Author: Vasant Kaiwar
Sucheta Mazumdar/
Editor(s): Vasant Kaiwar / Vasant Kaiwar
Publisher: Tulika
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 353
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185229775
Description
Antinomies of Modernity argues that concepts of race, Orient, and nation have been crucial to efforts across the world to create a sense of place, belonging and solidarity in the midst of the radical discontinuities wrought by global capitalism. Emphasizing the continued salience at the beginning of the twenty-first century of these supposedly nineteenth-century ides, the essays in this volume stress the importance of tracking the dynamic ways that race, orient, and nation have been reworked and used over time and in particular geographic locations.
Drawing on archival sources and fieldwork, the contributors explore aspects of modernity within the societies of South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Whether considering how European ideas of Orientalism became foundational myths of Indian nationalism; how racial caste systems between blacks, South Asians, and whites operate in post-apartheid South Africa; or how Indian immigrants to the United States negotiate their identities, these essays demonstrate that the contours of cultural and identity politics did not simply originate in metropolitan centers and get adopted wholesale in the colonies.
Colonial and postcolonial modernisms have emerged via the active appropriation of, or resistance to, far-reaching European ideas. Over time, Orientalism and nationalist and racialized knowledges become indigenized and acquire, for all practical purposes, a completely Third World patina. Antinomies of Modernity shows that people do make history, constrained in part by political-economic realities and in part by the categories they marshal in doing so.
REVIEWS
Antinomies of Modernity is a fundamental contribution to scholarship decentring Eurocentric epistemic perspectives. Vacant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar have collected impressive essays, including their own articles and introduction, showing he epistemic potential of antinomies of modernity in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. This collection makes a signal contribution toward a paradigm showing us the way beyond postmodernism and post colonialism.
-Walter D Mignolo, Duke University
Truly international in its engagement, Antinomies of Modernity is an important, original and timely collection. As cultural studies turns global, we will need more anthologies like this one.
-Christopher Connery, University of California, Santa Cruz
Contents
Acknowledgments
VASANT KAIWAR & SUCHETA MAZUMDAR
Introduction
VASANT KAIWAR
The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance: The Politics of Identity in an Age of Revolutions, Colonialism, and Nationalism
ANDREW E BARNES
Aryanizing Projects, African Collaborators, and Colonial Transcripts
MOHAMAD TAVAKOLI-TARGHI
Orientalism's Genesis Amnesia
A R VENKATACHALAPATHY
Coining Words: Language and Politics in Late Colonial Tamilnadu
MICHAEL O WEST
An Anticolonial International?
Indians, India and Africans in British Central Africa
NEVILLE ALEXANDER
The Moment of Manoeuvre: Race, Ethnicity, and Nation in Postapartheid South Africa
MINOO MOALLEM
Cultural Nationalism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Case of Iran
SUCHETA MAZUMDAR
The Politics of Religion and National Origin:
Rediscovering Hindu Indian Identity in the United States
VASANT KAIWAR & SUCHETA MAZUMDAR
Race, Orient, Nation in the Time-Space of Modernity
Select Bibliography
Contributors
Index