Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation (review)

When, with the blunt force of principle, laws fight each other, each law is always against (anti) the law (nomos): such is the logic of antinomy. It is through such a logic, Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar argue, that "the complexities of modernity are best understood" (2), a wager that entails recognizing irreconcilable differences, listening to the noise in the system, paying attention not only to where the big picture of modernity comes together but to where things fall apart. The genealogy of this book, comprising seven essays (original versions of which were published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East) and introductory and concluding chapters by Kaiwar and Mazumdar, can indeed be traced to certain academic antinomies: to stress fractures in area and ethnic studies produced by dialogue across national, regional, and disciplinary boundaries, dialogues that have uncovered shared concerns and intersecting histories, challenged "established frames of national and regional area studies" (5), and exposed the need for comparative analyses of phenomena such as colonialism, capitalism, and modernity. From such dialogues have emerged the three critical categories—race, Orient, nation—that are the focus of this volume and that, as its contributors compellingly demonstrate, have been crucial to the construction of modernity and to negotiating the fundamental antinomy between its "sense of ceaseless movement and . . . uprootedness" and its invention of "fixities and solidarities spanning large expanses of time and space" (261).

Antinomies of Modernity, unlike many essay collections, coherently and significantly develops the critical categories it sets out to investigate. Indeed, it is not only a stellar contribution to theorizations of race, Orient, and nation but an important corrective to understandings of modernity. All of the essays included in it, moreover, are well-researched, detailed, and substantial works of scholarship. Kaiwar's essay, for example, tracing "the formulation and unfolding of the Aryan model of history and the Oriental Renaissance" (13), assesses the new nineteenth-century disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, biology, philology, linguistics) that helped form the idea of an Indo-European language family proper to a (culturally, linguistically, and biologically) superior "Aryan race." After examining the two central pillars of the Aryan model of history—Greece and north India—Kaiwar demonstrates the impact of this model on Indian nationalism. While the conception of India as the eastern extension of the Aryan people allowed Hindu nationalists to claim parity with British colonizers, he argues, the freighted racial divide between Aryans and Dravidians was simultaneously deployed to construct that nationalism as strongly anti-Muslim.

In "Aryanizing Projects, African ‘Collaborators,' and Colonial Transcripts," Andrew E. Barnes investigates the writings of colonizers in Nigeria and the "affinities [they] posited between themselves and the Africans whose collaboration they sought" (62). Examining debates between missionaries, colonial administrators, writers of journalism and fiction, pundits in the metropole, and prospective African collaborators, Barnes shows the way in which the Aryan model was put to work in Nigeria: the qualities colonizers ascribed to a certain native elite, he contends, "owed a substantial debt to British ideas about the peoples and cultures of the Indian subcontinent" (63). This example, he avers, provides insight both into the guises colonized people assumed in order to negotiate with their colonizers and into the dialogic scenes (between Europeans and "natives") that subtend orientalist knowledge.

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi's dazzling essay, "Orientalism's Genesis Amnesia" (which should be required reading for all students of orientalism), shows that the academic discipline of orientalism was "grounded on a ‘genesis amnesia' that systematically obliterated the dialogic conditions of its emergence and the production of its linguistic and textual tools" (98). A propaedeutic retrieval of that dialogue, Tavakoli-Targhi's essay analyzes the contributions of Persianate scholars (such as Emperor Akbar and the Persian linguist Saraj al-Din Khan Azru) and other intellectual laborers (such as the Mehmandars, Indian and Iranian state-appointed hosts assigned to distinguished foreign guests) to the formation of "pioneering" orientalists Anquetil-Duperron and William Jones. "The breakthroughs in comparative religion and...