Introduction: Enchantments of Modernity

The idea of modernity rests on rupture. It brings into view a monumental narrative—the breaching of magical covenants, the surpassing of medieval superstitions, and the undoing of hierarchical traditions. The advent of modernity, then, insinuates the disenchantment of the world: the progressive control of nature through scientific procedures of technology, and the inexorable demystification of enchantments through powerful techniques of reason. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the privileged dispensation of legislative reason within regimes of modernity gathers together nature and humanity as conjoint attributes of a disenchanted world.

Yet processes of modernity also create their own enchantments. Enchantments that extend from the immaculately imagined origins and ends of modernity, to the dense magic of money and markets, to novel mythologies of nation and empire, to hierarchical oppositions between myth and history, ritual and rationality, East and West, and tradition and modernity. Intensely phantasmic but concretely palpable, tangible representations and forceful practices, such enticements order and orchestrate the past and the present. This special issue discusses the place of such enchantments in the mapping and molding, the making and unmaking, of the modern world. Straddling a range of disciplines and perspectives, the essays collected here eschew programmatic solutions, focusing instead in new ways on subjects of slavery and memory, global transformations and vernacular modernities, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledges, cosmopolitan democracy and secular politics, colonial conversion and subaltern translation, and spectral labor and speculative capital. "Enduring Enchantments" attempts to unravel the enchantments of modernity, in order to apprehend anew its constitutive terms, formative limits, and particular possibilities.

The Medieval and the Modern

There is something uncannily pressing, unerringly close to home, about modernity's enchantments, now drawing in and now reaching beyond scholarly understandings. ¹ Consider, for example, one among many of the Taliban's depredations, their destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan in January 2001, and the responses this act engendered. The many criticisms of the Taliban, stemming from distinct political positions, were prompt and unambiguous, together condemning this unusual act as the vandalizing of history, amounting to cultural genocide. Unsurprisingly, several of these denunciations—issued from India, Europe, and elsewhere—commonly characterized the destruction and its agents as "medieval." But an unrepentant Taliban regime defended these measures through invocations of Islam and claims upon the nation. Here the terms of the Taliban's representations and practices appeared as emergent attributes of modernity. Taken together, the enchantments of modernity precisely straddle this seemingly incommensurable divide, articulating the medieval and the modern. ²

In most denunciations of the Taliban's action, the simplicity of the story line marked off one world from another, construing critical antinomies: we are progressive, they are backward; we are tolerant, they are intolerant; we are modern, they are medieval; we are we/us, they are they/them. ³ Yet, mine is not a call for expressly undoing these oppositions—of merely revealing the ideological nature of the fault line they insinuate—by introducing empirical depth and conceptual nuance to a straightforward story, in order to turn it into a more complex narrative. Rather, I wish to stay longer with the seductions of the story, registering these as the enchantments of modernity. For to do so opens the possibility of holding a mirror to the assumptions, categories, and entities that shore up our worlds of late modernity, a measure that includes the odds of critically understanding the actions of the Taliban. The term medieval bears an enormous burden here.

Images of the medieval as darkly delineating practices, beliefs, cultures, faiths, and histories are acute reflections of the hierarchies of modernity. This is to say that the specter of the medieval is a prior presence and an ongoing horror in the mirror of modernity. As an idea, ideal, and ideology, modernity and the modern appear today to be premised on fundamental ruptures: a surpassing of tradition, a break with the medieval. ⁴ Time after time, in this vision of the past, present, and posterity, an...