Subjects of modernity: Time-space, disciplines, margins

by Saurabh Dube

In this book, Saurabh Dube thinks through modernity and its representations by exploring critical considerations of time and space. Drawing on anthropology, history and social theory, he investigates the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. Crucially, he understands the antinomies of modernity not as analytical errors, but as constitutive elements of modern worlds.

Dube questions routine portrayals of homogeneous time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space by social subjects. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory for the phenomena, he views modernity as involving checkered, contingent and contended processes of meaning and power, which have found heterogeneous historical elaborations over the past five centuries. Bringing together past and present, theory and narrative, he sows the historical, ethnographic and methodological deep into his critical procedures, offering an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

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".

Reviews

[Iqra Tasmiae]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=Iw...