ABSTRACT
Introduction In this chapter I argue that an orientation – or perhaps reorientation – towards nonWestern thought is a perilous but unavoidable undertaking if international relations scholars wish to explore the global context of modernity. I begin by drawing attention to the inadequacies that are revealed in mainstream understandings of modern subjecthood held by the Western Academy when colonial and imperial route(s) to modernity are brought to the fore of investigation. However, I then explore the significant epistemological difficulties that accompany the engagement with a non-Western archive of thought that at least in part has been constructed through colonially induced forms of representing ‘others’. Subsequently, I explore some approaches that might escape the tendency to essentialize and/or exoticize nonWestern thought on modernity, specifically ‘travelling theory’ and ‘translating modernity’. What is required, I argue, is a serious engagement with non-Western thought that is nevertheless sensitive to the way in which imperialism and colonialism have carved out the geo-cultural and geo-political terrains of West and non-West. Having made this ‘return’ to the non-West I suggest how, from this perspective, the ideal of Western modernity might be critically re-examined so as to provide a more adequate appreciation of the global context of modernity, modernity globalized through – and as – colonial and imperial projects.
