Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities

by Ishita Banerjee-Dube (Editor)

In this volume well-known scholars from India and Latin America-Enrique Dussel, Madhu Dubey, Walter Mignolo, and Sudipta Sen, to name a few-discuss the concepts of modernity and colonialism, and describe how the two relate to each other.

This explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and even the United States on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India.

257 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Professor of History at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City, and a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI), Mexico, where she holds the highest rank. Her authored books include Divine Affairs (2001), Religion, Law, and Power (2007) and, in Spanish, Fronteras del Hinduismo (2007). Among her eight edited volumes are Unbecoming Modern (2005), Caste in History (2008) and Ancient to Modern (2009).

Reviews

[Emin Yiğit · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a presentation in Heidelberg on two tribes in Eastern India, the author takes the readers for a historical journey to India and Australia, more specifically to the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games.

"Here I discuss how the Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony, a media extravaganza with wide implications, coupled the enchanted and the modern in its projection of the past and the present. Witnessed by millions of tv viewers around the world, the opening ceremony of the Sydney Games hinged on history, a vision of antiquity and an optic of posterity held in place by the phantasm of progress-an idea and an imagining, singular and universal. The show began with primordial images, first of fire and then of flowers, the desert landscape and the aboriginal lifeways in perfect harmony with each other, nature and culture collapsed together, a primitivist fantasy of visual rhythmes and colorful cadences. To conjure this perfect past was to signal its eventual destruction.
The cultural minorities of a multicultural down under announced their presence. The panorama was made up of several, distinct scenes. Brightly clad in traditional costumes and bearing the signs of native guise, the first inhabitants of the continent and the recent migrants to Australia sang, danced and laughed, separately but together. This was in tune with authoritative understandings of the culture-concept."