recapitulation of Europe’s owninternalstruggle between modern and anti-
modern forces, between, that is, ‘‘Enlightenment notions of reason, secular-
ism, universalism, civil society’’ on the one hand and ‘‘thevolkishtendencies
of cultural particularism, nativism, provincialism, and spiritualism’’ on the
other (Thompson 2003 , 1 – 2 ).
Bruno Latour has shown how the story of modernity portrays modern,
Western culture as aradicalbreak from all other modes of human thought,
social organization, and inquiry into nature. Only the moderns, the story
goes, have mastered the art of categorical puriWcation, of distinguishing
clearly between what is natural and what is cultural, between what is universal
and true and what is particular and partial. Latour rejects this conceit,
arguing that the diVerence between modern and other cultures is not quali-
tative but quantitative; that is, a matter of ‘‘lengthened networks.’’ If modern
critiques are more global, if modern self-consciousness is more explicit, if
modern technologies are more masterful, it is only because of a diVerence in
the ‘‘scope of mobilization,’’ which, while important, ‘‘is hardly a reason to
make such a great fuss’’ (Latour 1993 , 124 ).
Other critics have noted that modernity, preciselybecause it is part of
European history, cannot be exclusively European. Modernity cannot be
divorced from the imperialist and colonialist projects of Europe or America,
and thus is a product of the (psychic, linguistic, normative, bureaucratic,
military) interactions between the West and the non-West. This means that
multiple modernities exist side by side around the globe. Amit Chaudhuri
makes a version of this point when he says that, ‘‘if Europe is a universal
paradigm for modernity, we are all, European and non-European, to a degree
inescapably Eurocentric. Europe is at once a means of intellectual dominance,
an obfuscatory trope, and a constituent of self-knowledge,in diVerent ways
for diVerent peoples and histories’’ (Chaudhuri 2004 , 5 ; emphasis added). For
Partha Chatterjee, too, because the cultural exchanges that generate modern-
ity are not unidirectional, modernity must be understood as a multicultural
production. Speaking in the context of India’s modernity, he says that:
true modernity consists in determining the particular forms of modernity that are
suitable in particular circumstances; that is, applying the methods of reason to
identify or invent the speciWc technologies of modernity that are appropriate for
our purposes. (Chatterjee 1997 , 8 – 9 )
The postcolonial scholarship concerning non-Western or ‘‘alternative mod-
ernities’’ is rich and ongoing (see Gaonkar 2001 ; Chatterjee 2004 ). In insisting
upon the geographical, cultural, and subcultural speciWcities of coterminous
modernity and its critics 213