Early Modern or Early Colonial?

The terminological shift from "the Renaissance" to the "early modern" has not resulted in a conceptual overhaul either in terms of conceptions of time or of space, at least within our discipline of English studies. The former term was explicitly limited to European history and culture, which it privileged in relation to its own past and the rest of the world. Maureen Quilligan writes that "the Renaissance itself has been colonized as the birth of modernity" (10), and she suggests that, in fact, the period bore little resemblance to the one that is thus constructed. As we attempt to "decolonize" the Renaissance, we need to ask: who colonized it and why? Does there in fact exist an a priori "it" that can be conceptualized differently? It was colonial history that gave rise to, and then consolidated, modes of conceptualizing time and space that have shaped the idea of "the Renaissance" as well as the dominant narrative about the attributes of modernity. It is then hardly surprising that the deep and organic connection between colonialism and "the Renaissance" (both the period and the concept) has been distorted or obscured in these narratives. To decolonize the Renaissance, then, is to not only discover the very different global relations that existed during the time, but also to expose this connection between "it" and colonial-capitalist modernity.

Even as it is potentially less Eurocentric than "the Renaissance," the term "early modern" obscures the difference of the period from "our" modernity. But it also cannot automatically accomplish the task of global coeval-ness; until recently, the same years that were classified as "early modern" in Europe were characterized as "medieval" in South Asia because modernity was deemed to have arrived in South Asia with the English. "Modernity," just like the "Renaissance," had been defined by what Sanjay Subrahmanyam calls "'internalist' historians of European ideas" (51), who claimed that Europe alone was the site of new ways of thinking and new ways of inhabiting the world. Such work on the "Renaissance" also entrenched simplistic understandings of the European past itself, which medievalists have increasingly challenged. For this reason, the notion of "multiple" or "alternative modernities" has been developed by a variety of postcolonial scholars who have interrogated Eurocentric notions of progress, modernity, and history to show how these concepts were forged in and through colonialism. For obvious reasons, their work has been particularly attractive to European medievalists who are equally interested in challenging the spatial and temporal paradigms of "modernity."

But scholarship on multiple modernities often leaves the binaries and hierarchies posited by Eurocentric developmental models untouched. Thus it is suggested that whereas Euro-American modernity is characterized by clock time, historical consciousness, science, and rationality, the "modernities" of the rest of the world (and, indeed, the medieval past) are characterized by multiple temporalities, religiosity, and emotion. Such binary thinking is challenged by scholarship on "connected" histories that offers an alternative conceptualization of modernity itself. For example, Subrahmanyam argues that in their eagerness to criticize European historiography, postcolonial historians such as Dipesh Chakravarty end up attributing historical consciousness itself to the West; they suggest that "it was European expansion and, above all, the process of the colonization of the non-West by the West that created the possibility of history as a form of knowledge in the non-West" (26). Subrahamnayam traces the writing of world histories in widely disparate parts of the world (including Turkey, India, Russia, Mexico, China, and also England, Portugal, and Spain) during the sixteenth century. Subrahmanyam argues that these writings show us that "history is not a single genre but can be written in many genres" (27-28). These histories tell us that, rather than multiple modernities developing in different parts of the world, the "history of modernity is itself global and conjunctural, not a history in which Europe alone first produces and then exports modernity to the world at large"(28). Of course, it is true that European ways of thinking, painting, and so on did travel to other parts of the world, and vice versa. But when the former type of exchange is privileged and the latter obscured...