Introduction: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities

Over the past two decades, a variety of critical perspectives have questioned the place of the West as history, modernity, and destiny.¹ First, recent years have seen vigorous challenges to univocal conceptions of universal history under the terms of modernity. Imaginatively exploring distinct pasts forged within wider, intermeshed matrices of power, these works have queried the imperatives of historical progress and the nature of the academic archive, both closely bound to aggrandizing representations of a reified Europe (Amin 1995; Banerjee Dube 1999; Chakrabarty 2000; Dube 1998; Fabian 2000; Florida 1995; Hartman 1997; Klein 1997; Mignolo 1995; Price 1990; Rappaport 1994; Skaria 1999; see also Axel 2001; Mehta 1999; and Trouillot 1995).

Second, close to our times, dominant designs of a singular modernity have been increasingly interrogated by contending intimations of heterogeneous moderns. Such explorations have critically considered the divergent articulations and representations of the modern and modernity that have shaped and sutured empire, nation, and globalization. As a result, modernity/modernities have been themselves revealed as contradictory and contingent processes of culture and control, as checkered, contested histories of meaning and mastery—in their formation, sedimentation, and elaboration. It follows, too, that questions of modernity increasingly often escape the limits of sociological formalism and exceed the binds of a priori abstraction, emerging instead as matters of particular pasts and attributes of concrete histories—defined by projects of power, and molded by provisions of progress (Chatterjee 1993; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Coronil 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Dube forthcoming; Ferguson 1999; Gilroy 1993; Gupta 1998; Hansen 1999; Prakash 1999; Price 1998; Taussig 1987; see also Appadurai 1996; Escobar 1993; Harootunian 2000; Piot 1999; and Rofel 1999).

Third and finally, for some time now critical scholarship has contested the enduring binaries—for example, between tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, and East and West—that have shaped influential understandings of pasts and key conceptions of cultures. On the one hand, such theoretical accounts have derived support from critiques of a subject-centered reason and a meaning-legislating rationality that have thought through the dualisms of Western thought and post-Enlightenment traditions. On the other, critical discussions of cultures and pasts have also challenged the analytical binaries of modern disciplines, interrogating essentialized representations of otherness and questioning abiding representations of progress that are variously tied to the totalizing templates of universal history and the ideological images of Western modernity (Asad 1993; Bauman 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Errington 1998; Gray 1995; Lander 2000; Mignolo 2000; Said 1978; Rorty 1989; Taussig 1997; see also Lowe and Lloyd 1997; and Scott 1999).²

At the same time, the reflections of a singular modernity, the representations of universal history, and the reifications of overriding oppositions are not mere specters from the past, now exorcised by critical epistemologies and subversive knowledges. Rather, such lasting blueprints continue to beguile and seduce, palpably present in the here and now: both the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, including Operation “Enduring Freedom”—as phrase and program—are striking examples. Articulating dominant traditions of social theory and animating inherited terms of everyday discourse, these resilient mappings and their determinate reworkings lead a charmed life in the academy and beyond in both Western and non-Western contexts.

Critical Questions

The concerns sketched above are better understood as constituting the wider theoretical context of the essays that comprise this special issue, as horizons that these articles engage in inherently different ways. Indeed, it is through critical considerations of colonial modernities that the contributions here seek to articulate questions of difference, power, and knowledge. At the same time, it would be a mistake to claim either a transparent connotation or a precise status for colonial modernities as a category. Now, this Janus-faced neologism highlights the acute enmeshments of determinations of colony and formations of modernity, particularly when colonial modernities are regarded as a broad rubric that...