China, India and Alternative Asian Modernities PDF Download

Author: Sanjay Kumar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429536453
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
The conception of modernity as a radical rupture from the past runs parallel to the conception of Europe as the primary locus of global history. The essays in this volume contest the temporal and spatial divisions—between past and present, modernity and tradition, and Europe’s progress and Asia’s stasis—which the conventional narrative of modernity creates. Drawing on early modern Chinese and Indian history and culture instead, the authors of the book explore the provenance of modernity beyond the west to see it in a transcultural and pluralistic light. The central argument of this volume is that modernity does not have a singular core or essence—a causal centre. Its key features need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations imagined. By studying the Bhakti movement, Confucian democracy, and the maritime and agrarian economies of China and India, this book enlarges the terms of debate and revisits devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authority, and rural as resources for modernity. This book will be of great interest to researchers and academicians working in the areas of history, Sociology, Cultural Studies, literature, geopolitics, South Asian and East Asian Studies.

Author: Huri Islamoglu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000083926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West, this book seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', as well as question its geographical split into two irreconcilable trajectories: the European and the non-European. The book examines shared experiences of modern transformation or modernity in three regions -- China, India and the Ottoman Empire -- which conventional historiography identifies as non-European, and therefore, by implication, outside of modernity or only tangentially linked to it as its victim. In other words, this work looks at modernity without reference to any 'idealised' criteria of what qualifies as 'modern' or not, studying the negotiation and legacies of the early modern period for the modern nation state. It focuses on the experience of modernity of non-European regions for they play a crucial role in the new phase of transformational patterns may have deeper roots than are generally assumed. Rejecting European characterisations of 'eastern' states as Oriental despotisms, the volume conceives of the early modern state as a negotiated enterprise, one that questions the assumption that state centralisation must be a key metric of success in modernisation. Among other topics, the book highlights: state formations in the three empires; legislation pertaining to taxation, property, police reform, the autonomy of legal sphere, the interaction of different types of law, law's role in governance, administrative practice, negotiated settlements and courts as sites of negotiation, the blurred boundaries between formal law and informal mediation; the ability of 18th century Qing and Ottoman imperial governments to accommodate diverse local particularities within an overreaching structure; and the pattern of regional development pointing to the accommodative institutional capacity of the Mughal empire.

Author: Eva Kit-Wah Man
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783034300933
Category : Asia
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This book is a collection of selected essays presented at the International Symposium on «Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality and Hybridity» hosted by the Humanities Programme of Hong Kong Baptist University in September 2006. As «modernity» has been used to describe the cultural, economic and socio-political conditions in the Western worlds, the time in which we now live and the Asian countries where capitalistic transformation is extensively carried out are already articulating their own descriptions. The essays collected here discuss the notions of «contemporary», «Asia» and «modernities» as they relate to the global trend of adopting capitalism. They probe into questions related to modernity as well as global modernity, ranging from China in particular to Asia in general. As reflected in the pluriversal meanings in the title, the book endeavours to make critical inquiries into the concept of modernity/modernities from different perspectives.

Author: Shibsankar Jena
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527552896
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The social science discourse on the power of modernity and its everyday negotiation with tradition and locality in India has been a matter of continuous debate and discussion among academicians since the colonial era. By taking agriculture as a special field of investigation, this book describes the condition of ‘modernity’ in the agrarian social system of contemporary India. Farming is not only an economic activity, but also a personality formation where ‘status’ plays a significant role in Indian society. Taking ‘culture’, and ‘social status’ as the two important variables in the local ‘agriculture as performance’, this book develops a sociology of knowledge approach towards agrarian modernity and development in postcolonial India.

Author: Meena Bhargava
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100927662X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Did modernity arrive in South Asia with British colonialism? Or was South Asia already modern by then? What might have that modernity looked like? The Early Modern in South Asia engages with these questions. It brings together ten chapters, which collectively trace the contours of South Asia's early modernity between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. They do this by examining the nature of historical change in various domains, including philosophy, warfare, law, environment, politics, violence, religion, and society. The chapters argue that in all these fields, there were noticeable developments during this period, marking a shift from the medieval to the early modern. The introductory chapter contextualizes this by analysing the politics of periodization in history-writing across the world. It discusses the meanings of the relatively new concept of early modernity and the implications of its use for how we understand historical change and continuity in South Asia.

Author: Andrew N. Weintraub
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824874196
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of global historical changes. Female entertainers, positioned at the margins of intersecting fields of activities, created something hitherto unknown: they were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior, lifestyles, and morals. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures, of a newly emerging mass culture, and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Vamping the Stage is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music. Historicizing the artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and particularly as models for new life styles. Women’s voices, mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life.

Author: Derek Heng
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108903479
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
Since the late first millennium CE, Maritime Southeast Asia has been an inter-connected zone, with its societies and states maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with both China and Japan on the east, and the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East on the west. This global connectedness was facilitated by merchant and shipping networks that originated from within and outside Southeast Asia, resulting in a trans-regional economy developing by the early second millennium CE. Sojourning populations began to appear in Maritime Southeast Asia, culminating in records of Chinese and Indian settlers in such places as Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and the Gulf of Siam by the mid-first millennium CE. At the same time, information of products that were harvested in Southeast Asia began to be appropriated by pockets of society in China, the India and the Middle East, resulting in the production of new knowledge and usages for these products in these markets.

Author: Alexander Woodside
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures. The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution. A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.

Author: Kai Kresse
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110733331
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
As far too many intellectual histories and theoretical contributions from the ‘global South’ remain under-explored, this volume works towards redressing such imbalance. Experienced authors, from the regions concerned, along different disciplinary lines, and with a focus on different historical timeframes, sketch out their perspectives of envisaged transformations. This includes specific case studies and reflexive accounts from African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. Taking a critical stance on the ongoing dominance of Eurocentrism in academia, the authors present their contributions in relation to current decolonial challenges. Hereby, they consider intellectual, practical and structural aspects and dimensions, to mark and build their respective positions. From their particular vantage points of (trans)disciplinary and transregional engagement, they sketch out potential pathways for addressing the unfinished business of conceptual decolonization. The specific individual positionalities of the contributors, which are shaped by location and regional perspective as much as in disciplinary, biographical, linguistic, religious, and other terms, are hereby kept in view. Drawing on their significant experiences and insights gained in both the global north and global south, the contributors offer original and innovative models of engagement and theorizing frames that seek to restore and critically engage with intellectual practices from particular regions and transregional contexts in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. This volume builds on a lecture series held at ZMO in the winter 2019-2020

Author: Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822327141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
A special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this volume of essays examines modernity from transnational and transcultural perspectives, holding that within different cultures, there are different starting points of the transition to modernity that lead to differen