1st Edition
Disciplines of Modernity Archives, Histories, Anthropologies
Scrupulously based in anthropology and history – and drawing on social theory and critical thought – this book revisits the disciplines, archives, and subjects of modernity.
There are at least three interleaving emphases here. To begin with, the work rethinks institutionalized formations of anthropology and history – together with "archives" at large – as themselves intimating disciplines of modernity. Understood in the widest senses of the terms, these disciplines are constitutively contradictory.
Moreover, the study interrupts familiar projections of modern subjects as molded a priori by a disenchanted calculus of interest and reason. It tracks instead the affective, embodied, and immanent attributes of our varied worlds as formative of subjects of modernity, sown into their substance and spirit.
Finally, running through the book is a querying of entitlement and privilege that underlie social terrains and their scholarly apprehensions – articulating at once distinct elites, pervasive plutocracies, and modern "scholasticisms."
Series Editor’s Statement
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Rethinking Disciplines
Anthropology and History
3. Figures of Dissonance
Dalit Religions and Anthropological Archives
4. Subjects of Privilege
Entitlements and Affects in Plutocratic Worlds
5. Issues of Immanence
Modern Scholasticism and Academic Entitlement
References
Biography
Saurabh Dube is Professor-Researcher, Distinguished Category, El Colegio de México, Mexico City
"Disciplines of Modernity is a unique, thought-provoking, and challenging book. It makes an important intervention in the fields of social sciences and humanities by speaking across disciplines and archives. The work takes us forward from the moment of postcolonial and decolonial critique and recasts the framework within which scholars of/from the global south and the global north may henceforth converse."
- Prathama Banerjee, Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
"This is an innovative and inviting, powerful and provocative book. Abjuring the usual ‘guarantees’ of academic analysis, Dube conjoins intimacy and affect with structure and process. In the work, predilections of the postcolonial are interwoven with the contradictions of modernity, the contentions of disciplines are bound to ambiguities of the archive, and accumulation and development are crisscrossed by loss and excess."
- Mario Rufer, Professor, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México
"History and anthropology are core bridges between humanities and social science. They are integral to the intellectual formations constitutive of 'the West'. And as Saurabh Dube shows, they are not merely university disciplines but also disciplinary formations remaking modern subjectivity and critical perspectives throughout society. This is an original and compelling exploration."
, University Professor, Arizona State University, Tempe- Craig Calhoun
"Disciplines of Modernity is a tour de force from one of the most generative, creative, and surprising thinkers of our time. Weaving personal itineraries with public life, this moving and insightful book cuts to the heart of the hierarchies that continue to shape the global production of knowledge."
- Sunil Amrith, Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University, New Haven
