Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization

by Saurabh Dube (Editor), Ajay Skaria (Contributor), Craig J. Calhoun (Contributor)

The notion of modernity hinges on a break with the past, such as superstitions, medieval worlds, and hierarchical traditions. It follows that modernity suggests the disenchantment of the world, yet the processes of modernity also create their own enchantments in the mapping and making of the modern world. Straddling a range of disciplines and perspectives, the essays in this edited volume eschew programmatic solutions, focusing instead in new ways on subjects of slavery and memory, global transformations and vernacular and vernacular modernity, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledge, cosmopolitan politics and liberal democracy, and governmental effects and everyday affects. It is in these ways that the volume attempts to unravel the enchantments of modernity, in order to approach anew modernity's constitutive terms, formative limits, and particular possibilities.

300 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, subaltern studies and postcolonial-decolonial perspectives, and social theory and critical thought. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History – elected to the Distinguished Category of Professor-Researcher in 2009 – at the Centre of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Dube is a member also of the National System of Researchers (SNI), Mexico, in which since 2005 he holds the highest rank.
Saurabh Dube has been described recently as "one of the most generative, creative, and surprising thinkers of our time" ( Sunil Amrith) as well as "a thinker who in these times is fundamental to the Global South" ( Mario Rufer). He has been considered as having "long been one of the most interesting and perceptive scholars addressing the dilemmas of modernity in South Asia"; as issuing "excellent reminder[s] of the possibilities as well as the perils of modernity" at large; and as "bringing an electric urgency to the task of historiography of modernity", encompassing "the genealogies of the modern in Europe, the Americas, and South Asia".