This article explores some of the central challenges presented by decolonial thought to other critical, progressive, or emancipatory theories, especially theories of radical democracy. The article has two main aims. First it seeks to synthesize and highlight a number of key strands and interventions of contemporary decolonial thought. It does so through a reading of several decolonial literatures including the Latin American modernity/coloniality school, as well as research in Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonial Studies focused largely on the Anglo settler (...) colonies of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Three key thematics of decolonial thought are drawn out and explicated in this survey: modernity/coloniality, land, and ethico-political resurgences. The second aim is to show what kind of work is done by these decolonial interventions by using them to interrogate Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy. (shrink)

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation. Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and Anand, accordingly: (...) Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction, Across the Black Waters, my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stage... (shrink)

This article elucidates some connections and divergences between S.N. Eisenstadt’s work on multiple modernities and critical reflections on ‘African modernity’ presented by Africanist scholars. It argues that there is more cross-over between these discussions than is commonly thought when both are seen as parallel responses to the shortcomings of post-war modernization theory. Eisenstadt’s work can inform debates in African Studies concerning the effective power of tradition in postcolonial African societies, and on African interpretations of the ‘cultural programme’ of modernity. The (...) article also discusses some weaknesses in Eisenstadt’s theorizing which arise from an extension of the multiple modernities framework to African societies, namely, an underappreciation of the various modalities of colonial imperialism and racialization, as well as the institutional constraints placed on postcolonial societal elites. It claims that these can be offset via a dialogue with the work of scholars in African Studies. Moreover, it is argued that the paradigm of multiple modernities can more satisfactorily shed light on African trajectories of modernity via the retrieval of tenets of Eisenstadt’s ‘heterodox’ modernization theory and work on post-traditionality, outlined in the 1960s and the 1970s, which include specific reflections on African societies. (shrink)

Modernity has not collapsed under the weight of postmodern criticisms. On the contrary, it has rebounded with greater vigour as witnessed by the emergence of new terms such as reflexive modernization, liquid modernity and multiple modernities. These terms suggest that modernity can no longer be conceptualized in the singular. Yet the pluralization of modernity does not necessarily imply that there is a new consensus about the meaning of modernity. The appearance of these terms can be regarded as specific attempts to (...) transcend postmodern critiques. Comparison of these new terms provides an understanding of their usage in the context of the decline of postmodernism and the direction of contests over the meaning of modernity. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in the conceptual debate about modernities in the plural, this article presents a heuristic framework based on an interpretative approach to modernity. The article draws on theories of multiple modernities, successive modernities and poststructuralist approaches to modern subjectivity formation. In combining conceptual tools from these strands of social theory, we argue that the emergence of multiple modernities should be understood as a historical result of idiosyncratic social constructions combining global social imaginaries with religious and other (...) cultural traditions. In the second part of the article we illustrate this argument with three short excursions into the history of Islamic reform in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this way we interpret the modern history of Muslim societies as based on cultural conflicts between different forms of social order and individual identities similar to those present in European history. Contrary to the European experience, however, religious traditions gradually assumed an important role in defining ‘authentic’ Muslim modernities, leading to a relatively hegemonic role of so-called Islamic modernities toward the end of the 20th century. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the conceptual and methodological points of convergence and divergence of two intellectual currents frequently referred to as the decolonial and ontological turns in social and anthropological theory. Salient points considered are the ways both theoretical projects unsettle modernity’s dominant ontological and epistemological foundations by seriously engaging the conceptual potential of thinking with alterity (ethical dimension) and from exteriority (geopolitical dimension). I compare their subversive methodological contributions, examining, in particular, Enrique Dussel’s analectical hermeneutic approach and Eduardo (...) Viveiros de Castro’s ethnographic method of controlled equivocation. Lastly, I discuss how both theories and approaches complement each other’s efforts to destabilize Western modernity’s philosophical and anthropological foundations. (shrink)

In its etymology and in popular discourse, the term ‘avant-garde’ is commonly associated with a future temporality, while in art-historical discourse, it represents a tradition of modernist innovation, periodised as ‘historical avant-garde’ and ‘neo-avant-garde’. Since this historical periodisation was first established in the 1950s, the avant-garde’s futurity has been repeatedly disputed, bringing the very notion of an avant-garde into question. This thesis takes as its starting point the predicament of ‘an avant-garde after the avant-garde’ as a means to investigate the (...) philosophico-political implications of a historical temporality marked by ‘afterness’. Writing in critical dialogue with scholarship that has articulated the avant-garde as a notion of historical time, the thesis modifies the parameters of this scholarship by foregrounding the category of historicism, and by reformulating the avant-garde as a notion that both resists and inhabits historical periodisation. As a study at the disciplinary intersection of comparative literature and critical theory, 'Ahead of its Time' proceeds via close readings of selected theories of the avant-garde (German literary scholar Peter Bürger’s foundational Theory of the Avant-Garde in the 1970s; British art theorist John Roberts’ formulation of a ‘suspensive avant-garde’ in the twenty-first century; and the intellectual debates of the Italian circle Neoavanguardia in the 1960s), while also mobilising the critical resources available in the thought of Walter Benjamin. Through a non-linear, comparativist critical analysis that discusses these theories in, and as, a Benjaminian constellation, the thesis proposes the avant-garde as a relational, indexical category that is constitutively split between historical continuity and historical rupture. In this manner, 'Ahead of its Time' revisits the broader question of mediation between universality and particularity, and by recasting it in temporal terms, it advocates a chronopolitics of singularity, whereby the avant-garde’s split between continuity and rupture also reveals the ethically-necessary relationship between self-determination and contingency. (shrink)

The Haitian Revolution is not only one of the most important foundational moments in the emergence of the modern world, but also one of the most neglected within the social scientific literature. In this article, I ask what can be learnt, both from its omission from accounts of events claimed to be of ‘world historical’ significance, and from how social theory would need to be re-thought once we took such events seriously. In particular, I want to examine what is at (...) stake in such rethinking and how we might consider alternative formulations through an approach I call ‘connected sociologies’. (shrink)