Global Modernities Pdf
Elnora Heidrick
`A timely contribution to current debates around globalization theory and an excellent introduction to this complex and contradictory field of study. Globalization theory has not simply supplanted postmodernism, but has rather refocused many of the issues raised by postmodernism towards a more serious reappraisal of the whole question of modernity itself' - Habitat International
Theories of global modernity initially emerged from mainstream sociological deliberations that interrogated the relevance of classical theories in assessing contemporary changes within the Global North. This question led to the formation of other questions, one of which was whether the modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s modeled on classical sociological positions and emulating the European experience could continue to be useful for the comprehension of the modernity being articulated across the globe. It was soon recognized that the modernization model in reality homogenized and made hegemonic the European experience by arguing that the institutional organization and cultural features representing the modernization process in Europe would replicate themselves across the world. What was needed, the scholarship suggested, was a perspective that displaced the convergence theory of modernity with one that recognized the differences organizing the modern experience across the various regions of the globe.
It has been suggested that the multiple modernities thesis contributed to the cultural turn in contemporary social theory. It is clear from the above that material processes find little to no representation in this discussion of modernity. Additionally, though this thesis argues for historicity, there is no reference to colonialism, its organization of modernity, its exploitative processes, and its relationship to knowledge systems and especially those of the social sciences. The perspectives addressed below tackle these issues.
Coloniality of power argues that Eurocentrism constitutes theories justifying the control of: a) economy through land appropriation, exploitation of labor, control of natural resources; b) authority through the institutions of army, police, and political power; c) gender and sexuality through the family and education system; and d) subjectivity and knowledge through the elaboration of epistemology/knowledge systems.
The Department of English and American Studies hosts the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 2020-2022. Internationally renowned scholars will join the Department as Guest Professors for a period of up to six months to teach and research together with their Potsdam colleagues in Literary and Cultural Studies.
The chair aspires to advance innovative teaching in our superdiverse MA Programme Anglophone Modernities in Literature and Culture. In accordance with the decidedly post-colonial orientation of the MA programme, our Guest Professors will contribute to a diversification and decanonisation of the curriculum; they will introduce new international topics and approaches to our classrooms; and they will facilitate the reflection of teachers and students on the specific locality of knowledge production. Together with Potsdam colleagues in Literary and Cultural Studies, the Guest Professors will also conduct a series of workshops that test out best practice models for teaching the global postcolonial classroom.
Satish Poduval (winter term 2020/21)
Satish Poduval is Professor of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. His research interests include film and media studies as well as critical theory, focussing on connections and differences between Western and (South) Asian approaches.
Sarah Casteel (summer term 2021)
Sarah Casteel is Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University, Canada where she teaches postcolonial and diaspora literatures. Her research areas include Caribbean literature and hemispheric approaches to the literatures of the Americas as well as theories of diaspora and transnationalism. She is particularly interested in the emerging conversations between postcolonial and Jewish/Holocaust studies.
Katrina Schlunke (winter term 2021/22)
Katrina Schlunke is Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania and the University of Sydney, Australia. She is interested in thinking and writing about Indigenous (Australian) studies, (popular) cultural history, critical theory, ecocriticism and has an ongoing interest in fictocriticism, material fiction and queering the postcolonial.
Ira Raja (summer term 2022)
Ira Raja is Professor in the Department of English at Delhi University, India. She teaches South Asian literatures in English, as well as cultural studies and critical theory. Her research focusses on feminism and gender studies, ageing and intergenerational relationships, as well as consumption and food studies.
With this lecture series, we will examine art historiography as part of global modernization processes and invite scholars focusing on different regions in the Global South and Eastern Europe whose work is and has been seminal to these debates in order to discuss how notions of modernity were shaping art practices throughout the twentieth century.
The world is growing smaller. Every day we hear this idea expressed and witness its reality in our lives-through the people we meet, the products we buy, the foods we eat, and the movies we watch. In this bold look at the cultural effects of a shrinking world, leading cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai places these challenges and pleasures of contemporary life in a broad global perspective.
Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to the nation-state, whose era some see as coming to an end. Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at popular consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. He considers the way images-of lifestyles, popular culture, and self-representation-circulate internationally through the media and are often borrowed in surprising (to their originators) and inventive fashions.
Appadurai simultaneously explores and explodes boundaries-between how we imagine the world and how that imagination influences our self-understanding, between social institutions and their effects on the people who participate in them, between nations and peoples that seem to be ever more homogeneous and yet ever more filled with differences. Modernity at Large offers a path to move beyond traditional oppositions between culture and power, tradition and modernity, global and local, pointing out the vital role imagination plays in our construction of the world of today-and tomorrow.
Arjun Appadurai is director of the Chicago Humanities Institute and Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor of Anthropology, both at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981) and editor of The Social Life of Things (1986).
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Contending Modernities is a multi-year, interdisciplinary research and education initiative, co-directed by Scott Appleby, Ebrahim Moosa, and Atalia Omer, in partnership with secular and religious institutions and individuals from around the world. The project seeks to generate new knowledge and greater understanding of the ways in which religious and secular forces interact in the modern world and to advance collaboration for the common good.
Building upon and consolidating previous theories and deliberations, the second phase of Contending Modernities broadens the initiative's view to develop a robust engagement with the secular as a discursive tradition that itself does not stand in opposition to the "religious" under the premises of abstracted neutrality. This focus opens up the initiative to a historical and historicist discussion of other religious and spiritual traditions and their intersections with and coevality with modern political formations. This intersection demands a careful consideration of questions of gender, race, and nationalism as critical sites for the study of religion and modernities and for cultivating nuanced accounts of humanistic inquiries into religious-secular encounters. Firmly grounded in scholarship, the project endeavors in this phase to communicate its findings to new audiences around the world, cognizant of the policy implications of the research as well as the significance the project may hold for individuals and communities navigating the contested and overlapping boundaries of religious and secular experience.
The field of Buddhist Modernities provides a focused way of examining the distinctive development of the varied and complex forms of Buddhism within the contexts of multiple modernities. This field includes such areas of inquiry as how Buddhist institutions have been defined by, and defined themselves against, colonial regimes and nation-states, as well as how Buddhists have responded to changing social structures and technological developments. This area approaches the study of Buddhist communities within the context of their particular societies, economies, and political systems, but also understands the study of Buddhist Modernities as necessarily translocal, both because Buddhist practices such as meditation and mindfulness have traveled globally and because modernity is an unfinished project with a global reach. Buddhist Modernities further seeks to bring the study of Buddhism into conversation with emerging subfields in religious studies, such as religion and the environment, religion and technology, and contemplative studies.
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