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

“Globalization” has come to signify a multiplicity of intellectual and political movements, both in its defenses and in attempts at its disruption. The term itself increasingly stands in for perspectives which read a growing interconnectedness of economic, social and political life in this moment of late capitalism. The widespread uses of the concept of globalization have more often succumbed to the pitfalls of losing the historical particularities of the socio-political, and, more specifically, the socio-legal and socio-economic discourses which have made possible the concept of a world in which, for example, greater and more fluid movements of capital have engendered greater income disparities between various intra-national social groups, and between former colonizer and colonized regions. As Marxian notions of class, alienation, and imperialism are increasingly recuperated and deployed in many different discursive spaces, there is also a growing need to rethink, redefine, and reexamine the political rhetoric of so-called “anti-globalization” movements which, some may argue, is in danger of itself becoming naturalized through a certain willingness to accept uncritically terms which seem to offer neatly packaged analyses of social, economic and political unrest.

Given the many political contexts in which critiques of “globalization” are being mobilized, Antimonies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation offers a timely intervention. This collection of essays, many of which originally appeared in earlier versions in South Asia Bulletin and, as it later became, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, provides an essential rethinking and historicization of a globalized sense of modernity through the lenses of colonialism, race, Orientalism, and nation. Invoking critiques of uneven geopolitical development and the “hierarchy of global power,” the editors use the Frederic Jameson’s notion of an antimony in order to understand “the complexities of modernity...at the core of which lie a compact set of ideas about the nature of economics, cultures, nations, identity, and alterity.” (2) Using the three critical categories of race, Orient, and nation, the book places the development of modernity within a historical framework which reveals the intense contestations of colonial and post-colonial history. Class is a central feature in the structure of the collection, serving to provide the contingencies and particularities of intra- and inter-national power. Given the many examples of rising communalist tensions, claims to religious fundamentalist political power, the “war on terrorism,” and the need to voice alternatives to the re-visioning of economic and political hegemonies located in the mythical “west,” delineating the relationship between class and nationalism is a particularly necessary tool for generating multiple and cogent histories of the present.

The collection is loosely divided into three sections, and organized chronologically. The first, which includes essays by Vasant Kaiwar, Andrew Barnes, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targi, A.R. Venkatachalapathy, and Michael O. West, focus on romantic racialism and first-generation Orientalism in the colonial and immediate post-colonial periods. Writing in the vein of Said and Fanon, for example, the authors place Orientalism in relation to contemporary myths of nationalism inspired by long-standing relationships with transformed, yet, in many ways, ideologically stable notions of colonial and racial power. The second section, which consists of essays by Neville Alexander, Minoo Moallem and Sucheta Mazumdar, deals with postcolonial identity politics and nationalism. Ranging from post-apartheid South Africa to Iran’s Islamic Revolution to the varied phenomena of Hindu Indian migrations to the United States, the essays pose questions about the development of race, identity and nationhood in a vastly changed political landscape in which “aliens” and “natives” are no longer constructed within the geography of colonial resource extraction and rule. Mazumdar’s essay in particular raises questions about homelands, origins and ethnicity, the uneven and yet embedded notions of racial hierarchy, and offers a structural understanding of the ways in which the development of Indian communities in the U.S. provides insights into the highly contested terrain of racial and ethnic identity politics. In their final essay, Mazumdar and Kaiwair discuss modernity as...