COOPER, Frederick. Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history.
Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2005
Four perspectives on modernity run through much of the academic literature: p.113
I) Modernity represents a powerful claim to singularity: it is a long and
continuing project, central to the history of Western Europe, and in turn
defining a goal to which the rest of the world aspires. This singularity is
applauded by those who see new opportunities for personal, social, and
political advancement as liberation from the weight of backwardness and the
oppressiveness of past forms of Western imperialism
II) Modernity, again, is a bundle of social, ideological, and political phenomena
whose historical origins lie in the West, but this time it is condemned as
itself an imperial construct, a global imposition of specifically Western
social, economic, and political forms that tames and sterilizes the rich
diversity of human experience and the sustaining power of diverse forms of
community. p.113
III) Modernity is still singular; it is indeed a European project and a European
accomplishment, to be defended against others who may knock at the gate
but whose cultural baggage renders the mastery of modernity unattainable.
p.113
IV) Modernity is plural. We have “multiple modernities” and “alternative
modernities.” These arguments either bring out the way in which non-
Western peoples develop cultural forms that are not mere repetitions of
tradition but bring their own perspectives to progress. Or else such
interpretations focus on colonized intellectuals or leaders who explicitly
engage the claims of Western agents to represent all that was modern and
seek to put forward alternatives that are forward-looking but selfconsciously
distinct. P.114
Some questions
is modernity a condition—something written into the exercise of economic and political
power at a global level?
Or is it a representation, a way of talking about the world in which one uses a language
of temporal transformation while bringing out the simultaneity of global unevenness, in
which “tradition” is produced by telling a story of how some people became “modern”?
p.114
The power of the concept comes from the assertion that modernity has been the model
held up before colonized people: a marker of Europe’s right to rule, something to which
the colonized should aspire but could never quite deserve p.115
The colonial question is not the modernity question, even if issues of modernity arise
within colonial history. And if we recognize that about the colonial past, perhaps we can
pose issues about the future with more precision and without reproducing the polarities
that we want to dismantle p.116
point both to the proliferation of meanings of modernity— and hence its confusion
when used in the singular—and to the proliferation of modernities, and the vanishing
analytical utility of the term in the plural. P.116
Trying to escape from the false dichotomy of modern and traditional, we find ourselves
with a concept whose main value is to correct past misuses of the same word p.119
Classic modernization theory derived its notion of a transition from tradition to
modernity from Talcott Parsons’s concept of “pattern variables.” The interrelation of
these attributes over time gave the theory its force. Daniel Lerner’s 1968 formulation
included self-sustaining growth in the economy, public participation in the polity,
“diffusion of secular-rational norms in the culture,” increased mobility— including
personal freedom of physical, social, and psychic movement— and transformation of
“the modal personality that equips individuals to function effectively in a social order
that operates according to the foregoing characteristics.” P.120
Wilbert Moore put industrialism at the center, and saw it as shaping an entire way of
life: a rational perspective on decision-making, adapting to labor markets, working in a
hierarchical structure, and adapting to new social situations in places of residence. P.120
Still others set out modernization as a clearly delineated path that some people might
choose not to follow— at a tremendous cost.15 Then came the pessimistic and
authoritarian modernizers, convinced that some if not most non-Western peoples would
not follow the—still singular—path, leading to political and social pathologies that
would have to be kept in check by those who had made the transition p.120
If the early modernizers saw their focus as society, economics, and politics, their critical
concepts were also cultural, and in later considerations of the project of modernity, as in
the writing of Daniel Bell, this element came to the fore: modernity entailed a “sea
change of consciousness p.120
“What defines the modern is a sense of openness to change, of detachment from place
and time, of social and geographical mobility, and a readiness, if not eagerness, to
welcome the new, even at the expense of tradition and the past.” (BELL) P.120
Modernity implied a market economy, but an antibourgeois spirit, a rejection of the
stuffiness of the past, of the taken-for-grantedness of social arrangements and forms of
expression as well as of the received Word of religion p.120
The empirical critique of modernization theory took apart such associations: the linkage
of market economies to secularization worked neither for the classic case of capitalist
development in the Britain p.121
Conclusion (fact):
The covariance of commercialization, secularization, achievement orientation,
rationalism, and individuation fit poorly in the history of “modern” Europe or
“modernizing” Africa or Asia. P.121
Take Charles Taylor: “By modernity I mean that historically unprecedented amalgam of
new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production,
urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental
rationality), and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of
impending social dissolution).” Modernity lay at the end of a “long march,” which “is
perhaps ending only today.” P.121
For Dipesh Chakrabarty,
The phenomenon of “political modernity”—namely, the rule by modern institutions of
the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think of anywhere in
the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go
deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. Concepts such as
citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law,
the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject,
democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear
the burden of European thought and history p.121
(Nota 20)
When Chakrabarty asserts that European thought, especially that of “leftist
intellectuals,” was so sodden with the notions of secularism and reason that it “ceded to
the fascists all moments of poetry, mysticism, and the religious and mysterious” and
that “Romanticism now reminds them only of the Nazis,” he reveals how far the Europe
he wants to “provincialize” is from any Europe that existed. P.122
Critique for Dipesh
Instead of looking at the conflicting ways in which inhabitants of this province actually
thought, he has been content to let the most simplistic version of the Enlightenment
stand in for the European Province’s much more convoluted history
p.122
the people who called themselves modernists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries defined themselves—“bitterly,” as one scholar puts it—against “the modernity
of our industrial civilization and its major ideologies.”. Many saw themselves as an
avant-garde situated in opposition to the stuffiness of bourgeois culture, against
formalism in art, and in favor of subjectivist, self-critical understanding of human
experience. They were part of a longer, multisided debate beginning in the
Enlightenment itself over the uncertainties of ways of knowing p.123
The issue here is more profound than a misreading of European intelectual and cultural
history. The effort to provincialize Europe would be more meaningful if the all-
dominating post-Enlightenment rationality were seen in relation to the questioning,
contestation, and critique that were and are part of history p.123
Perhaps looking at Europe from the vantage point of its former colonies—and noting
the confusions of temporality and simultaneity to which “modernity” gives rise—will
point to the misleading coherence implied by the notion of a modern era, and the need
for more precise ways of thinking about change, in all parts of the world. P.124
Modernity exists and can exist only on a global scale, and the task of the scholar is not
to compare discrete instances of it but to analyze the relationship of particular cases to
the totality p.125
Let us call this way of narrating movement toward modernity “capitalism- plus.” The
development of capitalism in Europe and its extension via imperialism and world
markets to the rest of the world (never mind that empires linking distant territories
predate capitalism by centuries) are seen as the motor of history, but seeking to avoid
the economistic version of Marxist theory, such arguments bring in state-building and
bureaucratization p.125
The best historical scholarship on capitalism has emphasized that the story needs to be
pulled apart rather than mushed together: it brings out different trajectories of capitalist
development; the extent to which different forms of production are articulated with each
other; the importance of state protection, regulation of markets, and support to particular
capitalist classes; the varied trajectories of capitalist economies; the unevenness and
segmentation of labor markets; the varied roles of gender in the organization of
production [...]If, on the contrary, one moves beyond the specific effects of capitalist
development (or state-building, for that matter), one recreates modernization theory’s
problem of treating modernity as fully integrated and coherent. P.125/6
In slipping all too easily from identifying the importance of capitalism as a mode of
production to making broad assertions about cultural and political life, the capitalism-
plus school leaves us with a generic picture of the very processes whose importance it
has emphasized. P.126
Critique
Responses to modernity, in these arguments, are sometimes varied, and some analyses
(see below) give more weight than others to the variations. But modernity can only be
singular and universal.
It has concrete manifestations— visible in the landscape, describable in government
institutions, tangible in our taken-for-granted social relations, in our conceptions of
space and time, in the place of religion in our lives, in our notions of private zones and
public life, in our aesthetic notions, and in our sense of who we are. P.126
Some believe modernity is a good (and identifiable) thing, some a bad thing, and some
that it is a good story or a bad story. It might be a story told by intellectuals or by
ordinary people, by the person writing the account in question or the people about
whom the account is written. P.126
The concept of modernity, multiplied, therefore runs the gamut, from a singular
narrative of capitalism, the nation-state, and individualism—with multiple effects and
responses— to a word for everything that has happened in the last five hundred years
p.127
Modernity, to Berman, was experienced as adventure, power, flux, and joy, as well as
disintegration and anguish. His is a restless modernity, avant-gardist, a project as much
as a realization p.128
Setting out to do an anthropology of modernity, in other words, is not a good research
strategy. Finding a discourse of modernity could be a revealing demonstration p.131
For most Africans, he insists [James Ferguson], modernity has quite concrete meanings
– health facilities, education, decent pensions, opportunity to sell one’s crops and obtain
useful commodities from elsewhere – and the language of modernization gave them a
basis for asserting claims: if you think we should be modern, help us find the means.
P.131
In his sensitive ethnography of Zambian mine workers in an era when their hard-won
wages and pensions have been eroded by inflation, when facilities that once seemed to
be improving have collapsed, when childhood mortality that seemed to be declining is
resurgent, Ferguson writes the story of modernization as a story of claims made,
expectations that they might at least in part be realized, and bitter disappointment about
the modernization that never came to be. P.131
The issue here is not whether modernity is singular or plural, but how the concept is
used in the making of claims. Modernization—as a policy as much as a theory—pointed
in its heyday to the depth of global hierarchy and promised that eventually material
standards would converge upward p.131
But the writing is indicative of a deeper problem: the package of modernity substitutes
for analysis of debates, actions, trajectories, and processes as they took place in history
p.134
Framing debates in terms of modernity, antimodernity, and alternative modernities has
not provided a precise or suggestive vocabulary for analyzing the relationship of
different elements of change, the alternative ways in which political issues can be
framed, or conflicting dreams of the future p.135
Both the value and the limits of thinking about modernity in colonial situations may be
approached by contrasting two arguments, one well disseminated and well received in
the American academy, by the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the other little
known beyond francophone Africanist circles and controversial within them, by the
Cameroonian journalist Axelle Kabou.p.135
Dipesh Chakrabarty
He argues that the most deadly manifestation of backwardness—ethnic chauvinism and
intolerance—is itself part of the modernizing project, for its impetus to classify and
enumerate the population turned shades of difference into rigid units around which
power was organized and resources allocated p.136
Chakrabarty denies that he seeks “a simple rejection of modernity, which would be, in
many situations, politically suicidal.” He accepts “the immense practical utility of left-
liberal political philosophies,” and hopes that a fuller understanding of just what these
notions signify historically will “help teach the oppressed of today how to be the
democratic subject of
tomorrow.” p.136
Whereas Chakrabarty seeks to undermine the power of universality, Kabou rejects the
ideological power of particularity p.137
The critique of universalism and the critique of particularism refer to different longings
and different anxieties that are important parts of colonial and postcolonial experience.
Both of these thoughtful and important arguments help us understand that the ways in
which issues are framed in political discourse are neither self-evident nor innocent of
the exercise of power in colonial and postcolonial situations. But both remain at too
high a level of abstraction to explain how any framing developed in the course of
interaction or struggle or to help us reframe issues in the future and discuss
responsibility for specific actions. P.138
The interconnection—and commensurability—of different parts of the world is not only
a historical fact but a resource, for good, for bad, and for much that lies in between.
Rights talk is effective insofar as it provides a resource— for example, for women
critical of patriarchy to find allies and arguments beyond the local, regional, or national
system of gender relations p.139
Community talk is a resource as well, deployed against overbearing forces that threaten
to sweep people before the tide of a supposedly universal history. One can recognize,
with Chakrabarty, that “universal” values come with the baggage of colonial history
and, with Kabou, that appeals to cultural specificity can be selfserving and constraining,
but recognize that imposition from outside and defense of autonomy are not the only
two alternatives p.139
Organizational and discursive resources can bring together people across borders—
contingently and with awareness of the asymmetrical power relations involved p.139
But, as Sheldon Pollock observes, if we can think about the tensions of universality and
particularity without making “particularity ineluctable” or “universalism compulsory,”
we can think more historically about the past and more constructively about the future
p.139
colonial Africa, modernization projects were important in certain moments and certain
contexts. Meanwhile, the inability and disinterest of regimes in establishing an
apparatus of routine control lay behind some of the worst instances of colonial violence;
early-twentieth-century economic policy included the coercive, brutal extraction of
resources in King Leopold’s Congo or the “old empire” style of the concessionary
company in France’s Equatorial Africa, and conflicts continued between colonizers who
favored the grab-what-one-can approach and those who sought to build structures
favoring long-term profitability and expansion p.144
If one is to take seriously the “civilizing mission” enunicated by the government of the
French Third Republic at the end of the nineteenth century, then one should take note of
the important argument of J. P. Daughton that colonial rulers devoted few resources—
teachers, doctors, engineers—to the cause, but that the inveterate foes of secular
republicanism, the Catholic Church, sent a vastly larger body of men into the empire,
aimed not at civilizing but at converting, at fostering a social order far more hierarchical
and traditionalist than that advocated at home and overseas by republican modernizers.
P.144
And one should note as well that even the republican government backed off its
civilizing mission after World War I in favor of a politics of retraditionalization p.144
the story of this volatile moment, suggests another way of looking at the language of
modernity: as a claim-making device p.146
In the postwar conjuncture, British and French governments and African and Asian
social and political movements brought forth different modernization projects. P.147
The critique of modernity recognizes that political contestation takes place within
frameworks, and the history of colonization and decolonization has shaped the
structures within which economic and social issues are debated, and the language with
which they are discussed - structures that remain unequal and languages that privilege
certain modes of understanding p.147/148
The struggles were unequal, but they were not one-sided. Colonial voices might have to
shout to be heard in European capitals, but at critical moments, the intensity of colonial
conflicts, uncertainties about colonial policies, disagreements between those who
wanted to save souls and those who wanted to exploit bodies, and competing visions of
national missions and national interests provided fissures that colonized subjects […]
The struggles were unequal, but they were not one-sided. Colonial voices might have to
shout to be heard in European capitals, but at critical moments, the intensity of colonial
conflicts, uncertainties about colonial policies, disagreements between those who
wanted to save souls and those who wanted to exploit bodies, and competing visions of
national missions and national interests provided fissures that colonized subjects p.149
My purpose has not been to purge the word modernity and certainly not to cast aside the
issues that concern those who use the word. It is to advocate a historical practice
sensitive to the different ways people frame the relationship of past, present, and future,
an understanding of the situations and conjunctures that enable and disable particular
representations, and a focus on process and causation in the past and on choice, political
organization, responsibility, and accountability in the future p.149
