Modernity is better defined as a time orientation, instead of as a set of institutions, which usually smuggles in some provincial or other aprioristic assumptions. A time conception of modernity also gives a precise meaning to postmodernity. Modernity in this non-Eurocentric sense, entails several different, competing master narratives, different social forces of, and conflicts between, modernity and anti-modernity, and different cultural contextualizations of the past-future contrast. But these different varieties do not simply coexist and challenge each other, they are entangled (...) with each other in various ways. Starting from observing how different time warps were interwoven in vanguard modernist art, an analytical framework for grasping, understanding, and explaining the entanglement of modernities is spelled out. (shrink)

Nowadays, the widespread view is that classical sociology is tainted with ‘methodological nationalism and it would appear that there has been a significant overlap between social and political space. We disagree with this point of view for three reasons: (1) by dealing with the global world, classical sociology has already glimpsed the possibility of going beyond the nation-state as a unit of analysis; (2) having operated above all with the notion of ‘social’ rather than ‘national’, its categories are transnational; and (...) (3) when classical sociology has dealt with national society, studies have not reified it within its political boundaries. Consequently, in our opinion, classical sociology highlights both analytical categories that go beyond the ontology of the nation-state as well as new socio-political forms defined within the trajectory of modernity under the pressure of globalization processes. (shrink)

Este trabajo plantear algunas ideas para descolonizar la historia. Realizar esta tarea requiere concebir el pasado como campo de conflicto entre fuerzas sociales y negar la existencia de una sola historia. Descolonizar es una intervención intelectual que se opone a las interpretaciones de la historia que reproducen la dominación moderna, capitalista, colonialista y patriarcal. Dichas interpretaciones utilizan el concepto de “línea abisal” para separar social y racialmente a los seres humanos, y el concepto de “tiempo lineal” para sostener una temporalidad (...) unidireccional, acumulativa, irreversible y progresiva. Descolonizar la historia significa denunciar la existencia de esa forma dominante de concebirla, y afirmar la construcción de una historia post-abisal y no-lineal que tome en cuenta la irrupción de los oprimidos en los procesos sociales. La “historia de las ausencias” y la “historia de las emergencias” son herramientas para descolonizar la historia ya que muestran que el pasado no está cerrado y exhiben cómo los oprimidos confrontan las formas de dominación utilizadas por los opresores para caracterizar a los vencidos: “epistemicidio”, “kairocidio” y “timécidio”. (shrink)