Modernity from Below

Histories of modernity have mostly been written from the perspective of its victors. In this view, modernization brings with it the emergence of modern site institutions, civil societies, cosmopolitanism, democracy, political rights, technologies, medical advances. At the same time it dispels superstition, atavistic and patriarchal, cultural parochialism, autocracies and authoritarian social customs. Modernity is progressive and by and large desirable, despite the dislocation it may entail. Critics of modernity have often been seen as at best nostalgic for a utopian ideal past and at worst fanatics seeking to arrest the inevitable process of modernization.

In recent years, however, social historians have begun to rewrite the history of modernity from the perspective of its subordinate classes: slaves, sailors, workers, colonized peoples. Such work does not see the masses that are unleashed by modernity as its victims, passively succumbing to the destruction of their cultures and life-ways, nor does it understand their reactions to the forces of modernization as a defense of traditional practices. On the contrary, the perspective of “modernity from below” seeks to recover the ways in which dominated classes have shaped modernity itself, through their struggles to define and broaden its emancipatory possibilities, to forge alternatives to the disciplines that constrain them, to produce the cultural forms that are repertoires of hope in the face of the violence that modernity inflicts.

The conference, “Modernity from Below” will bring together scholars from a variety of fields and historical periods, ranging from the eighteenth century Atlantic and Caribbean—to Ireland, the Philippines and India through the twentieth century. Scholars will explore how the effects of modernity and colonization and subordinated peoples have forged cultural and political alternatives that constitute a variegated terrain of “counter modernities”. The conference will highlight the diversity of work being produced in the field and the range of approaches that are in current scholarship.

Participants:

John David Blanco
University of California, San Diego

Chungmoo Choi
University of California, Irvine

Joan Dayan
University of Pennsylvania

Luke Gibbons
University of Notre Dame

Saidiya Hartman,
University of California, Berkeley

Biodun Jefiyu
Cornell University

Agustin Lao-Montes
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Peter Linebaugh
University of Ohio, Toledo

Zita Nunes
University of Maryland

Jose Rabasa
University of California, Berkeley

Julio Ramos
University of California, Berkeley

Timothy J. Reiss
New York University

Ajay Skaria
University of Minnesota

Candace Vogler
University of Chicago

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