Subjects of Modernity

Dube ranges widely and globally - from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India - to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies. Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago Saurabh Dube, a distinguished scholar of the 'enchantments of modernity', turns his attention here to the various 'subjects' to which modernity has given rise: to its agents, its subalterns and its narrators; to the particular sort of space and time it produces and presumes; above all, to the disciplined and undisciplined forms of knowledge it has spawned. At a time when the tenets of modernity are increasingly being called into question, he offers us a meditation of unusual insight and critical value. Jean and John Comaroff, Harvard University Saurabh Dube has crafted an elegantly essayistic critique of the simplistic (and single-stranded) evolutionism that inspires the pretensions of self-proclaimed global and hegemonic modernity. He shows how even progressive and well-meaning scholars conflate heterogeneous complexities, thereby imbuing this all-encompassing conceptual structure with seemingly ineluctable reality. His provocations offer a challenging break with frameworks that for too long have carried colonialism's intellectual heritage forward even after its political demise. Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University Saurabh Dube's elegant and insightful meditation on modernity, with a focus on the academic and aesthetic trajectories of the phenomenon, as well as on historical actors who both shaped and were shaped by these processes, constitutes an important revisionist take on the subject. Dube's exploration of modernity, through a scrupulous attention to its temporal-spatial imperatives, poses a challenge at both the empirical and conceptual level to the exemplary status of the West. The book models a form of critical scholarship that is generous in its engagement with the work of its interlocutors even as it pushes against the latest cliches to chart new directions. Subjects of Modernity deserves to be read very widely across a variety of overlapping fields and subfields, from history to anthropology and from subaltern studies to postcolonial theory. Mrinalini Sinha, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 'Dube's book is an excellent reminder of the possibilities as well as the perils of modernity.' Projit Bihari Mukharji, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania, Postcolonial Studies 'Dube brings an electric urgency to the task of historiography of modernity, a need to look for a way out and away from the exigencies of modernity. The book is disguised as a thesis. But Dube has obviously penned a manifesto. It has its academic credentials- and he is happy to invite readers to skip and scan, reading the book as six essays rather than as a monograph. But at heart, this book is a call for action. And it is this urgency to act that makes this book a benchmark by which we look at the future investigators of modernity and their ethical and privileged respon sibilities for naming and changing the scripts that bind the subject of modernity.' Nishant Shah is Dean, ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands and teaches at the Leuphana University, Germany, Economic and Policical Weekly June 2018 -- .