Learning to Forget The Anti-Memoirs of Modernity

by Gupta, Dipankar

• ISBN13: 9780195674330
• ISBN10: 0195674332
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This project is written as a mission to separate the modern from the contemporaneous, to revisit the idea of modernity and to de-link it from superficial traits of westernization. Discussing the difference between modernization and westoxication, the book is a phenomenological treatment that is abstract and yet illustrative, when discussing issues such as affirmative action, citizenship, and development in India. This book argues that given the reality of mistaken modernity and the idealization of the past in many societies of the South, it is necessary to make the case for modernity as uncompromisingly as possible.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements	vii
Project Modernity	1	(38)
Intersubjectivity as Iso-ontology
Learning to Forget	39	(22)
The Anti-Memoirs of Modernity
The Domesticated Public	61	(29)
Modernity and the Regime of Injunctions
The Everyday Aesthete	90	(18)
An Excursus on Modern Taste
Creating a `Minimum Set of Resemblances'	108	(18)
Normative Interventions for Iso-ontology
Meeting `Felt Aspirations'	126	(38)
For a New Paradigm of Development
The Burden of Memory	164	(18)
The Challenge before Nation-States
Between Ethnicity and Communalism	182	(31)
Memory against Citizenship
Dying to Remember	213	(16)
Martyrdom and Failed Modernity
Conditions for Forgetting	229	(7)
Intersubjectivity as Modernity's Logic
References	236	(13)
Index	249