Böcker av Saurabh Dube

Scrupulously based in anthropology and history - and drawing on social theory and critical thought - this book revisits the disciplines, archives, and subjects of modernity.There are at least three interleaving emphases here. To begin with, the work rethinks institutionalized formations of anthropology and history - together with "archives" at large - as themselves intimating disciplines of modernity. Understood in the widest senses of the terms, these disciplines are constitutively contradictory.Moreover, the study interrupts familiar projections of modern subjects as molded a priori by a disenchanted calculus of interest and reason. It tracks instead the affective, embodied, and immanent attributes of our varied worlds as formative of subjects of modernity, sown into their substance and spirit.Finally, running through the book is a querying of entitlement and privilege that underlie social terrains and their scholarly apprehensions - articulating at once distinct elites, pervasive plutocracies, and modern "scholasticisms."

This book thinks through modernity and its representations by drawing in critical considerations of time and space. It explores the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity as constitutive of our worlds. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory of the phenomena, the work discusses modernity as involving checkered, contingent, and contended processes of meaning and power over the past five centuries. Subjects of Modernity considers the overlaps yet distinctions between modernity, modernism, and modernization, further imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology. Critically engaging historical anthropology, subaltern studies, de-colonial understandings, and post-colonial procedures, it at once offers an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively reassess critical perspectives, from South Asia to Latin America. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, post-colonial studies, cultural geography, among other subjects, finding adoption in different courses/seminars across disciplines.

Probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. This book combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography.