ABSTRACT
The diffusion of the ideology and practices of globalization over the last two decades has been accompanied by proliferating cultural claims on modernity that are audible in calls for the recognition of multiple and alternative modernities. It is ironic that modernity globalized – global modernity – calls modernity into question as a coherent cultural concept. The questioning of modernity also challenges modernity’s ways of knowing, including the claims to universality of knowledge produced under the sign of science, which now appears as only one among many ways of knowing. As the globalization of modernity erodes the centrality to it of its Euro/American origins, its epistemology, too, loses its hegemony, and retreats into parochialism as the product of one cultural province among others of modernity. Theory, an essential tool in the production of such knowledge, and one of its foremost symbols, follows the fragmentation of knowledge into fragmentary spaces of culture (see Dirlik 2007, pp. 70-9).
