efforts. Looking at such issues as the plasticity of identity, the collaboration and contention between French and Tunisian Jewish communities, Jewish women’s negotiation of social power relationships in Tunis, and the razing of the city’s Jewish quarter, Parks fills the gap in current literature by focusing on the broader transnational context of French actions in colonial Tunisia.

This book analyses how multiple and hybrid ‘modernities’ have been shaped in colonial and postcolonial India from the lens of sociology and anthropology, literature, media and cultural studies, law and political economy. It discusses the ideas that shaped these modernities as well as the lived experience and practice of these modernities. The two broad foci in this book are: (a) The dynamism of modern institutions in India, delineating the specific ways in which ideas of modernity have come to define these institutions and how institutional innovations have shaped modernities; and (b) perspectives on everyday practices of modernities and the cultural constituents of being modern. This book provides an enriching read by bringing together original papers from diverse disciplines and from renowned as well as upcoming scholars.

In light of an unprecedented constitutional acknowledgement of diverse epistemologies and stipulation making the protection and advancement of so-called 'ancestral knowledges' a duty of the state, this research provides an analysis of the uptake of historically subalternised knowledges by the state during the government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017), as well as of the strive for epistemic justice by peoples and nationalities' organisations in the context of struggles for social change, decolonisation, and self-determination. On the basis of rich empirical material, the analysis traces state discourses and practices and mechanisms to govern 'ancestral knowledges' in the framework of the government's Knowledge Society project and delineates how leaders of peoples and nationalities' organisations struggle for the decolonisation of knowledge. This monograph will be of interest to those concerned with relations between peoples and nationalities and Latin American states, politics of recognition and collective rights, the workings of purportedly post-neoliberal governments and the possibilities and limits for alternatives to development, the struggle of peoples and nationalities' organisations for (epistemic) decolonisation, as well as ongoing (re-)conceptualisations of cosmopolitanisms against restructurations of the coloniality of knowledge and being.