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Introduction

Peter van der Veer

in The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India

This introductory chapter examines India and China and the ways in which they have been transformed by Western imperial modernity. The onset of modernity is said to be located in the nineteenth ... More

This introductory chapter examines India and China and the ways in which they have been transformed by Western imperial modernity. The onset of modernity is said to be located in the nineteenth century and is characterized politically by the emergence of the nation-state, economically by industrialization, and ideologically by an emphasis on progress and liberation. The nation-form itself is a global form that cannot be understood as the product of one particular society. It is the dominant societal form today, and India and China have gradually developed into nation-states. For this reason, one can compare India and China at the level of nation-states, although these societies are internally immensely differentiated and the particular nation-form they have taken is historically contingent.Less

Chinese Middle Classes between Empire and Revolution

Sabine Dabringhaus and Jürgen Osterhammel

in The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire

This chapter points out how the political turbulences of the twentieth century prevented the emergence of a viable middle class. Until the late nineteenth century, China seemed to remain static, ... More

This chapter points out how the political turbulences of the twentieth century prevented the emergence of a viable middle class. Until the late nineteenth century, China seemed to remain static, while Western Europe developed a new kind of dynamic bourgeois society underpinned by industrialization and fueling imperial expansion. This situation changed after the opening of the treaty ports, which became important places for the entry of Western modernity into China. In the coastal cities, it is possible to speak of the emergence of a social group that resembled the Western middle class, at least from the second decade of the twentieth century. On the one hand, it involved an entrepreneurial elite; on the other, a new generation of Western-educated Chinese, who either joined the private economic sector, found employment as teachers in the rapidly expanding schools and universities, or tried to make a living as freelance intellectuals. This short period, however, came to an end after the Japanese invasion in 1937, and completely disappeared after 1949, when any remnants of middle-class society were ruthlessly eradicated by the Communist Party.Less

The Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness: History, the Commodity, and Diasporic Modernity

Lindon Barrett

Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. Mcbride, and John Carlos Rowe (eds)

in Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

This chapter traces modern conceptions of racial blackness from the beginnings of Euro-American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere through the seventeenth-century Atlantic slave trade and the ... More

This chapter traces modern conceptions of racial blackness from the beginnings of Euro-American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere through the seventeenth-century Atlantic slave trade and the mercantilist economy dependent on slavery up to the Federalist era (1780–1800) in early U.S. national politics. It traces a historical trajectory—approximately 1500 to 1800—that links the origin of the U.S. nation (and its Constitutional avoidance of the immorality of its slave system) to European imperialism and the mercantilist economy supported by the slave trade. In so doing the chapter establishes “the fundamental, ongoing event of Western modernity” and how it revises systems of world trade and the mechanics of state powers, and revises the materiality of the body and the relations of the body to the discursive mechanisms by which it is socially apprehended and managed in the modern exclusive paradigms of personhood.Less

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in Kuroshitsuji

Waiyee Loh

in Mechademia 7: Lines of Sight

This chapter presents a reading of Toboso Yana’s Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), a manga series set in late Victorian England about a beautiful butler named Sebastian, who is actually a devil in ... More

This chapter presents a reading of Toboso Yana’s Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), a manga series set in late Victorian England about a beautiful butler named Sebastian, who is actually a devil in disguise, and his young master, Count Ciel Phantomhive. With its Western European setting, its aestheticization of the demonic and the deathly, and its penchant for roses, Rococo motifs, and the color black, Kuroshitsuji exemplifies a type of “Gothic” style that has become popular in postwar Japanese shōjo culture. The chapter examines this shōjo Gothic style and its relation to Japanese national identity in the age of postmodern globalization and postcolonial reevaluations of the legacy of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. It argues that through its Gothic style, Kuroshitsuji paradoxically intervenes in its own idealization of Western modernity to celebrate contemporary Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures and to disseminate its hybrid cultural commodities around the world as a cultural superpower in the age of postmodern globalization.Less

Native Son and Diasporic Modernity

Mikko Tuhkanen

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 6: The American Novel 1879-1940

This chapter examines Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940) and its relation to the intellectual tradition of theorizing Western modernity. More specifically, it considers Native Son's ... More

This chapter examines Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940) and its relation to the intellectual tradition of theorizing Western modernity. More specifically, it considers Native Son's contextualization of the American tragicomedy of race relations in the larger histories of industrialization, colonization, and the slave trade. It also explores Wright's use of timekeeping to tackle racism in America in terms of the social conditions imposed on African Americans by the dominant white society. Finally, the chapter explains the symbolic significance of the histories of global modernity and the African diaspora in Native Son.Less

Social Changes: “Dual” and “Incomplete” Societies

Ivan T. Berend

in History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter describes the social changes in Central and Eastern Europe. “Dual” and “incomplete” societies represented both the dominant traditional characteristics and the new elements of a rather ... More

This chapter describes the social changes in Central and Eastern Europe. “Dual” and “incomplete” societies represented both the dominant traditional characteristics and the new elements of a rather sluggishly modernizing society. Coexistence of the old and new elites under the unquestioned political and social leadership of the old elite was a hallmark of the dual society. The “Jewish question” arose in Austria and to some extent in Bohemia as well. The duality of the society in its upper layers was also clearly visible in the lower strata. The separation of the traditional and the modern, and the beginning of real social change, occurred first in the newly emerging, rapidly growing cities. Central and Eastern Europe might have begun social modernization but, on the eve of World War I, they stood at the beginning of a long, rough historical road toward Western European modernity.Less

Living in a Broken World

Dwayne A. Tunstall

in Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism

This chapter examines four ways Marcel battles against the dehumanization of human persons in late Western modernity. First, Marcel criticizes the reduction of human persons to their functions in ... More

This chapter examines four ways Marcel battles against the dehumanization of human persons in late Western modernity. First, Marcel criticizes the reduction of human persons to their functions in twentieth century western societies. Second, he criticizes the techniques of degradation used on marginalized people in Europe during the Second World War. Third, he criticizes the dehumanizing effects of technology on human persons. His criticism of technology is then compared to Albert Borgmann’s neo-Heideggerian criticism of technology. Fourth, Marcel criticizes the impersonal political ideologies that have led to the death of millions during the first half of the twentieth century.Less

Introduction

Tyler Roberts

in Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism

This introductory chapter discusses the concept of religion, which most scholars view as a product of Western modernity. A vital aspect of its genealogy is the deep suspicion about the power of ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the concept of religion, which most scholars view as a product of Western modernity. A vital aspect of its genealogy is the deep suspicion about the power of Christian institutions that signified the thinking of Western intellectuals in the Enlightenment. This suspicion compelled social and political efforts to limit religious power, and helped shape developments in political theory that grounded human power in the natural and social, rather than the divine. Philosophical efforts also turned to conceptualize and enact the autonomy of reason against the authority of tradition and revelation. The chapter then describes how the book is divided into three parts. The first part looks at the emergence of historical-critical studies of the Bible, as well as the naturalistic investigations into the origin of religion. The second part talks about the study of religion along humanistic lines; while the final part explores the interrelationship between theological thinking and philosophy of religion.Less

Corrupting Politics

Nadia Bou Ali

in Islam after Liberalism

The chapter explores the relationship between culturalism and liberalism in modern Arabic. It argues that internal contradictions from within Arabic thought haunt the attempt to define the Arabs as ... More

The chapter explores the relationship between culturalism and liberalism in modern Arabic. It argues that internal contradictions from within Arabic thought haunt the attempt to define the Arabs as an organicist community. These contradictions within particular identity are expressed in the pervasive anxiety about habits and language. Anxiety emerges when there is a crisis in imaginary identification, it is generated as a remainder of acknowledging the self in a specular image: the mirror of language, the Arab’s moustache. It emerges from a process of misrecognition, when uncanny elements within identity itself become overwhelming. Rather than read the discourse on habits as a desire for Western modernity the chapter argues against a non-dialectical pitting of culture (Arab, non-West) against liberalism (West), which forecloses the real loss that is generated from this modern antinomy: the retreat and scarcity of politics in both liberalism and culturalism.Less