ABSTRACT
From our twenty-first century vantage point, it seems rather obvious to state that the dominant cartography of modernity is a largely Europe-centred enterprise. The respective philosophical, political, and economic events of the Enlightenment and the French and industrial revolutions taken to signal the emergence, consolidation, and development of modernity are exclusively and distinctively European events. Even exemplary contemporary perspectives on the emergence and constitution of modernity, supposedly acclimated to an intellectual environment that questions and problematises the foundation and production of knowledge within narrow geographical contexts, have not fully escaped this constricting focus. Anthony Giddens’s outline of the birth of the modern reflexive subject and social institutions, Marshall Berman’s tour of European urban centres with Goethe, Marx, and Baudelaire as guides, and Jürgen Habermas’s recognition of the (unfinished) generative impulse provided by nineteenth-century aesthetic modernism, all demonstrate the tacit Europe-centred frame of normative modernity.1
