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http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/32dube01 1/24

Savi Sawarkar, untitled, 2000, mixed media on paper. Born a dalit

(“untouchable”) in India, Sawarkar now lives and works in Mexico. In this

composition, he draws on his experience in the (colonial/modern) town of

Taxco to depict figures of the other “Indian” subaltern. Drawing

reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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SPECIAL ISSUE

Critical Conjunctions

Foundations of Colony and Formations of Modernity

Introduction

Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities

Saurabh Dube

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 challengesto 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 ag-

grandizing 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 moder-

nity have been increasingly interrogated by contending intimations of het-

erogeneous moderns. Such explorations have critically considered the di-

vergent articulations and representations of the modern and modernity

that have shaped and sutured empire, nation, and globalization. As a re-

sult, 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

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 3.2

Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

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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 attributesof concrete histories—defined by projects of power, and molded by provi-

sions 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 con-

tested the enduring binaries—for example, between tradition and moder-nity, 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 sup-

port 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 mod-

ern disciplines, interrogating essentialized representations of otherness andquestioning 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 op-

positions 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

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horizons that these articles engage in inherently different ways. Indeed, it

is through critical considerations of colonial modernities that the contribu-

tions here seek to articulate questions of difference, power, and knowledge.At the same time, it would be a mistake to claim either a transparent con-

notation or a precise status for colonial modernities as a category. Now, this

Janus-faced neologism highlights the acute enmeshments of determina-

tions of colony and formations of modernity, particularly when colonial

modernities are regarded as a broad rubric that indicates historical pro-

cesses and critical perspectives, entailing particular locations of enuncia-

tion, interrogating the disembodied view-from-nowhere that becomes the

palpable view-for-everywhere. Precisely for this reason, however, colonialmodernities indicate both a contentious theoretical terrain and a contending

analytical arena. And it is exactly such contention that can turn this concept-

metaphor into an enabling resource for dialogue and debate. Therefore, it

is useful to raise two sets of questions in order to think through colonial

modernities.

First, what is at stake in conjoining questions of colonialism with

issues of modernity to produce and endorse the hybrid figure, colonial

modernities? What marks of difference and which lineaments of power areunderscored through such moves? Indeed, in what ways are we using the

term modernity and its plural modernities here? In speaking of modernity,

is the reference to an overarching ideology that accompanied the work of

capital, the expansion of empire, and the fabrication of colonialism over

the last five hundred years? Or are modernities also to be understood as

particular historical processes predicated upon distinct but wide-ranging

intersections of the metropole and the margins, upon discrete yet critical

encounters between the colonizer and the colonized?

Clearly, these different orientations actually come together, each

questioning dominant representations of the modern, both challenging

singular self-images of modernity, including in the essays that follow. The

point is simple. Rather than imagining and instituting a facile synthe-

sis between contending understandings of modernity and modernities—

and, indeed, between competing conceptions of colonialism and history—

consciously recognizing such distinctions and differences as productive

tensions can be a source of strength in thinking through colonial moder-

nities. Such acknowledgement entails the admission that we already labor

in the light of anterior understandings, and always work in the shadow

of prior categories—in order to revisit the binds and exclusions between

globalization and colonialism, modernity and “coloniality,” world-system

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and colonial modernities, the one set engaging and extending the other

copula.

Second, what are the critical imperatives of reading and writing aswe consider stipulations of difference and provisions of power? In a wide

variety of contemporary scholarly discourses both power and difference can

appear as prefabricated entities, already given categories, and a priori terms

of discussion. To think through/against such dispositions is to recognize the

impossibility of escaping modernity and history by means of talking and

writing cures, which often succumb to the seduction of lurking nativisms,

third-world nationalisms, and endeavors that turn their backs on the here-

and-now. Such critical endeavor is also a matter of being self-consciousabout the particular ways in which we put forward notions of difference

and premises of power. At the same time, if such moves are necessary

exercises, two other considerations stand out.

On the one hand, it is important to be vigilant of the manner in

which difference is inflected by power. On the other, one must recognize the

way in which power is shot through with difference. This is not to indulge

in sophistry. Take the example of that plural, modernities. In speaking

of modernities are we merely saying that Indian modernity is differentfrom German modernity, which is then different from, say, Mexican or

Venezuelan modernity? If this is the case, what modalities of power are

occluded here, not only in relation to authoritative grids of empire and

globalization, but also within non-Western formations of state and nation?

Equally, by invoking a bloated and singular modernity centered on the

West in order to interrogate the homogenizing impulses of projects of

power, do we perhaps succumb to reified representations of an imaginary

but tangible Europe that overlook the labor of difference within the work

of domination?

In other words, what understandings of prior traditions/pasts and

which conceptions of present history/progress do we bring to bear upon

our renderings of power and difference? What anterior idea animates our

appropriation of history, universal or provincial? Which immediate image

articulates our apprehension of modernity, singular or plural? Is it possible

to work through terms of discourse in which power is not construed as

totalized terrain and where difference does not constitute a ready antidote to

power—whether as insurgent identity, ecstatic hybridity, or preconfigured

plurality?

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Divergent Conjunctions

The nature of the questions I have just raised indicates my intention in this

introduction to generate debate rather than to garner consensus. This isin keeping with the tenor of this special issue, where contending positions

access and exceed each other, the exchange and the surplus intimating

newer directions. At work here are particular terms of interaction between

distinct bodies of scholarship, especially writings on and readings out of

Latin America and South Asia, as they bear upon the critical conjunctions

at the heart of colonial modernities.

In authoritative apprehensions and commonplace conceptions

flowing from Latin America, intimations of modernity have been longpresent, generally reflected in the image of a reified Europe. Albeit with

specific lacks and within particular limits, Latin America has itself been

envisioned as part of the Western world, a result of dominant mappings

and authoritative “metageographies” that have split the world into Occi-

dent and Orient, West and East. With few exceptions, questions of colo-

nialism have been understood in Latin America as occupying a dim and

distant past.3 Not surprisingly, issues of empire—themselves narrowly

conceived—continue to be widely considered as the distinct domain of specialist scholars of a long-forgotten period in Latin American history. In

such dispositions salient traces of colonial cultures in modern Latin Amer-

ica chiefly consist of the monumental architecture and the grand art of a

distinctive, bygone era.

Against the grain of these dominant orientations, an important

body of critical thought on Latin America today focuses on the subter-

ranean schemes and the overwrought apparitions of the modern and the

colonial—in the past and the present. In other words, this corpus critically

considers the spectral place and tangible presence of colonial stipulations of

knowledge/power within modern provisions of power/knowledge. Con-

sequently, such moves, acutely represented in this issue, have also held up

a mirror to modernity as a deeply ideological project, a ruse of history, a

primary apparatus of domination, here now and there tomorrow (Dussel

1995; Lander 2000; Mignolo 1995, 2000; Castro-Gómez 1998).

In South Asia, colonial questions have occupied a critical place in

writings on the region’s history, economy, and society for several decades

now. The immediacy of empire and the force of nationalism—as anti-

colonial movement and nation-building project—have both played an im-

portant role. Over time, this has resulted in the accumulation of distinct

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perspectives on colonial processes in South Asia, which have extended from

revisionist histories of colonial transitions, to historical ethnographies of im-

perial formations, to postcolonial perspectives associated with the SubalternStudies project and critical literary analyses.4

It is also the case, however, that that the import of modernity has

been critically considered in India only in recent times.5 Here the deter-

minations and direction of modernity in South Asia have been variously

cast as an enlightened trajectory of social transformation, an overween-

ing project laboring against creative difference, an authoritative apparatus

ever engendering critical alterity, and a historical process that produces

both exotic exceptions and historical sameness.

6

In most of these readings,current reflection on modernity has followed upon the prior presence of

the colony. Not surprisingly, newer critical writings on South Asia, also

represented in this issue, have sought to extend anterior understandings of

colony and present propositions of modernity through historical filters and

ethnographic grids, each in conjunction with the other (see, e.g., Appadu-

rai 1996; Chakrabarty 2000; Chatterjee 1993; Dirks 2001; Hansen 1999; and

Nandy 2001).

Recent years have seen the proliferation, in and out of print, of “al-ternative” and “early” modernities, “colonial” and “multiple” modernities,

attempts to write into the concept of modernity anterior histories, multiple

trajectories, alternative patterns (e.g., Barlow 1997; Burton 1999; Daedalus

1998, 2000; and Gaonkar 2001). Critical Conjunctions joins such exercises,

but it does so with its particular twist, its specific stipulations—based on

the salience of plural perspectives on colonialism, modernity, and colonial

modernities. For this special issue is shaped by encounters between the

distinct bearings toward colonialism and modernity that I outlined ear-

lier. Arguably, this plurality and contention constitute central strengths of

the corpus ahead, since they indicate diversity in cultures of scholarship

and theoretical orientations. For example, it is not enough to suggest that

the philosophically inclined essays in this issue are primarily interested in

the epistemological labor of colony and modernity, while the empirically

grounded articles are more concerned with the historical work of these cat-

egories. Actually, most of the essays tack between the two predilections,

inexorably mixing them up. In Critical Conjunctions different disciplinary

dispositions are enlivened by their interplay with distinct theoretical orien-

tations. Here intellectual diversity and theoretical distinction are enhanced

and extended, since, as they circulate together, one orientation interrupts

and exceeds the other disposition.

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These concerns are better understood in the light of the essays

themselves. A little later I will outline the specific arguments of each con-

tribution. Here it is useful to consider the dialogue and contention amongthese articles with regard to two critical questions that I broached earlier,

the intertwined issues of the linkages between colonialism and modernity

and the binds between power and difference. Let us turn, then, to the contri-

butions by Enrique Dussel, Edgardo Lander, and Santiago Castro-Gómez,

the three essays that open Critical Conjunctions.

Discussing the articulation between colonialism and modernity,

Dussel attempts to undo influential propositions—of a “subtle,” “second

Eurocentrism”—that project Europe as having been the center of theworld-system for the last five centuries. Lander interrogates the Eurocentric

premises at the heart of authoritative agreements to facilitate global capi-

tal. Castro-Gómez explores the enmeshments of the disciplinary power of

the modern nation-state with the hegemonic relationships of the mod-

ern/colonial world-system, also suggesting that although the structural

terms of global power remain in place, the means and strategies of their

legitimation have undergone crucial transformations. At the same time, in

spite of their different emphases, all three essays argue that the formationsof modernity are grounded in the foundations of colony, both colonial-

ism and modernity being apprehended as dominant European projects

of power/knowledge that form the exclusive core of a singular capitalist

world-system. Thus, when Castro-Gómez describes modernity as a series

of practices oriented toward the rational control of human life—entailing

the social sciences, global capitalism, colonial expansion, and the nation-

state—he is summing up a powerful perspective that is arguably also shared

by Dussel and Lander (and, of course, many others).

And what of the orientations of these three scholars toward the re-

lationship between power and difference? Dussel and Lander underscore

the authoritative thrust and the homogenizing impulse of recent Euro-

American modernity and of Eurocentric knowledge, respectively. Con-

fronting the exclusive trajectory of such power, which has underwritten

global capital, both emphasize the ethics of critical difference, the for-

mer locating alterity in “‘trans’-modernity,” and the latter emphasizing

the need to consolidate/recuperate alternative knowledges. For his part,

Castro-Gómez identifies modernity as a machine that engenders alterities,

even as it suppresses hybridity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contingency in

the name of reason and through the designation of humanity. Under con-

ditions of postmodernity the continued hegemony of global capital within

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the world-system is secured not through the repression of difference, but

rather through the production and proliferation of alterities. However, de-

spite such distinctions—including the productive “ambiguity” that attendsCastro-Gómez’s formulations of the fabrication of alterities under moder-

nity and postmodernity—these writings present power as emanating from

a singular locus and holding exclusive sway, quite as pure difference appears

as an answer to power here.

The ethical terms of such dispositions are at once elaborated and

extended by the essays that follow these three. Thus, in both explicit and

implicit ways, several of the later contributions configure colonial moderni-

ties as premised upon the mutual determinations of power and difference,upon the ceaseless dynamic of exclusion and inclusion—pointing toward

contingency and contradiction at the heart of such processes. Here there is

also no direct recourse to categories such as the “world-system” and “global

capital.” For example, Josefina Saldaña-Portillo unravels the productive

conjunctions at the core of a colonial modernity through two intertwined

procedures. On the hand, her essay traces the marks of difference engen-

dered by Spanish colonialism in its fabrication of the figure of the “In-

dian,” revealing continuities between a colonial governmentality and theMexican state. On the other hand, it outlines the work of such difference on

lineaments of power and their subversions in the modern Mexican nation,

especially the forging of an alternative modernity by the Zapatistas, who

straddle and scrabble revolutionary nationalism and the colonial-modern.

Guillermo Zermeño and Sudipta Sen highlight that the powerful

impulse within the modern nation and the colonial state toward excluding

subaltern subjects and colonized peoples has been equally accompanied

by the forceful drive to include them at the margins of the authoritative

grid of “civilization.” Zermeño underscores the “convergent-divergences”

between colonial apprehensions and a nationalist anthropology in Mexico

by discussing how these distinct modalities of knowledge nonetheless fab-

ricated the figure of the Indian as the “primitive” outsider who had to be

forged as the “improved” insider within both empire and nation. Sen shows

that the twin imperatives of British colonialism—lamenting the lack of a

true civil society in India while instituting a residual order of civil society

there—together constituted modalities of colonial rule that straddled the

line between dominance and hegemony.

The politics of exclusion and inclusion are ever entwined with the

interplay between power and difference, the terms of this dynamic find-

ing distinct expressions in Critical Conjunctions. For instance, in my own

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essay, I explore dominant projections and commonplace apprehensions of

“enchanted spaces” and “modern places,” which split the world while hold-

ing it together. Such mappings acutely indicate the salience of tracing theenmeshed determinations and entangled denials between power and differ-

ence. For it is precisely by splitting power and difference into separate poles

that critiques of modernity sharply reflect self-projections of the modern,

questions that are addressed by Madhu Dubey in her critical analysis of

academic and literary representations that increasingly cast the U.S. South

as an enchanted terrain of difference.

In Critical Conjunctions different theoretical stances engage dis-

tinct critical alignments, yet none of them give up their own cardinalpersuasions.7 For the aim of this special issue is not to legislate on colo-

nial modernities, resolving an inquiry in the manner of a problem by

adjudicating on it. On the one hand, it is important to restate that as critical

perspective and historical process colonial modernities emerge as a question

and a horizon better approached through distinct orientations, intimating

inquiries and indicating vistas that are best kept open. On the other, it

is useful to repeat that precisely on account of such differences between

theoretical dispositions, colonial modernities appear here rather less as agiven object predicated upon transcendental knowledge and omniscient

history, and rather more as a historical subject betokened by prior places

and particular pasts. It is time to describe such advances.

Crisscrossing Concerns

Our considerations open with an intervention by Enrique Dussel. Here

the Argentine philosopher recalls the moment of the “first Eurocentrism,”

which presented an immaculately conceived Europe realizing itself—from

its Greek origins through to its modern manifestations—as the centerpiece

and the end of universal history. He proposes that this authoritative ideal-

imaginary Europe came to be challenged by understandings of the “world-

system.” At the same time, according to Dussel, to assume along with

Immanuel Wallerstein that after the “discovery” of the Americas, from the

sixteenth century, Europe became the center of the world-system is to sub-

mit to a “second Eurocentrism.” It ignores the fact that until the latter part of

the eighteenth century, China—along with India (or “Hindustan,” the his-

torical term Dussel prefers)—remained an enormously important player in

the world-system of production and exchange, and that during this “first”

modernity the dominance of Europe was primarily an Atlantic phenome-

non. Indeed, Europe came to supplant China as the primary protagonist in

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the world-system only after the “second” modernity of the Enlightenment

and the Industrial Revolution, revealing thereby that the centrality of Eu-

rope in the modern world is no more than 225 years old. All this has vital im-plications for Dussel. For the very recentness of European hegemony over

the colonial/modern world-system opens up a variety of “civilizational”

possibilities for transcending modernity and globalization. Proposing that

postmodern critiques of modernity remain confined within abiding Euro-

centric premises, Dussel finds alternative futures, rather, within the terms

and ethics of “‘trans’-modernity,” incorporating the cultures of the majority

of humanity that is excluded from modernity. These cultures, from their

very position of “exteriority,” point to other ethical worlds in the wake of capitalism.

Dussel’s emphases find distinct articulations in the contributions

by Edgardo Lander and Santiago Castro-Gómez. Lander explores the

geopolitical implications of Eurocentric apprehensions in the contempo-

rary world, insinuating that such knowledge is colonial in nature because

of its authoritarian assumptions and its totalizing thrust. The essay begins

with a brief consideration of the dualities at the heart of Eurocentric knowl-

edge. This makes possible an analysis of the often explicit assumptions thatshore up and sustain significant recent deliberations on global arrangements

of investment and commerce, namely, the Multilateral Agreement on In-

vestment and the proceedings leading to the creation of the World Trade

Organization. In place here is a particular construction of the liberal order

as the most “advanced” form of social organization, as the unquestioned

goal for all humanity. In this vision, the free market is the “natural state” of

society, and all counterclaims to its universalizing pretensions are “unnatu-

ral distortions.” This underlies the consolidation of a “free” legal/political

global order designed to secure and guarantee relentless freedom for invest-

ment, prohibiting collective action that questions the sway of capital, and

denying possibilities of both sovereignty and democracy. Indeed, Eurocen-

tric knowledge polarizes a privileged minority and an excluded majority

throughout the planet, also legitimating a predatory model of civilization.

It is barely surprising, therefore, that in Lander’s essay the critique of Euro-

centrism and the construction-recuperation of alternative knowledges are

vitally linked to “local” and “global” demands of communities and organi-

zations that challenge the increasing dominance of transnational capital.

In a wide-ranging article, Castro-Gómez discusses the mutual en-

tanglements between the nation-state, the social sciences, the “coloniality”

of power, and the capitalist world-system in the articulation of modernity,

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further exploring the terms of critical knowledge that are adequate for the

present. The Colombian scholar interrogates the “project of modernity,”

pointing to the centrality of the state and the social sciences within prac-tices of modernity that seek to disenchant and demagicalize—that is, to

control and master—the natural and social world in the mirror of “man”

and through the reification of “reason.” At work here are singular dis-

positions toward knowledge/power that produce coordinated profiles of

subjectivity entailing the “invention of the other.” At the same time, ac-

cording to Castro-Gómez, the question of the “invention of the other”

within the nation-state needs to be conjoined with considerations of the

modern/colonial world-system’s “longue durée macrostructures.” For thedisciplinary dispositions of modernity are anchored in a double “juridical

governmentality”—one exercised by the nation-state from within, and the

other articulated by the hegemonic terms of the colonial/modern world-

system from without. And it is entirely in tune with this logic that from the

seventeenth century onward—through their binary categories and imag-

inaries of progress, their endorsement of universal history and enmesh-

ments in statist modernization—the social sciences and social theory have

produced alterities from within and from without. The “coloniality of power” and the “coloniality of knowledge” derive from the same genetic

matrix.

How, then, are we to understand the notion of the “end of moder-

nity” with which the essay begins and closes? According to Castro-Gómez,

the project of modernity arrives at its “end” when the nation-state loses

its capacity to organize the social and material life of human subjects. As

modernity is now replaced by globalization, governmentality does not re-

quire an Archimedean point, a central mechanism of social control. Rather,

globalization entails a governmentality without government, a spectral and

nebulous dominance—the libidinal power of postmodernity that instead

of repressing differences stimulates and produces them. If this transforma-

tion is in tune with the systemic exigencies of global capitalism, the newer

requirements of power and capital have also brought about a “change of

paradigm” in the social sciences and the humanities. Here Castro-Gómez

critically considers the “postmodern condition”—as formulated by Jean-

François Lyotard, and expressed within cultural studies—to argue that the

end(s) of metanarratives of modernity in fact do not imply the death of

the capitalist world-system itself. Thus, the essay concludes that the task

of a critical theory of society in the present is to make visible the new

mechanisms of the production of differences in times of globalization.

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Josefina Saldaña-Portillo addresses the question of colonial moder-

nities head on by considering the prior place of the colony and exploring

the present-productions of the modern in the making and unmaking of Mexico. Starting with the premise that the varieties of modernity in Latin

America all bear “the imprint of Spanish colonialism,” her essay resolutely

refuses to locate the figure of the Indian in a never-never land of enchanted

tradition, apart from determinations of domination, ahead of provisions of

power. Rather, it proposes that what appear today as the traditional charac-

teristics of Mesoamerican indigenous cultures are all products of “Spanish

colonial governmentality and economic exploitation.” The figure of the

“Indian” was produced within these processes, which at once “universal-ized” and “parochialized” indigenous identity. At the same time, far from

being passive victims, indigenous communities worked within the inter-

stices of these processes of power, producing value and meaning in surplus

of governmental techniques, thus creating cultural formations and resis-

tant identities that exceeded the colonial category of the lowly Indian. Not

surprisingly, the stipulations of “this colonial regime of difference” have

shaped the modern project of nation building in Mexico over the past two

centuries, revealing the contradictory articulation of Indian difference andnational identity within economies of power and regimes of representation

of state and modernity.

This sets the stage for Saldaña-Portillo’s exploration of how the

Zapatistas and their insurrection in southern Mexico have emerged from

within the terms of a revolutionary nationalism and the idioms of a colonial

modernity, where Zapatismo has appropriated and extended, accessed and

exceeded such stipulations. This case is made through a sensitive ethnog-

raphy of a political event—a dramatic representation by the Zapatistas in

the summer of 1996, inviting the participation of visiting outsiders. A the-

ater of politics, a play on power, the enactment of this episode hinged on

the staging of a silence by the Zapatistas, a silence with multiple civic and

ethical echoes that interrupted the noisy command of dominant Mexican

nationalism. The essay suggests that the staging of such a silence is actually

indicative of the Zapatistas’ presence as an “empty signifier” of civil soci-

ety, of Mexican community. Indeed, by oscillating between avowing and

claiming Indian difference and disavowing and vacating Indian particular-

ity, “the Zapatistas also present us with an alternative modernity.”

The figure of the “Indian” and the form of the “primitive” forged

by colonial knowledge and nationalist thought also constitute the subject of

Guillermo Zermeño’s essay, which focuses on the work of Manuel Gamio,

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widely considered to be the “father of modern anthropology” in Mexico.

Taking a cue from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s critical yet enabling read-

ing of Hegel, Zermeño’s goal is to acknowledge Gamio’s weighty legacyin order to transcend it. On the one hand, the work of Manuel Gamio

was shaped by late nineteenth-century positivist assumptions concerning

scientific knowledge in the service of national progress. To build a mod-

ern Mexico, the new science had to discover essential racial, cultural, and

economic patterns that would turn sociological observation into a means of

accurate prediction and effective governance. Based on acute distinctions

between “tradition” and “modernity” and “backwardness” and “progress,”

this matrix of knowledge fostered the economy of power of the modernnation-state. It also underlay Gamio’s own division of the Mexican nation

into two poles: its white population representing “modern civilization,” the

“dynamic” harbingers of “progress”; and its indigenous and mestizo groups,

“the great underdeveloped and passive majority.” On the other hand, Gamio

sought to develop a disciplinary practice adequate for the twentieth cen-

tury, an applied endeavor geared toward “social improvement,” separating

magic from truth, under the dispensation of a new anthropology. Taken

together, for Gamio, the task of applied anthropology was to work with thestate to transform the “cultural backwardness” of the indigenous subject in

the image of the modernity and the civilization of the white citizen. The

very procedures of this new knowledge produced an “essential image of

the Indian,” which could then be manipulated in time and space.

It is against this background that Zermeño traces the “divergent

convergences” in Gamio’s anthropology and that of Fray Bernardino de

Sahagún, the colonial chronicler of the sixteenth century. Both construe the

Indian as an object of knowledge that had to be healed—of “idolatry” for

Sahagún, of “backwardness” for Gamio. Both construct knowledges that

were bound to wider political projects—the first, colonizing-evangelizing,

and the second, building a modern nation. In each case, the construction

and consolidation of indigenous “otherness” also constitutes the means and

mechanism to assail and diminish this difference. The precise divergences

between the projects of Gamio and Sahagún go hand-in-hand with the

profound convergences among them, so that “the century of Mexican lib-

eral nationalism”—in its bourgeois and revolutionary incarnations—itself

emerges as the “second conquest” of the Indian world. Yet it would be

hasty to confine such questions to the past. As Zermeño poignantly asks,

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what is the guarantee that present anthropological apprehensions of indige-

nous peoples do not continue to be inscribed within related teleologies of

progress?Abiding terms of history and ethnography, cultural politics and

political cultures form the locus of my own contribution, in which I ex-

plore the persistent seductions of enchanted spaces and modern places in

widespread “metageographies” shaped by the vision of a universal his-

tory, and articulated by the provisions of historical progress. These sets

of spatial imaginings and structured dispositions are closely connected to

colonial entanglements and articulations of the nation-state, to determi-

nations of difference and stipulations of sameness, playing a critical rolein the imagination and institution of the modern disciplines and the con-

temporary world. On the one hand, I present such lineaments through

ethnographic descriptions, first of a scholarly conference, and later of the

opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney, pointing toward the

spectral presence of the enchanted and the modern that haunts authorita-

tive apprehensions and commonplace conceptions. On the other, I consider

the unsaid and the under-thought of academic deliberation, which also

have rather wider implications. Here the figures of an already enchantedtradition and the forms of an always disenchanted modern lie before the

privilege of vision and the distinction of voice in imagining and instituting

the past and the present. At the end I argue that at stake in thinking through

such mappings are questions of the mutual determinations of power and

difference.

Such cartographies come alive further as Madhu Dubey puts the

spotlight on another South, discussing the discourses of difference con-

cerning southern regional specificity that have burgeoned in the United

States since the 1970s. She proposes that a “spatialized cultural politics of

difference,” emphasizing particularity, diversity, and the situated nature of

all knowledge is a hallmark of the “postmodern” era. The recent reflec-

tions of the regional difference of the U.S. South are exemplary of these

wider bearings. Here Dubey explores writings across a range of disciplines

and genres, including the work of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Houston

Baker Jr., Addison Gayle, the anthropologist Carol Stack, and the historian

Eugene Genovese. Thereby, Dubey unravels the widespread construction

of the South as a rural, premodern, enchanted arena precisely at the mo-

ment when it is becoming increasingly industrialized and ever more urban.

Indeed, she interprets the southern turn in U.S. culture as a distinct re-

sponse to processes of economic and cultural change that have dramatically

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transformed the South. Here the discursive construction of the South as

a magical zone of arrested “development” is crucial to its operation as an

Archimedean lever for the critique of global capitalism and impersonalmodernity. Dubey underscores both the problems and the possibilities of

current quests to preserve southern cultural difference.

What are the epistemological entanglements of contemporary cri-

tiques of Eurocentric knowledge and modern power? In a provocative es-

say, Rubén Chuaqui cautions against the dangers of the relativism that can

attend these arenas, which militate against the very possibility of objective

understanding, especially of the radically “other.” Chuaqui acknowledges

that the precise “distortions” unraveled by Edward Said’s powerful in-dictment of “Orientalism,” for example, have long characterized Western

representations of all non-European others, ever enmeshed with modalities

of power. At the same time, Chuaqui argues that to ground such representa-

tions in a “gnoseological relativism” actually undermines the positions and

subjectivities being defended. He proposes that most of what we apprehend

about human beings and social orders yet not all that we understand of them

rests on our comprehension of their cultures. This means that despite the

manifold problems of knowing and the inevitable residues of unknowa-bility, the cultures and the beliefs of the “other” are in fact knowable.

Here Chuaqui explores terms of incommensurability and commensurabil-

ity through different instances—dual or triadic conditions or subject states

projected as not depending on culture, even if they might have cultural

dimensions. These require that the observer leave, even if momentarily,

the position to which she or he belongs in order to ascertain from the one

side what lies on the other. Considering differences of experience, for ex-

ample, between male and female, madness and sanity, and among error,

certainty, and doubt, Chuaqui argues that none of these conditions are in-

commensurable conditions, which would make the experiences of one side

utterly incommunicable to the other. In other words, Chuaqui endorses a

relative relativism, which (devoid of paradox) will be a relativism anchored

in phenomena that are not relative.

In the issue’s final essays a historian of India and a historian of

Mexico, Sudipta Sen and Andrés Lira, undertake comparative reflections

on the experience of empire. Sen discusses colonial modernities by explor-

ing the relationship between civil society and the modern state, focusing on

colonial India while adducing comparative notes on the Spanish Empire.

He proposes that a useful manner to consider the difference between dom-

ination and hegemony is to take into account the exogenous origins of the

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colonial state and its relative alienation from indigenous society. Here the

form and ambition of a colonial state are analyzed by uncovering the ho-

mologies and parallels in state formations in the metropole and the colony.Specifically, Sen finds that in many respects the ideology and practice of

colonial state formation straddled the line between acts of domination and

ambitions of hegemony. From its very inception the colonial state in British

India created a paradoxical image of Indian society and peoples. On the one

hand, this state form decried the lack of a true civil society in India and the

persistence of tyranny there. On the other, the colonial state’s requirement

to pass legislation and to govern the Indians meant that it had to bestow

on these subjects “a degree of volition and agency”—a residual order of “society,” or “civilization,” or “culture.” For the very “improvement” of the

Indians, their consent and compliance was imagined and elicited within

an apparition of civil society. The invention and institution of such a novel

colonial society in South Asia through legal and economic measures ac-

tually parallels the creation of a new order of colonial subjects in Spanish

America, although of course religious conversion did not play a significant

role in the British-Indian empire. Indeed, it is this fabrication of a new

social order that is crucial to apprehending colonial domination and itsattempts at hegemony in different parts of the modern world.

Drawing on his disciplinary capital as a lawyer and a historian,

Andrés Lira considers the work of the English legal scholar Henry S.

Maine. His essay underscores that Maine’s construal of history as the

“uninterrupted present of humankind” at once straddled and scrambled

blueprints of evolutionary progress, putting a question mark on the notion

of the “primitive,” his historicism interrupting the evolutionism charac-

teristic of the period. Indeed, Maine’s work exceeded both the narrow-

ness of nineteenth-century analytical jurisprudence and the individual-

ist/utilitarian premises of “European rationalism.” Here a critical role was

played by Maine’s understanding of the nature of the “village-community”

(especially entailing the patriarchal family and landed property), which

itself drew on his apprehension of communitarian dynamics and colo-

nial presence in British India. Specifically, Maine proposed that when an

effective external power—especially a “good” government seeking to pre-

serve prior “custom”—intervened in the life of the community, this led to

the latter’s “feudalization” and fragmentation. According to Lira, Maine’s

propositions regarding the village-community “as a past that was present”

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suggest important pathways in the comparative history of colonialism, par-

ticularly through a dialogue between the legal scholar’s writings and pro-

cesses bearing on indigenous communities under empire and nation inLatin America. For such an exchange highlights the salient possibilities of

critical conversations on subjects of colonialism, modernity, and colonial

modernities—from South Asia, through Europe, to the Americas.

A Final Word

Having brought to a close this description of the routes traveled and the

paths traversed by Critical Conjunctions, I should add that this special issue

of Nepantla has yet another distinction, one that I have been unable tounravel here. In addition to the differences in their theoretical orientations

and disciplinary dispositions, the contributions are also marked by distinct

styles of writing. While this may be the case with most cross-disciplinary

endeavors, it is possibly more true of the effort at hand. Six of the essays

here have been translated from the Spanish, which arguably only adds to

the divergent institutional locations shaping the writings. This plurality,

too, is characteristic of the possibilities and predicaments of the journey(s)

ahead.

Notes

This special issue of Nepantla is based on the proceedings of “Intersecting Histories

and Other Modernities,” a workshop held at the Colegio de México in June

2000. Lorenzo Meyer, Walter Mignolo, Pramod Misra, and Hugo Zemelman

also presented papers at the workshop that could not be included here. Jose-

fina Saldaña-Portillo could not attend the workshop but very kindly sent her

essay. Both the workshop and the special issue can only be understood as in-

tensely collaborative ventures. The editors particularly wish to thank Andrés

Lira, Benjamin Preciado, Walter Mignolo, David Lorenzen, Pilar Camacho,

Angelica Vargas, and all the participants at the workshop. Additional thanks

are due to Sudipta and Madhu for bearing the burden of food and fluids at

the close of the conference. We also gratefully acknowledge the critical insti-

tutional support of the Center for Asian and African Studies at the Colegio

de México, and of the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation at Duke

University. Nepantla’s two anonymous reviewers greatly aided the project

with their perceptive and sensitive comments, and Laura Carballido’s role as

a research assistant has been exemplary. If perfect editors were to be conjured

as part of academic utopias, Alex Martin at Nepantla would certainly be in the

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running. Finally, this introduction had its (hesitant) beginnings in collabora-

tive labor, but later I completely recast the piece, writing it anew in order to

express very particular concerns. Therefore, the introduction appears underthe name of just one of the editors, who gratefully acknowledges the earlier

inputs of Edgardo Lander and Ishita Banerjee Dube.

1. The particular analytical dispositions to follow constitute overlapping theoretical

orientations, which have been expressed in a variety of ways, constituting

an enormous corpus. My bibliographic citations provide a few representative

examples.

2. This discussion will be more fully elaborated in Dube 2002.

3. Such exceptions include, for example, dependencia theorists and related scholars whohave apprehended the world in terms of an aggrandizing center and an

expropriated periphery, thereby instituting imperialism and neoimperialism

at the core of modern history.

4. Once more limitations of space permit only indicative references. Here the first ten-

dency is represented by Bayly 1983, 1988; and Washbrook 1988; the second, by

Cohn 1987, 1996; and Dirks 1987;and thethird, by Guha 1982–89, 1997; Chat-

terjee and Pandey 1992; Arnold and Hardiman 1994; Amin and Chakrabarty

1996; Bhadra, Prakash, and Tharu 1999; Bhabha 1994; and Spivak 1988. Re-

cent writings that critically engage all three orientations include Dube 1998;

and Skaria 1999.

5. This is not to deny the palpable place of provisos of progress in apprehensions of the

subcontinent. We find them in everything from historical debates on social

advance under colonial rule, to sociological celebrations of modernization

theory, to governmental seductions and everyday enchantments of the impor-

tance of being modern as a state, a nation, a people. Nor is it to overlook the

significance of the critique of modernity as embodied, for example, in the

thought and practice of Gandhi. Rather, my point concerns the recentness of

critical considerations of modernity in India within the academy. This also

brings up the salient distinctions between intimations of modernity in South

Asia and Latin America: imagined as a passage of history and instituted as

an attribute of nation building, representations and processes of modernity

in South Asia and in Latin America have both been imbued with difference

with respect to Europe. However, such distinctions have followed divergent

directions. Over the past two centuries, the tangible terms of imperial au-

thority, the immediate pasts of colonial rule, and the urgent designs of new

nations have meant that dominant articulations of modernity in South Asia

stand haunted by the presence of colonial difference and postcolonial dis-

tinction. Here the West has never been absent. And so for a long time, in a

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variety of ways, Indian modernity has been apprehended as almost the same,

but different. During this period, the lack of formal empire, the dominance

of a Creole elite, and the prior presence of colonial categories have engen-dered in Latin America an authoritative modern premised upon specters of

shared history and cultural affinity with Europe. Here Europe has been ever

ahead. Thus, Latin American modernity has been represented as different,

but almost the same.

6. These four distinct apprehensions of modernity are articulated by Gupta 2000; Nandy

1983; Prakash 1999; and Dube forthcoming, respectively. See also Kapur 2000;

and Sheikh 1997.

7. Clearly, the very conditions of possibility of dialogue, debate, and distinction amongthe essays collected here lie in the fact that these contributions address a

shared set of concerns, under the rubric of colonial modernities. First, issues

of authoritative dualities—and of the connections between modern disci-

plines and disciplinary power—run throughout the essays of, for example,

Castro-Gómez, Dussel, Lander, Chuaqui, Zermeño, and Dubey, as well as

my own, finding distinct expressions in each. Second, the more specific con-

cerns taken up in the issue reveal, equally, critical conjunctions and productive

divergences. A case in point is the fabrication of the figure of the lowly “In-

dian” in Mexico (Saldaña-Portillo and Zermeño); and the proliferation and

reification of difference under the postmodern condition (Castro-Gómez and

Dubey). Indeed, in the section that follows my goal is precisely to present

such binds and distinctions through the ordering of the essays and the means

of describing them.

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