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Introduction
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Introduction joshua goldstein To critique historicism . . . is to learn to think the present—the “now” that we inhabit as we speak—as irreducibly not-one. —dipesh chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe As much as we might try to dispel the conflation of the temporal concept “modern” with the spatial notion called “the West,” this conflation is still everywhere and every day reproduced by capitalist and state forces that propel us at terrific speed toward what is rather misleadingly termed “globalization .”1 Part of the problem, as many postcolonial theorists have demonstrated, is that the West-versus-the-rest and modern-versus-nonmodern dichotomies have always been produced fractally and through a seemingly endless number of stand-ins and displacements.2 In the late nineteenth century, for example, Japan could attempt to “de-Asianize” itself and thereby stand in for the West in relation to the rest of Asia. In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai, the Paris of the East, could take on a cosmopolitan air and model modernity for the Chinese hinterland. Such displacements have drawn some scholars to the idea of “alternative modernities”—trends that resemble Western modernity but have a Chinese, Japanese, or (fill in the blank with your favorite non-Western culture) flavor. Yet the arguments for deconstructing or pluralizing modernity into a range of alternative modernities leave the impression that there is still some “original modernity” that began in the West and that all other instances are somehow derivative copies. Indeed, the phrase “alternative modernity” itself under- writes the assumption that where the term modernity appears unmarked, it must, by default, mean Western. As Partha Chatterjee plainly put it, if we persist in viewing modernity as a modular form originating in the West and borrowed by the Other, then “history, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity.”3 A somewhat more eªective approach has been to attack the Western-equalsmodern equation by showing that key conceptual and systemic bulwarks of modernity were born not in Europe but in the colonial periphery. Benedict Anderson showed that modern nationalism originated in the culturally complex Creole Americas.4 Paul Rabinow, Gwendolyn Wright, and Timothy Mitchell all demonstrated that key technologies of modern social control first appeared in Indochinese and African colonies and not in the Western metropole.5 Yet despite these scholarly eª orts, the conflation Western equals modern remains almost automatic. “The West,” more than being an arbitrary term for a geographical zone, is a pliant, resilient, and ideologically loaded concept that does much of our “mapping” for us, incessantly returning to rationalize and locate historical and political diªerences in a system of unequal power relations. Despite the intransigence of this conceptual coupling, the critique goes on, and not, one hopes, unproductively. Many of the most lucid and poetic descriptions, as well as the most trenchant critiques, of modernity have taken as their focus everyday practice and experience. Inspired by this approach, the contributors to this volume take the everyday as a site from which to launch a critique aimed at problematizing and enriching our understanding of modernity . As Harry Harootunian notes of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life— but in a spirit that could apply equally well to Marx’s detailed exploration of factory work routines and commodity consumption, not to mention the explicit theorizations of the everyday in Simmel, Lefebvre, and de Certeau— for Freud, nothing was insignificant, and the most mundane speech situation could have unsuspected meanings. . . . [The everyday] was no longer simply the place of positivistic facticity but the space where common experience concealed deeper conflicts and contradictions whose elucidation was available to a rational consciousness. Rather than being an inert experience of facts, everyday life was increasingly seen as the site that revealed symptoms of society’s deepest conflicts and aspirations.6 Introduction 4 roject MUSE (2024-03-29 14:39 GMT) The idea that many of the most mundane everyday life experiences provide excellent material from which to launch investigations into processes of modernity is central to our collection of essays on twentieth-century China. The contributors arrive at no comprehensive agreement about the nature of Chinese modernity, nor do they produce a laundry list of its distinctive characteristics . Some are directly engaged in theorizing the conflicting, violent, and potentially liberating discursive spaces of modernity; others are more concerned with providing evocative empirical descriptions of the lived textures of modern life. What unites the essays—across...