Mitchell T. (ed.) Questions Of Modernity

Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2000 — 240 p. — (Contradictions of Modernity, 11) — ISBN10: 0816631344; ISBN13: 978-0816631346.Well-known contributors offer an illuminating look at how modernity develops in non-Western contexts. Modernity has always laid claim to universal certainty-which meant assigning a different and lesser significance to anything deemed purely local, non-Western, or lacking a universal expression. This book makes those very non-Western, non-universal elements the tools for fashioning a more complex, rigorous, and multifaceted understanding of how the modern comes about. Focusing on the making of modernity outside the West, eight leading anthropologists, historians, and political theorists explore the production of new forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco. Topics include the therapeutics of colonial medical practice, the multiple registers of popular film, television serials and their audiences, psychiatrists and their patients, the iconic figure of the young widow, and the emergence of new political forms beyond the grasp of civil society.Timothy Mitchell. IntroductionTimothy Mitchell. The Stage of Modernity
Partha Chatterjee. Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the Non-Christian World
Dipesh Chakrabarty. Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Modern Subject in Bengal
Lila Abu-Lughod. Modern Subjects: Egyptian Melodrama and Postcolonial Difference
Stefania Pandolfo. The Thin Line of Modernity: Some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity
Nicholas B. Dirks. The Sovereignty of History: Culture and Modernity in the Cinema of Satyajit Ray
Veena Das. The Making of Modernity: Gender and Time in Indian Cinema.
Gyan Prakash. Body Politic in Colonial India.