Alternative Modernities: Globalization and the Post-Colonial

Abstract

Modernism and modernization have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. (Marshal Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air 16) Modernities are everywhere, precisely the time as the epochal discourse of the West appears to be on its last legs. This is one of the more paradoxical features of the global. One might declare the of in a narrow sense as Jean-Francois Lyotard (and postmodernism in general) does, but to declare its even as an epoch is either to fall into the fallacy that has remained a Western phenomenon, or to colonize the world with the Western paradigm of the postmodern. The sense that is a turning point comes not, I would suggest, from its imminent demise either through the end of history (Fukuyama) or the clash of civilizations (Huntington), but from its global, transcultural, and variegated character. Globalization may now be characterized by the multiplicity of its modernities and post-colonial theory provides a way to understand why this is so. How it does that will require a closer look the journey of post-colonial theory itself and the pitfalls its alliance with globalization studies has opened up. The defining moment of the fallacy that is the site of the West's cultural triumph occurs in Weber's Introductory Note to his Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion where he provides a list of Occidental achievements defining its separation from the rest of the world: ... only the West developed proper scientific procedures, while Babylonian astronomy lacked a mathematical foundation, Indian sciences lacked rational experiments, Chinese historiography lacked the Thucydidean paradigm and Asian jurisprudence lacked the strict juridical procedures of canonical law; although musical understanding and polyphonic music could be found everywhere in the world, only the West developed rational harmonic music, musical notation, and instruments such as the organ, the piano and the violin; while the principles of pointed arch and dome were known and practiced in the Orient, only the Occident developed them into a systematic style in medieval architecture; print was known in China, but only the West acquired a press; ... (Schultz-Engler 37-38) The list goes on to include universities, the civil service, parliamentary democracy and capitalism. We recognize in this triumphant declaration the supreme self-confidence of the Orientalism that led to the expansion of European empires into the rest of the world with their mission civilatrice and quest resources and markets, a self-confidence that looks extremely dated in the face of the range of modernities that characterizes the 'modern' today. I. Alternative Modernities A substantial literature has developed on the related concepts of modernities, alternative modernities, of at large, globalizations and the principles of fluidity, localization and hybridization that they imply. (1) Eisenstadt, one, claims that the concept of multiple modernities is a refutation of the triumphalist theories of modernization of the 1950s, which assumed that all industrial societies would one day converge. The so-called classical theories of modernization (Marx, Durkheim, Weber) all posited a cultural program of modernity, which had its origins in Europe but was expected to become universal in time. And yet, the progress of modernization showed that modernity and Westernization were not identical (Eisenstadt Multiple 1-3). The temptation to equate with a capitalist economy quickly runs aground. Communist Russia, instance, often regarded as a revolt against modernity, offered a model that might for all its disastrous flaws and irrationalities have been a distinctive but ultimately self-destructive version of rather than a sustained deviation from the modernizing mainstream (Arnason 61). …