ABSTRACT
It is unfortunate that Stuart Hall chose to read my response to his essay as a wilful and persistent misreading of his arguments, intended to saddle him with the views of modernization theorists with whom he disagrees significantly. Far from making Hall a ‘substitute target’ for my arguments with modernization theorists, my intent was to problematize how the most progressive and well-intentioned arguments can evoke paradigms that, once made explicit, would be unacceptable to those of us who are committed to challenging Euro-Enlightenment oriented policies. In fact it is precisely because I respect Hall’s sensitivity to such issues, that I tried to sketch the genealogy of, and inherent assumptions in, particular analyses of nationalism since the 1960s, taking care to point out where Hall’s argument seems to concur and depart from this genealogy. Hall’s contextualization of his views on nationalism through a discussion of the conflict between Wales and England is helpful in locating the historical and geographical compass of his theorizing. My disagreement is more with attempts at explicating the rest of the nationalist movements in the world through a theoretical skeleton derived from a historical context that is too often located in the West. While I understand the need to do away with the binarism of the ‘First and Third world’, I feel that the equation of a specific Western history (which claims to be universal) with the phenomenon of modernity that indeed has become globalized remains poorly theorized in most discussions on modernity in the non-Western world. In short, what difference, if any, does the consideration of specific cultural and social history make to theorizations of modernity? Unfortunately Hall does not engage this question.
