ABSTRACT
Modernity, it seems, is back with a vengeance. The flood of books and articles on postmodernism has yielded in recent times to a new interest in the modern and an ongoing reassessment of its ambiguous cultural and political legacies. A cynical observer might interpret such a phenomenon as nothing more than the ultimate instance of the postmodern cannibalization of history, its rapacious consumption of its own past. To the often asked question, ‘what comes after the postmodern?’ comes the inevitable answer-the return to the modern, of course, reappropriated and recycled in the ultimate gesture of retro chic and tongue-in-cheek nostalgia. Yet there may be more substantive reasons for the renewed interest in the modern in contemporary critical theory. The honing of new methodologies of cultural analysis has inspired a proliferation of historical and theoretical perspectives on the nature and meanings of modernity which differ sharply from the established discourses of modernization in sociology and modernism in literary criticism respectively. Particular disciplinary frameworks, it has become clear, dramatically shape the way in which an object of analysis is constituted and interpreted; the contours of a historical period shift and change when viewed through a different analytical lens. At the same time, the concept of modernity is also being retrieved and reconfigured by theorists of gender, race and sexuality who are beginning to question the routine conflation of the modern with the interests of white heterosexual patriarchy. Insisting upon the complex entanglements and investments of subaltern identities with the history that they simultaneously contest, they compellingly show that attention to such identities requires us to rethink the theoretical and historical categories through which the modern has conventionally been understood (Gilroy, 1993). Rather then embodying a uniform, all-encompassing historical logic, in other words, modernity plays itself out differentially across the particularities of cultural context, group identity and embodied experience.
