Modernity and exclusion / Joel S. Kahn.

Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society.

1. Modernity and its Others: Universal Ideals and Particular Outcomes -- 2. Naturalising Difference: Civilisation and the Primitive in the British Imagination -- 3. American Modern: Aliens, Despots and the Republic -- 4. Civilisational Virtues in the Malay Kampong -- 5. Encountering the Other: Modernism and Racism.

"In what ways has modernity produced social exclusion? Does it make any sense to strive for 'universal' theories or propositions about human behaviour? What does the study of culture in the East tell us about the limitations of Western world-views?" "This book re-examines 'the project of modernity'. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative 'ethnographic' understanding Categorically and methodologically, the book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. Modernity then, is to be understood concretely, but always with the caveat that modern experience and modern analysis is reflexive. The book illustrates these categoric and methodological imperatives by examining cases of 'popular modernism' in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia. The author draws out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism. He concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion. However, by demonstrating that modernism is always embedded in specific historical and cultural contexts, the book also shows that particular forms of racial and cultural exclusion are never inevitable. By revealing and challenging the circumstances of exclusion, modernism can become inclusive of those previously excluded."--BOOK JACKET.