Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Enadeavour through Sociology and LiteratureGurminder K. Bhambra
In a recent interview on the occasion of the publication of his edited volume, Colonialism, Modernity and Literature: A View from India, Satya P. Mohanty made the following statement: “Read through the lens of alternative modernities, literary texts open up new historical archives and suggest tantalising perspectives on a past we thought we knew well“ (2012: 91). With this, Mohanty aligns the political project of the volume with the “alternative modernities“ literature, exemplified by the work of Dilip Gaonkar, “to trace the provenance of such [modern] values and ideas in … non-European contexts and to examine the alternative institutions and cultural forms that supported them“ (2011: 3). Further, Mohanty makes a strong case for the novel to be understood as a form of social theory and political engagement where its political relevance concerns both past and present. Through the process of literary analysis, the essays in the volume discuss and reframe the generally accepted understandings of the relationship between colonialism and modernity and make a powerful contribution to rethinking modernity in the light of experiences other than those of Western subjects. In this piece, I take up their provocation to think this relationship differently and to examine the implications of this for standard sociological understandings of modernity and colonialism. As a historical sociologist long concerned with the debates around modernity, multiple modernities, and alternative modernities (Bhambra 2007), I am interested also in thinking through the particular role that literature may have to play in these reconceptualisations. The relationship between colonialism and modernity is a contested one. The standard interpretation is that colonialism is the vehicle that brings modern values and institutions to the colonised world. Indeed, historians such as Niall Ferguson (2004) continue to promote the idea that Britain not only “made“ the modern world, but has no reason to apologise for the world that was made. Others, such as William McNeill, reinforce such sentiments by suggesting that we must “admire those who pioneered the [modern] enterprise and treat the human adventure on earth as an amazing success story, despite all the suffering entailed“ (1990: 3, my emphasis). Questions consisting of who this “we“ and whether “we“ must celebrate the successes (of some) despite the suffering (of others) form the nub of postcolonial, and other, criticisms. As Nandy (1987) argues, there is continuity between not being recognized as a subject in historical narratives, and subjection in the present. Indeed, the importance of rectifying silences in scholarly and mainstream historical narratives is related to the rectification of injustices in the present. The use of literature is both an important aspect of recovering silenced voices and important in its own terms as the articulation of new voices. From this perspective, what is required is an account of the production of particular silences, how (and where) those silenced histories and stories have been remembered, and the conversion of these processes into a politics for the present – concerns foreign to Ferguson and McNeill. As Mohanty argues in the Introduction, the pre-colonised world is typically represented as the repository of all that is traditional and the colonised world – either in positive or negative terms – is seen to embody (or have the potential to come to embody) the modern. The basic assumption, he continues, is that the world that “colonialism replaced or destroyed belongs to the irretrievable past and is irrelevant for our [modern] purposes“ (2011: 2). Further, the focus in much of the standard historical and sociological literature has primarily been on the presumed unidirectional nature of the relationship whereby colonial powers take “modernity“ – as expressed in the modern institutions of the state, market-economy and bureaucracy – to the colonised. The evidentiary base, together with the normative presuppositions, of such claims (and many more) have been seriously called into questions by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and others over the last few decades. This has been in large part as a consequence of increasingly available research from around the globe that contests and contradicts many complacent assumptions about the origin, nature, and spread of what we have come to understand as modernity. There has also been significant research addressing the multitude of ways in which the modern was created in the colonial context – the work of Cohen and Dirks (1988) for example, details the invention of fingerprinting and other modes of governmentality within the colonies before being imported “back“ to the metropole. Pages: 1 2 3 4 |
Essays in this Forum
Rethinking the Global South
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi From Indian Literature to World Literature: A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty by Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur Asia in My Life by Ngugi wa Thiong'o The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization by Duncan Mceachern Yoon The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu by Sanjay Kumar Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Endeavour through Sociology and Literature by Gurminder K. Bhambra Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies by Tilottoma Misra Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism: A Response by Shivani Jha Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature? by E. V. Ramakrishnan Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular by Purushottam Agrawal West Indian Writers and Cultural Chauvinism by Jerome Teelucksingh Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred by Fatima Sadiki |