Tag: Modernities

Free Download Formative Modernities in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond: Identities, Polities and Glocal Economies (Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History) by Veronika Hyden-Hanscho, Werner Stangl
English | February 15, 2023 | ISBN: 9811984166 | 392 pages | MOBI | 13 Mb
This book offers a new perspective on the concept of modernity. Since its invention as a contrast to Antiquity or the Middle Ages, modernity has been tied to ideas of superiority, progress, and efficiency. As a counterpart to the Marxist "history of class struggle", "modernization theories" have transformed modernity into an almost teleological concept of historical development. These strong connotations obstruct a clear look at other forms of modernity.

Free Download Carolien Stolte, "Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities "
English | ISBN: 9089648836 | 2017 | 262 pages | PDF | 2 MB
The essays in this volume explore crucial intellectual and cultural exchanges between Asia and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Examining the increased mobility of people and information, scientific advances, global crises, and the unravelling of empires, Eurasian Encounters demonstrates that this time period saw an unprecedented increase in a transnational flow of politically and socially influential ideas. Together, the contributors show how the two ends of Eurasia interacted in artistic, academic, and religious spheres using new international and cosmopolitan approaches.

Free Download Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh
1996 | 206 Pages | ISBN: 1859841066 | PDF | 4 MB
Challenging the similarly romantic, ahistoric and irreconcilable notions of Islamic and Western cultures, this book cuts through conventional wisdom and common cliches to highlight the plurality and historicity of both. For Aziz Al-Azmeh, the Orientalist and racist view of Islam is nothing but the mirror-image of the myths propagated by the Islamic fundamentalists an radicals. In this book he demonstrates both views share an erroneous and an historical conception of Islam as an unchanging and monolithic entity. Moreover, this analysis dissects the mutual implication of both the dominant Western discourse and its supposed primary opponent, postmodernism, in this form of essentialism. There is no one, homogeneous Islam, and this book highlights the diversity and plurality of forms of the Muslim tradition, seeking to understand historically the phenomenon of fundamentalism, amongst other strands, as a profoundly modern ideology. Challenging the stereotypes and legends of both its opponents and proponents, the book traces how political Islam breaks with core elements of the Muslim tradition and, at the same time, roots many of its concepts in European reactionary and romantic thought. This edition is expanded to include further studies of the role of the secular and the popular in Islamic societies. Aziz Al-Azmeh is the author of Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies, Ibn Khaldun and Muslim Kingship.

Free Download Vincent L. Wimbush, "Masquerade: Scripturalizing Modernities through Black Flesh "
English | ISBN: 1978715129 | 2023 | 208 pages | EPUB, PDF | 4 MB + 4 MB
Continuing his project of critical analysis of the scriptural formation of culture, Vincent L. Wimbush has gathered in this book essays by scholars of various backgrounds and orientations who focus in different registers on the theme of masquerade as the "play-element" in modern culture. Masquerade functions as a window onto the mimetic performances, dynamics, arrangements, psycho-logics, and politics ("scripturalizing") by which the "made-up" becomes fixed or one among our realities (scripturalization). Modern-world racialization (and its attendant explosions into racialisms and racisms) as the hyper-scripturalization of difference in human flesh (registered in psychosocial relations as a type of "scripture") is argued in this book to be one of the most consequential examples and reflections of masquerade and thereby one of the primary impetuses behind, and determinants of, the shape of the realities of modernities. The open window onto these realities is facilitated by touchstone references to-not exhaustive treatment of-a now famous eighteenth-century life story, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). This story, told by a complexly positioned Black-fleshed self-acknowledged ex-slave/"stranger," is itself a "mask-ing" that throws light on the predominantly white Anglophone world as masking (as scriptural formation). Equiano/Vassa’s story as masking helps makes a compelling case for analyzing through Black flesh the ongoing shaping of the modern and the perduring mixed if not also devastating consequences.

Free Download Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (Routledge Research in Gender and History) By Antoinette Burton (editor)
1999 | 248 Pages | ISBN: 0415200687 | PDF | 6 MB
Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities considers the ways in which modernity was constructed, in all its incompleteness, through colonialism. Using a variety of archival resources and equally diverse methodologies, the authors trace modernity’s unstable foundations in the slippages and ruptures of colonial gender and sexual politics. As a whole, the essays illustrate that modern colonial regimes are never self-evidently hegemonic, but are always in process – subject to disruption and contest – and never finally accomplished; and are therefore unfinished business.

Free Download Nishat Zaidi, "Indian Modernities"
English | ISBN: 1032280123 | 2023 | 338 pages | PDF | 3 MB
This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh.