Savi Sawarkar, untitled, 2000, mixed media on paper.

Born a dalit
(untouchable) in India, Sawarkar now lives and works in Mexico. In this
composition, he draws on his experience in the (colonial/modern) town of
Taxco to depict gures of the other Indian subaltern. Drawing
reproduced with the permission of the artist.

SPECIAL ISSUE

Critical Conjunctions
Foundations of Colony and Formations of Modernity

Introduction
Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities

Saurabh Dube

ver the past two decades, a variety

of critical perspectives have questioned the place of the West as history,
modernity, and destiny.1 First, recent years have seen vigorous challenges
to univocal conceptions of universal history under the terms of modernity.
Imaginatively exploring distinct pasts forged within wider, intermeshed
matrices of power, these works have queried the imperatives of historical
progress and the nature of the academic archive, both closely bound to aggrandizing representations of a reied Europe (Amin 1995; Banerjee Dube
1999; Chakrabarty 2000; Dube 1998; Fabian 2000; Florida 1995; Hartman
1997; Klein 1997; Mignolo 1995; Price 1990; Rappaport 1994; Skaria 1999;
see also Axel 2001; Mehta 1999; and Trouillot 1995).
Second, close to our times, dominant designs of a singular modernity have been increasingly interrogated by contending intimations of heterogeneous moderns. Such explorations have critically considered the divergent articulations and representations of the modern and modernity
that have shaped and sutured empire, nation, and globalization. As a result, modernity/modernities have been themselves revealed as contradictory
and contingent processes of culture and control, as checkered, contested
histories of meaning and masteryin their formation, sedimentation, and

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elaboration. It follows, too, that questions of modernity increasingly often

escape the limits of sociological formalism and exceed the binds of a priori
abstraction, emerging instead as matters of particular pasts and attributes
of concrete historiesdened by projects of power, and molded by provisions of progress (Chatterjee 1993; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Coronil 1997;
Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Dube forthcoming; Ferguson 1999; Gilroy
1993; Gupta 1998; Hansen 1999; Prakash 1999; Price 1998; Taussig 1987;
see also Appadurai 1996; Escobar 1993; Harootunian 2000; Piot 1999; and
Rofel 1999).
Third and nally, for some time now critical scholarship has contested the enduring binariesfor example, between tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, and East and Westthat
have shaped inuential understandings of pasts and key conceptions of
cultures. On the one hand, such theoretical accounts have derived support from critiques of a subject-centered reason and a meaning-legislating
rationality that have thought through the dualisms of Western thought
and post-Enlightenment traditions. On the other, critical discussions of
cultures and pasts have also challenged the analytical binaries of modern disciplines, interrogating essentialized representations of otherness and
questioning abiding representations of progress that are variously tied to
the totalizing templates of universal history and the ideological images of
Western modernity (Asad 1993; Bauman 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff
1992; Errington 1998; Gray 1995; Lander 2000; Mignolo 2000; Said 1978;
Rorty 1989; Taussig 1997; see also Lowe and Lloyd 1997; and Scott 1999).2
At the same time, the reections of a singular modernity, the
representations of universal history, and the reications of overriding oppositions are not mere specters from the past, now exorcised by critical
epistemologies and subversive knowledges. Rather, such lasting blueprints
continue to beguile and seduce, palpably present in the here and now: both
the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, including Operation
Enduring Freedomas phrase and programare striking examples.
Articulating dominant traditions of social theory and animating inherited
terms of everyday discourse, these resilient mappings and their determinate
reworkings lead a charmed life in the academy and beyond in both Western
and non-Western contexts.
Critical Questions

The concerns sketched above are better understood as constituting the

wider theoretical context of the essays that comprise this special issue, as

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horizons that these articles engage in inherently different ways. Indeed, it

is through critical considerations of colonial modernities that the contributions here seek to articulate questions of difference, power, and knowledge.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to claim either a transparent connotation or a precise status for colonial modernities as a category. Now, this
Janus-faced neologism highlights the acute enmeshments of determinations of colony and formations of modernity, particularly when colonial
modernities are regarded as a broad rubric that indicates historical processes and critical perspectives, entailing particular locations of enunciation, interrogating the disembodied view-from-nowhere that becomes the
palpable view-for-everywhere. Precisely for this reason, however, colonial
modernities indicate both a contentious theoretical terrain and a contending
analytical arena. And it is exactly such contention that can turn this conceptmetaphor into an enabling resource for dialogue and debate. Therefore, it
is useful to raise two sets of questions in order to think through colonial
modernities.
First, what is at stake in conjoining questions of colonialism with
issues of modernity to produce and endorse the hybrid gure, colonial
modernities? What marks of difference and which lineaments of power are
underscored through such moves? Indeed, in what ways are we using the
term modernity and its plural modernities here? In speaking of modernity,
is the reference to an overarching ideology that accompanied the work of
capital, the expansion of empire, and the fabrication of colonialism over
the last ve hundred years? Or are modernities also to be understood as
particular historical processes predicated upon distinct but wide-ranging
intersections of the metropole and the margins, upon discrete yet critical
encounters between the colonizer and the colonized?
Clearly, these different orientations actually come together, each
questioning dominant representations of the modern, both challenging
singular self-images of modernity, including in the essays that follow. The
point is simple. Rather than imagining and instituting a facile synthesis between contending understandings of modernity and modernities
and, indeed, between competing conceptions of colonialism and history
consciously recognizing such distinctions and differences as productive
tensions can be a source of strength in thinking through colonial modernities. Such acknowledgement entails the admission that we already labor
in the light of anterior understandings, and always work in the shadow
of prior categoriesin order to revisit the binds and exclusions between
globalization and colonialism, modernity and coloniality, world-system

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and colonial modernities, the one set engaging and extending the other
copula.
Second, what are the critical imperatives of reading and writing as
we consider stipulations of difference and provisions of power? In a wide
variety of contemporary scholarly discourses both power and difference can
appear as prefabricated entities, already given categories, and a priori terms
of discussion. To think through/against such dispositions is to recognize the
impossibility of escaping modernity and history by means of talking and
writing cures, which often succumb to the seduction of lurking nativisms,
third-world nationalisms, and endeavors that turn their backs on the hereand-now. Such critical endeavor is also a matter of being self-conscious
about the particular ways in which we put forward notions of difference
and premises of power. At the same time, if such moves are necessary
exercises, two other considerations stand out.
On the one hand, it is important to be vigilant of the manner in
which difference is inected by power. On the other, one must recognize the
way in which power is shot through with difference. This is not to indulge
in sophistry. Take the example of that plural, modernities. In speaking
of modernities are we merely saying that Indian modernity is different
from German modernity, which is then different from, say, Mexican or
Venezuelan modernity? If this is the case, what modalities of power are
occluded here, not only in relation to authoritative grids of empire and
globalization, but also within non-Western formations of state and nation?
Equally, by invoking a bloated and singular modernity centered on the
West in order to interrogate the homogenizing impulses of projects of
power, do we perhaps succumb to reied representations of an imaginary
but tangible Europe that overlook the labor of difference within the work
of domination?
In other words, what understandings of prior traditions/pasts and
which conceptions of present history/progress do we bring to bear upon
our renderings of power and difference? What anterior idea animates our
appropriation of history, universal or provincial? Which immediate image
articulates our apprehension of modernity, singular or plural? Is it possible
to work through terms of discourse in which power is not construed as
totalized terrain and where difference does not constitute a ready antidote to
powerwhether as insurgent identity, ecstatic hybridity, or precongured
plurality?

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Divergent Conjunctions

The nature of the questions I have just raised indicates my intention in this
introduction to generate debate rather than to garner consensus. This is
in keeping with the tenor of this special issue, where contending positions
access and exceed each other, the exchange and the surplus intimating
newer directions. At work here are particular terms of interaction between
distinct bodies of scholarship, especially writings on and readings out of
Latin America and South Asia, as they bear upon the critical conjunctions
at the heart of colonial modernities.
In authoritative apprehensions and commonplace conceptions
owing from Latin America, intimations of modernity have been long
present, generally reected in the image of a reied Europe. Albeit with
specic lacks and within particular limits, Latin America has itself been
envisioned as part of the Western world, a result of dominant mappings
and authoritative metageographies that have split the world into Occident and Orient, West and East. With few exceptions, questions of colonialism have been understood in Latin America as occupying a dim and
distant past.3 Not surprisingly, issues of empirethemselves narrowly
conceivedcontinue to be widely considered as the distinct domain of
specialist scholars of a long-forgotten period in Latin American history. In
such dispositions salient traces of colonial cultures in modern Latin America chiey consist of the monumental architecture and the grand art of a
distinctive, bygone era.
Against the grain of these dominant orientations, an important
body of critical thought on Latin America today focuses on the subterranean schemes and the overwrought apparitions of the modern and the
colonialin the past and the present. In other words, this corpus critically
considers the spectral place and tangible presence of colonial stipulations of
knowledge/power within modern provisions of power/knowledge. Consequently, such moves, acutely represented in this issue, have also held up
a mirror to modernity as a deeply ideological project, a ruse of history, a
primary apparatus of domination, here now and there tomorrow (Dussel
1995; Lander 2000; Mignolo 1995, 2000; Castro-Gmez 1998).
In South Asia, colonial questions have occupied a critical place in
writings on the regions history, economy, and society for several decades
now. The immediacy of empire and the force of nationalismas anticolonial movement and nation-building projecthave both played an important role. Over time, this has resulted in the accumulation of distinct

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perspectives on colonial processes in South Asia, which have extended from

revisionist histories of colonial transitions, to historical ethnographies of imperial formations, to postcolonial perspectives associated with the Subaltern
Studies project and critical literary analyses.4
It is also the case, however, that that the import of modernity has
been critically considered in India only in recent times.5 Here the determinations and direction of modernity in South Asia have been variously
cast as an enlightened trajectory of social transformation, an overweening project laboring against creative difference, an authoritative apparatus
ever engendering critical alterity, and a historical process that produces
both exotic exceptions and historical sameness.6 In most of these readings,
current reection on modernity has followed upon the prior presence of
the colony. Not surprisingly, newer critical writings on South Asia, also
represented in this issue, have sought to extend anterior understandings of
colony and present propositions of modernity through historical lters and
ethnographic grids, each in conjunction with the other (see, e.g., Appadurai 1996; Chakrabarty 2000; Chatterjee 1993; Dirks 2001; Hansen 1999; and
Nandy 2001).
Recent years have seen the proliferation, in and out of print, of alternative and early modernities, colonial and multiple modernities,
attempts to write into the concept of modernity anterior histories, multiple
trajectories, alternative patterns (e.g., Barlow 1997; Burton 1999; Daedalus
1998, 2000; and Gaonkar 2001). Critical Conjunctions joins such exercises,
but it does so with its particular twist, its specic stipulationsbased on
the salience of plural perspectives on colonialism, modernity, and colonial
modernities. For this special issue is shaped by encounters between the
distinct bearings toward colonialism and modernity that I outlined earlier. Arguably, this plurality and contention constitute central strengths of
the corpus ahead, since they indicate diversity in cultures of scholarship
and theoretical orientations. For example, it is not enough to suggest that
the philosophically inclined essays in this issue are primarily interested in
the epistemological labor of colony and modernity, while the empirically
grounded articles are more concerned with the historical work of these categories. Actually, most of the essays tack between the two predilections,
inexorably mixing them up. In Critical Conjunctions different disciplinary
dispositions are enlivened by their interplay with distinct theoretical orientations. Here intellectual diversity and theoretical distinction are enhanced
and extended, since, as they circulate together, one orientation interrupts
and exceeds the other disposition.

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These concerns are better understood in the light of the essays

themselves. A little later I will outline the specic arguments of each contribution. Here it is useful to consider the dialogue and contention among
these articles with regard to two critical questions that I broached earlier,
the intertwined issues of the linkages between colonialism and modernity
and the binds between power and difference. Let us turn, then, to the contributions by Enrique Dussel, Edgardo Lander, and Santiago Castro-Gmez,
the three essays that open Critical Conjunctions.
Discussing the articulation between colonialism and modernity,
Dussel attempts to undo inuential propositionsof a subtle, second
Eurocentrismthat project Europe as having been the center of the
world-system for the last ve centuries. Lander interrogates the Eurocentric
premises at the heart of authoritative agreements to facilitate global capital. Castro-Gmez explores the enmeshments of the disciplinary power of
the modern nation-state with the hegemonic relationships of the modern/colonial world-system, also suggesting that although the structural
terms of global power remain in place, the means and strategies of their
legitimation have undergone crucial transformations. At the same time, in
spite of their different emphases, all three essays argue that the formations
of modernity are grounded in the foundations of colony, both colonialism and modernity being apprehended as dominant European projects
of power/knowledge that form the exclusive core of a singular capitalist
world-system. Thus, when Castro-Gmez describes modernity as a series
of practices oriented toward the rational control of human lifeentailing
the social sciences, global capitalism, colonial expansion, and the nationstatehe is summing up a powerful perspective that is arguably also shared
by Dussel and Lander (and, of course, many others).
And what of the orientations of these three scholars toward the relationship between power and difference? Dussel and Lander underscore
the authoritative thrust and the homogenizing impulse of recent EuroAmerican modernity and of Eurocentric knowledge, respectively. Confronting the exclusive trajectory of such power, which has underwritten
global capital, both emphasize the ethics of critical difference, the former locating alterity in trans-modernity, and the latter emphasizing
the need to consolidate/recuperate alternative knowledges. For his part,
Castro-Gmez identies modernity as a machine that engenders alterities,
even as it suppresses hybridity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contingency in
the name of reason and through the designation of humanity. Under conditions of postmodernity the continued hegemony of global capital within

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the world-system is secured not through the repression of difference, but

rather through the production and proliferation of alterities. However, despite such distinctionsincluding the productive ambiguity that attends
Castro-Gmezs formulations of the fabrication of alterities under modernity and postmodernitythese writings present power as emanating from
a singular locus and holding exclusive sway, quite as pure difference appears
as an answer to power here.
The ethical terms of such dispositions are at once elaborated and
extended by the essays that follow these three. Thus, in both explicit and
implicit ways, several of the later contributions congure colonial modernities as premised upon the mutual determinations of power and difference,
upon the ceaseless dynamic of exclusion and inclusionpointing toward
contingency and contradiction at the heart of such processes. Here there is
also no direct recourse to categories such as the world-system and global
capital. For example, Josena Saldaa-Portillo unravels the productive
conjunctions at the core of a colonial modernity through two intertwined
procedures. On the hand, her essay traces the marks of difference engendered by Spanish colonialism in its fabrication of the gure of the Indian, revealing continuities between a colonial governmentality and the
Mexican state. On the other hand, it outlines the work of such difference on
lineaments of power and their subversions in the modern Mexican nation,
especially the forging of an alternative modernity by the Zapatistas, who
straddle and scrabble revolutionary nationalism and the colonial-modern.
Guillermo Zermeo and Sudipta Sen highlight that the powerful
impulse within the modern nation and the colonial state toward excluding
subaltern subjects and colonized peoples has been equally accompanied
by the forceful drive to include them at the margins of the authoritative
grid of civilization. Zermeo underscores the convergent-divergences
between colonial apprehensions and a nationalist anthropology in Mexico
by discussing how these distinct modalities of knowledge nonetheless fabricated the gure of the Indian as the primitive outsider who had to be
forged as the improved insider within both empire and nation. Sen shows
that the twin imperatives of British colonialismlamenting the lack of a
true civil society in India while instituting a residual order of civil society
theretogether constituted modalities of colonial rule that straddled the
line between dominance and hegemony.
The politics of exclusion and inclusion are ever entwined with the
interplay between power and difference, the terms of this dynamic nding distinct expressions in Critical Conjunctions. For instance, in my own

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essay, I explore dominant projections and commonplace apprehensions of

enchanted spaces and modern places, which split the world while holding it together. Such mappings acutely indicate the salience of tracing the
enmeshed determinations and entangled denials between power and difference. For it is precisely by splitting power and difference into separate poles
that critiques of modernity sharply reect self-projections of the modern,
questions that are addressed by Madhu Dubey in her critical analysis of
academic and literary representations that increasingly cast the U.S. South
as an enchanted terrain of difference.
In Critical Conjunctions different theoretical stances engage distinct critical alignments, yet none of them give up their own cardinal
persuasions.7 For the aim of this special issue is not to legislate on colonial modernities, resolving an inquiry in the manner of a problem by
adjudicating on it. On the one hand, it is important to restate that as critical
perspective and historical process colonial modernities emerge as a question
and a horizon better approached through distinct orientations, intimating
inquiries and indicating vistas that are best kept open. On the other, it
is useful to repeat that precisely on account of such differences between
theoretical dispositions, colonial modernities appear here rather less as a
given object predicated upon transcendental knowledge and omniscient
history, and rather more as a historical subject betokened by prior places
and particular pasts. It is time to describe such advances.
Crisscrossing Concerns

Our considerations open with an intervention by Enrique Dussel. Here

the Argentine philosopher recalls the moment of the rst Eurocentrism,
which presented an immaculately conceived Europe realizing itselffrom
its Greek origins through to its modern manifestationsas the centerpiece
and the end of universal history. He proposes that this authoritative idealimaginary Europe came to be challenged by understandings of the worldsystem. At the same time, according to Dussel, to assume along with
Immanuel Wallerstein that after the discovery of the Americas, from the
sixteenth century, Europe became the center of the world-system is to submit to a second Eurocentrism. It ignores the fact that until the latter part of
the eighteenth century, Chinaalong with India (or Hindustan, the historical term Dussel prefers)remained an enormously important player in
the world-system of production and exchange, and that during this rst
modernity the dominance of Europe was primarily an Atlantic phenomenon. Indeed, Europe came to supplant China as the primary protagonist in

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the world-system only after the second modernity of the Enlightenment

and the Industrial Revolution, revealing thereby that the centrality of Europe in the modern world is no more than 225 years old. All this has vital implications for Dussel. For the very recentness of European hegemony over
the colonial/modern world-system opens up a variety of civilizational
possibilities for transcending modernity and globalization. Proposing that
postmodern critiques of modernity remain conned within abiding Eurocentric premises, Dussel nds alternative futures, rather, within the terms
and ethics of trans-modernity, incorporating the cultures of the majority
of humanity that is excluded from modernity. These cultures, from their
very position of exteriority, point to other ethical worlds in the wake of
capitalism.
Dussels emphases nd distinct articulations in the contributions
by Edgardo Lander and Santiago Castro-Gmez. Lander explores the
geopolitical implications of Eurocentric apprehensions in the contemporary world, insinuating that such knowledge is colonial in nature because
of its authoritarian assumptions and its totalizing thrust. The essay begins
with a brief consideration of the dualities at the heart of Eurocentric knowledge. This makes possible an analysis of the often explicit assumptions that
shore up and sustain signicant recent deliberations on global arrangements
of investment and commerce, namely, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the proceedings leading to the creation of the World Trade
Organization. In place here is a particular construction of the liberal order
as the most advanced form of social organization, as the unquestioned
goal for all humanity. In this vision, the free market is the natural state of
society, and all counterclaims to its universalizing pretensions are unnatural distortions. This underlies the consolidation of a free legal/political
global order designed to secure and guarantee relentless freedom for investment, prohibiting collective action that questions the sway of capital, and
denying possibilities of both sovereignty and democracy. Indeed, Eurocentric knowledge polarizes a privileged minority and an excluded majority
throughout the planet, also legitimating a predatory model of civilization.
It is barely surprising, therefore, that in Landers essay the critique of Eurocentrism and the construction-recuperation of alternative knowledges are
vitally linked to local and global demands of communities and organizations that challenge the increasing dominance of transnational capital.
In a wide-ranging article, Castro-Gmez discusses the mutual entanglements between the nation-state, the social sciences, the coloniality
of power, and the capitalist world-system in the articulation of modernity,

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further exploring the terms of critical knowledge that are adequate for the
present. The Colombian scholar interrogates the project of modernity,
pointing to the centrality of the state and the social sciences within practices of modernity that seek to disenchant and demagicalizethat is, to
control and masterthe natural and social world in the mirror of man
and through the reication of reason. At work here are singular dispositions toward knowledge/power that produce coordinated proles of
subjectivity entailing the invention of the other. At the same time, according to Castro-Gmez, the question of the invention of the other
within the nation-state needs to be conjoined with considerations of the
modern/colonial world-systems longue dure macrostructures. For the
disciplinary dispositions of modernity are anchored in a double juridical
governmentalityone exercised by the nation-state from within, and the
other articulated by the hegemonic terms of the colonial/modern worldsystem from without. And it is entirely in tune with this logic that from the
seventeenth century onwardthrough their binary categories and imaginaries of progress, their endorsement of universal history and enmeshments in statist modernizationthe social sciences and social theory have
produced alterities from within and from without. The coloniality of
power and the coloniality of knowledge derive from the same genetic
matrix.
How, then, are we to understand the notion of the end of modernity with which the essay begins and closes? According to Castro-Gmez,
the project of modernity arrives at its end when the nation-state loses
its capacity to organize the social and material life of human subjects. As
modernity is now replaced by globalization, governmentality does not require an Archimedean point, a central mechanism of social control. Rather,
globalization entails a governmentality without government, a spectral and
nebulous dominancethe libidinal power of postmodernity that instead
of repressing differences stimulates and produces them. If this transformation is in tune with the systemic exigencies of global capitalism, the newer
requirements of power and capital have also brought about a change of
paradigm in the social sciences and the humanities. Here Castro-Gmez
critically considers the postmodern conditionas formulated by JeanFranois Lyotard, and expressed within cultural studiesto argue that the
end(s) of metanarratives of modernity in fact do not imply the death of
the capitalist world-system itself. Thus, the essay concludes that the task
of a critical theory of society in the present is to make visible the new
mechanisms of the production of differences in times of globalization.

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Josena Saldaa-Portillo addresses the question of colonial modernities head on by considering the prior place of the colony and exploring
the present-productions of the modern in the making and unmaking of
Mexico. Starting with the premise that the varieties of modernity in Latin
America all bear the imprint of Spanish colonialism, her essay resolutely
refuses to locate the gure of the Indian in a never-never land of enchanted
tradition, apart from determinations of domination, ahead of provisions of
power. Rather, it proposes that what appear today as the traditional characteristics of Mesoamerican indigenous cultures are all products of Spanish
colonial governmentality and economic exploitation. The gure of the
Indian was produced within these processes, which at once universalized and parochialized indigenous identity. At the same time, far from
being passive victims, indigenous communities worked within the interstices of these processes of power, producing value and meaning in surplus
of governmental techniques, thus creating cultural formations and resistant identities that exceeded the colonial category of the lowly Indian. Not
surprisingly, the stipulations of this colonial regime of difference have
shaped the modern project of nation building in Mexico over the past two
centuries, revealing the contradictory articulation of Indian difference and
national identity within economies of power and regimes of representation
of state and modernity.
This sets the stage for Saldaa-Portillos exploration of how the
Zapatistas and their insurrection in southern Mexico have emerged from
within the terms of a revolutionary nationalism and the idioms of a colonial
modernity, where Zapatismo has appropriated and extended, accessed and
exceeded such stipulations. This case is made through a sensitive ethnography of a political eventa dramatic representation by the Zapatistas in
the summer of 1996, inviting the participation of visiting outsiders. A theater of politics, a play on power, the enactment of this episode hinged on
the staging of a silence by the Zapatistas, a silence with multiple civic and
ethical echoes that interrupted the noisy command of dominant Mexican
nationalism. The essay suggests that the staging of such a silence is actually
indicative of the Zapatistas presence as an empty signier of civil society, of Mexican community. Indeed, by oscillating between avowing and
claiming Indian difference and disavowing and vacating Indian particularity, the Zapatistas also present us with an alternative modernity.
The gure of the Indian and the form of the primitive forged
by colonial knowledge and nationalist thought also constitute the subject of
Guillermo Zermeos essay, which focuses on the work of Manuel Gamio,

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widely considered to be the father of modern anthropology in Mexico.

Taking a cue from the philosopher Paul Ricoeurs critical yet enabling reading of Hegel, Zermeos goal is to acknowledge Gamios weighty legacy
in order to transcend it. On the one hand, the work of Manuel Gamio
was shaped by late nineteenth-century positivist assumptions concerning
scientic knowledge in the service of national progress. To build a modern Mexico, the new science had to discover essential racial, cultural, and
economic patterns that would turn sociological observation into a means of
accurate prediction and effective governance. Based on acute distinctions
between tradition and modernity and backwardness and progress,
this matrix of knowledge fostered the economy of power of the modern
nation-state. It also underlay Gamios own division of the Mexican nation
into two poles: its white population representing modern civilization, the
dynamic harbingers of progress; and its indigenous and mestizo groups,
the great underdeveloped and passive majority. On the other hand, Gamio
sought to develop a disciplinary practice adequate for the twentieth century, an applied endeavor geared toward social improvement, separating
magic from truth, under the dispensation of a new anthropology. Taken
together, for Gamio, the task of applied anthropology was to work with the
state to transform the cultural backwardness of the indigenous subject in
the image of the modernity and the civilization of the white citizen. The
very procedures of this new knowledge produced an essential image of
the Indian, which could then be manipulated in time and space.
It is against this background that Zermeo traces the divergent
convergences in Gamios anthropology and that of Fray Bernardino de
Sahagn, the colonial chronicler of the sixteenth century. Both construe the
Indian as an object of knowledge that had to be healedof idolatry for
Sahagn, of backwardness for Gamio. Both construct knowledges that
were bound to wider political projectsthe rst, colonizing-evangelizing,
and the second, building a modern nation. In each case, the construction
and consolidation of indigenous otherness also constitutes the means and
mechanism to assail and diminish this difference. The precise divergences
between the projects of Gamio and Sahagn go hand-in-hand with the
profound convergences among them, so that the century of Mexican liberal nationalismin its bourgeois and revolutionary incarnationsitself
emerges as the second conquest of the Indian world. Yet it would be
hasty to conne such questions to the past. As Zermeo poignantly asks,

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what is the guarantee that present anthropological apprehensions of indigenous peoples do not continue to be inscribed within related teleologies of
progress?
Abiding terms of history and ethnography, cultural politics and
political cultures form the locus of my own contribution, in which I explore the persistent seductions of enchanted spaces and modern places in
widespread metageographies shaped by the vision of a universal history, and articulated by the provisions of historical progress. These sets
of spatial imaginings and structured dispositions are closely connected to
colonial entanglements and articulations of the nation-state, to determinations of difference and stipulations of sameness, playing a critical role
in the imagination and institution of the modern disciplines and the contemporary world. On the one hand, I present such lineaments through
ethnographic descriptions, rst of a scholarly conference, and later of the
opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney, pointing toward the
spectral presence of the enchanted and the modern that haunts authoritative apprehensions and commonplace conceptions. On the other, I consider
the unsaid and the under-thought of academic deliberation, which also
have rather wider implications. Here the gures of an already enchanted
tradition and the forms of an always disenchanted modern lie before the
privilege of vision and the distinction of voice in imagining and instituting
the past and the present. At the end I argue that at stake in thinking through
such mappings are questions of the mutual determinations of power and
difference.
Such cartographies come alive further as Madhu Dubey puts the
spotlight on another South, discussing the discourses of difference concerning southern regional specicity that have burgeoned in the United
States since the 1970s. She proposes that a spatialized cultural politics of
difference, emphasizing particularity, diversity, and the situated nature of
all knowledge is a hallmark of the postmodern era. The recent reections of the regional difference of the U.S. South are exemplary of these
wider bearings. Here Dubey explores writings across a range of disciplines
and genres, including the work of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Houston
Baker Jr., Addison Gayle, the anthropologist Carol Stack, and the historian
Eugene Genovese. Thereby, Dubey unravels the widespread construction
of the South as a rural, premodern, enchanted arena precisely at the moment when it is becoming increasingly industrialized and ever more urban.
Indeed, she interprets the southern turn in U.S. culture as a distinct response to processes of economic and cultural change that have dramatically

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transformed the South. Here the discursive construction of the South as

a magical zone of arrested development is crucial to its operation as an
Archimedean lever for the critique of global capitalism and impersonal
modernity. Dubey underscores both the problems and the possibilities of
current quests to preserve southern cultural difference.
What are the epistemological entanglements of contemporary critiques of Eurocentric knowledge and modern power? In a provocative essay, Rubn Chuaqui cautions against the dangers of the relativism that can
attend these arenas, which militate against the very possibility of objective
understanding, especially of the radically other. Chuaqui acknowledges
that the precise distortions unraveled by Edward Saids powerful indictment of Orientalism, for example, have long characterized Western
representations of all non-European others, ever enmeshed with modalities
of power. At the same time, Chuaqui argues that to ground such representations in a gnoseological relativism actually undermines the positions and
subjectivities being defended. He proposes that most of what we apprehend
about human beings and social orders yet not all that we understand of them
rests on our comprehension of their cultures. This means that despite the
manifold problems of knowing and the inevitable residues of unknowability, the cultures and the beliefs of the other are in fact knowable.
Here Chuaqui explores terms of incommensurability and commensurability through different instancesdual or triadic conditions or subject states
projected as not depending on culture, even if they might have cultural
dimensions. These require that the observer leave, even if momentarily,
the position to which she or he belongs in order to ascertain from the one
side what lies on the other. Considering differences of experience, for example, between male and female, madness and sanity, and among error,
certainty, and doubt, Chuaqui argues that none of these conditions are incommensurable conditions, which would make the experiences of one side
utterly incommunicable to the other. In other words, Chuaqui endorses a
relative relativism, which (devoid of paradox) will be a relativism anchored
in phenomena that are not relative.
In the issues nal essays a historian of India and a historian of
Mexico, Sudipta Sen and Andrs Lira, undertake comparative reections
on the experience of empire. Sen discusses colonial modernities by exploring the relationship between civil society and the modern state, focusing on
colonial India while adducing comparative notes on the Spanish Empire.
He proposes that a useful manner to consider the difference between domination and hegemony is to take into account the exogenous origins of the

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colonial state and its relative alienation from indigenous society. Here the
form and ambition of a colonial state are analyzed by uncovering the homologies and parallels in state formations in the metropole and the colony.
Specically, Sen nds that in many respects the ideology and practice of
colonial state formation straddled the line between acts of domination and
ambitions of hegemony. From its very inception the colonial state in British
India created a paradoxical image of Indian society and peoples. On the one
hand, this state form decried the lack of a true civil society in India and the
persistence of tyranny there. On the other, the colonial states requirement
to pass legislation and to govern the Indians meant that it had to bestow
on these subjects a degree of volition and agencya residual order of
society, or civilization, or culture. For the very improvement of the
Indians, their consent and compliance was imagined and elicited within
an apparition of civil society. The invention and institution of such a novel
colonial society in South Asia through legal and economic measures actually parallels the creation of a new order of colonial subjects in Spanish
America, although of course religious conversion did not play a signicant
role in the British-Indian empire. Indeed, it is this fabrication of a new
social order that is crucial to apprehending colonial domination and its
attempts at hegemony in different parts of the modern world.
Drawing on his disciplinary capital as a lawyer and a historian,
Andrs Lira considers the work of the English legal scholar Henry S.
Maine. His essay underscores that Maines construal of history as the
uninterrupted present of humankind at once straddled and scrambled
blueprints of evolutionary progress, putting a question mark on the notion
of the primitive, his historicism interrupting the evolutionism characteristic of the period. Indeed, Maines work exceeded both the narrowness of nineteenth-century analytical jurisprudence and the individualist/utilitarian premises of European rationalism. Here a critical role was
played by Maines understanding of the nature of the village-community
(especially entailing the patriarchal family and landed property), which
itself drew on his apprehension of communitarian dynamics and colonial presence in British India. Specically, Maine proposed that when an
effective external powerespecially a good government seeking to preserve prior customintervened in the life of the community, this led to
the latters feudalization and fragmentation. According to Lira, Maines
propositions regarding the village-community as a past that was present

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suggest important pathways in the comparative history of colonialism, particularly through a dialogue between the legal scholars writings and processes bearing on indigenous communities under empire and nation in
Latin America. For such an exchange highlights the salient possibilities of
critical conversations on subjects of colonialism, modernity, and colonial
modernitiesfrom South Asia, through Europe, to the Americas.
A Final Word

Having brought to a close this description of the routes traveled and the
paths traversed by Critical Conjunctions, I should add that this special issue
of Nepantla has yet another distinction, one that I have been unable to
unravel here. In addition to the differences in their theoretical orientations
and disciplinary dispositions, the contributions are also marked by distinct
styles of writing. While this may be the case with most cross-disciplinary
endeavors, it is possibly more true of the effort at hand. Six of the essays
here have been translated from the Spanish, which arguably only adds to
the divergent institutional locations shaping the writings. This plurality,
too, is characteristic of the possibilities and predicaments of the journey(s)
ahead.

Notes
This special issue of Nepantla is based on the proceedings of Intersecting Histories
and Other Modernities, a workshop held at the Colegio de Mxico in June
2000. Lorenzo Meyer, Walter Mignolo, Pramod Misra, and Hugo Zemelman
also presented papers at the workshop that could not be included here. Josena Saldaa-Portillo could not attend the workshop but very kindly sent her
essay. Both the workshop and the special issue can only be understood as intensely collaborative ventures. The editors particularly wish to thank Andrs
Lira, Benjamin Preciado, Walter Mignolo, David Lorenzen, Pilar Camacho,
Angelica Vargas, and all the participants at the workshop. Additional thanks
are due to Sudipta and Madhu for bearing the burden of food and uids at
the close of the conference. We also gratefully acknowledge the critical institutional support of the Center for Asian and African Studies at the Colegio
de Mxico, and of the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation at Duke
University. Nepantlas two anonymous reviewers greatly aided the project
with their perceptive and sensitive comments, and Laura Carballidos role as
a research assistant has been exemplary. If perfect editors were to be conjured
as part of academic utopias, Alex Martin at Nepantla would certainly be in the

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running. Finally, this introduction had its (hesitant) beginnings in collaborative labor, but later I completely recast the piece, writing it anew in order to
express very particular concerns. Therefore, the introduction appears under
the name of just one of the editors, who gratefully acknowledges the earlier
inputs of Edgardo Lander and Ishita Banerjee Dube.
1. The particular analytical dispositions to follow constitute overlapping theoretical
orientations, which have been expressed in a variety of ways, constituting

2.
3.

4.

5.

an enormous corpus. My bibliographic citations provide a few representative

examples.
This discussion will be more fully elaborated in Dube 2002.
Such exceptions include, for example, dependencia theorists and related scholars who
have apprehended the world in terms of an aggrandizing center and an
expropriated periphery, thereby instituting imperialism and neoimperialism
at the core of modern history.
Once more limitations of space permit only indicative references. Here the rst tendency is represented by Bayly 1983, 1988; and Washbrook 1988; the second, by
Cohn 1987, 1996; and Dirks 1987; and the third, by Guha 198289, 1997; Chatterjee and Pandey 1992; Arnold and Hardiman 1994; Amin and Chakrabarty
1996; Bhadra, Prakash, and Tharu 1999; Bhabha 1994; and Spivak 1988. Recent writings that critically engage all three orientations include Dube 1998;
and Skaria 1999.
This is not to deny the palpable place of provisos of progress in apprehensions of the
subcontinent. We nd them in everything from historical debates on social
advance under colonial rule, to sociological celebrations of modernization
theory, to governmental seductions and everyday enchantments of the importance of being modern as a state, a nation, a people. Nor is it to overlook the
signicance of the critique of modernity as embodied, for example, in the
thought and practice of Gandhi. Rather, my point concerns the recentness of
critical considerations of modernity in India within the academy. This also
brings up the salient distinctions between intimations of modernity in South
Asia and Latin America: imagined as a passage of history and instituted as
an attribute of nation building, representations and processes of modernity
in South Asia and in Latin America have both been imbued with difference
with respect to Europe. However, such distinctions have followed divergent
directions. Over the past two centuries, the tangible terms of imperial authority, the immediate pasts of colonial rule, and the urgent designs of new
nations have meant that dominant articulations of modernity in South Asia
stand haunted by the presence of colonial difference and postcolonial distinction. Here the West has never been absent. And so for a long time, in a

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Dube . Introduction

variety of ways, Indian modernity has been apprehended as almost the same,
but different. During this period, the lack of formal empire, the dominance
of a Creole elite, and the prior presence of colonial categories have engendered in Latin America an authoritative modern premised upon specters of
shared history and cultural afnity with Europe. Here Europe has been ever
ahead. Thus, Latin American modernity has been represented as different,
but almost the same.
6. These four distinct apprehensions of modernity are articulated by Gupta 2000; Nandy
1983; Prakash 1999; and Dube forthcoming, respectively. See also Kapur 2000;
and Sheikh 1997.
7. Clearly, the very conditions of possibility of dialogue, debate, and distinction among
the essays collected here lie in the fact that these contributions address a
shared set of concerns, under the rubric of colonial modernities. First, issues
of authoritative dualitiesand of the connections between modern disciplines and disciplinary powerrun throughout the essays of, for example,
Castro-Gmez, Dussel, Lander, Chuaqui, Zermeo, and Dubey, as well as
my own, nding distinct expressions in each. Second, the more specic concerns taken up in the issue reveal, equally, critical conjunctions and productive
divergences. A case in point is the fabrication of the gure of the lowly Indian in Mexico (Saldaa-Portillo and Zermeo); and the proliferation and
reication of difference under the postmodern condition (Castro-Gmez and
Dubey). Indeed, in the section that follows my goal is precisely to present
such binds and distinctions through the ordering of the essays and the means
of describing them.

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