Makeovers of modernity

This paper shall explore issues of modernity to consider a critical conversation between postcolonial propositions and de-colonial perspectives. On the one hand, the terms of de-coloniality have frequently focused on modernity as a primary apparatus of domination, which was inseparable from the colonial making and unmaking of world. On the other, postcolonial writings have revealed more ambivalent, even contending, approaches to modernity. The paper would argue that such mutual tension between the two understandings is not disabling, but can be a spur to thought. This is especially the case if instead of ghettoizing postcolonial and de-colonial orientations as fully finished knowledge(s), which turn upon themselves, they are set to work as part of the wider rethinking of disciplines and worlds. Drawing on a range of recent scholarship I will underscore that questions of modernity have increasingly escaped the limits of (purely) discursive derivation, scholarly formalism, and a priori abstraction. As a result, formations of modernity have been themselves revealed as contradictory and contingent processes of culture and control, as checkered and contested histories of meaning and mastery – in their constitution, sedimentation, and elaboration. On the one hand, it is within such contingency and contradiction that modernity’s constitutive hierarchies and formative oppositions are framed and elaborated. On the other hand, these processes are not subject-less procedures, and emerge instead as expressed by subjects of modernity – and not only modern subjects – that are non-Western and Western. Together, all of this raises key questions for a dialogue between the two knowledge formations under discussion as well as between understandings of South Asia and Latin America.