Delimiting Modernities: Conceptual Challenges and Regional Responses

(Hardback)

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This collection seeks to contribute to the many long-standing discussions on modernity, but also and more specifically to the more recent debates over trends to pluralize modernity. These debates are current in many different academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature and postcolonial studies. Hitherto, most engagements with modernity in the plural have remained conspicuously confined to one or other intra-disciplinary notion of modernities, such as that of Shmuel Eisenstadts multiple modernities which has triggered a host of conference papers and publications largely within sociology: all the while, it seems that the literatures, for instance, of multiple modernities and alternative modernities are each distinguished by the fact that one ignores the other. It is the principal aim of this edited volume to subject these disciplinary discussions to a more encompassing view, assembling contributions from different scholars who not only work in different disciplines and regional settings, but who also engage with their research topics in a variety of approaches and at different levels of analysis. The volume thus transcends the sometimes narrow boundaries of the debates over modernities within the established academic disciplines and seeks to turn the unavoidable friction brought about by this interdisciplinary setting into most original and insightful scholarship.

Reviews

In the current global conjuncture, claims on modernity are proliferating, and we witness increasingly contested debates about early and multiple modernities, and about visions of development outside the frame of Euro-American epistemologies. In this anthology, a group of distinguished scholars offers a wealth of insights and critical perspectives, aiming both at assessing the meaning of these interventions, and to reconfigure the notion of "modernity" for our times. -- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universitt Berlin
In this interdisciplinary and international collection of essays, delimiting modernities becomes a twofold project: on the one hand, consolidating as well as complicating the use of a pluralized notion of modernity; on the other hand, further provincializing the Eurocentric conceptual history of modernity in ways that reflect ongoing global assymmetries of power. The result is a far-reaching exploration of a timely subject by some of the best scholars in the field -- Manuela Boatca, Freie Universitt Berlin

Author Bio

Sven Trakulhun is lecturer of history at the Universities of Zurich and Konstanz. Ralph Weber is assistant professor for European Global Studies at the University of Basel.