Delimiting Modernities Conceptual Challenges and Regional Responses [Hardcover]

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.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 fieldThis book 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.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 lÒ