Rethinking modernity: A postcolonial critique

Standard historical-sociological accounts of modernity are predicated on notions of rupture and difference: a temporal rupture between an agrarian, pre-modern past and an industrial, modern present, and a cultural difference between the 'West' and the 'Rest'. While sociology's long-standing linear accounts of modernization have been tempered by a recent emphasis on 'multiple modernities', the wider postcolonial critique has not been sufficiently answered. In this presentation, I argue that the world historical character of concepts such as modernity rests on a partial understanding of what happened in the West with little consideration of events in other places - more specifically, of the necessarily interconnected, global conditions of such events. In addition, I argue that it is only by recognising the 'colonial global' historically that it is possible to understand and address the postcolonial present of sociology and its concepts.