Description
In Subjects of Modernity, Saurabh Dube thinks through modernity and its representations by exploring critical
considerations of time and space. Drawing on anthropology, history and social theory, he investigates the
oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences
spawned under modernity. Crucially, Dube understands the antinomies of modernity not as analytical
errors, but as constitutive elements of modern worlds. Dube questions routine portrayals of homogeneous
time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space
by social subjects. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory for the phenomena, it views
modernity as involving checkered, contingent and contended processes of meaning and power, which
have found heterogeneous historical elaborations over the past five centuries. Bringing together past and
present, theory and narrative, it sows the historical, ethnographic and methodological deep into his critical
procedures, offering an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively exploring the
relationship between history and anthropology.
