Let me say from the beginning that my title is deliberately provocative. There are many things I think are right about the alternative modernities thesis. The challenge to the dominant narrative of Western modernity, the analysis of the specific characteristics of different cultures and civilizations on their own terms, the search to transform practices of modernity – these are all legitimate and politically laudable elements of the approach. In the introductory essay to his 2001 volume entitled Alternative Modernities, Dilip Gaonkar explains that ‘the very idea of alternative modernities has its origin in the persistent and sometimes violent questioning of the present precisely because the present announces itself as the modern at every national and cultural site today’. For Gaonkar, the signature feature of the alternative modernities approach is ‘to examine the career and dilemmas of modernity from a specific national/cultural site’. In ‘each national or cultural site’, he contends, ‘cultural practices, social forms and institutional arrangements’ that ‘surface’ in ‘the wake of modernity’ are ‘put together (reticulated) in a unique and contingent formation in response to local culture and politics’.[i] At face value these claims seem incontrovertible.
Gaonkar recasts arguments about modernity, which have traditionally been formulated with reference to time, within a spatial and cultural frame. There is, on the one hand, an insistence on the transnational and transcultural, and on the other hand, an emphasis on the local. Only by sticking to a site-bound analysis, which is simultaneously attentive to the unfolding dynamics of globalisation, Gaonkar suggests, is it possible to discern the contours of a modernity that is neither exclusively Western in origin nor conditioned only in reaction to the historical dominance of the West.
Implicit in this approach, although more pronounced in the writings of other thinkers, is a politics of knowledge production. Kuan-Hsing Chen diagnoses the import of Western critical theory into the East Asian context as partly responsible for the limited contact between critical intellectuals in the region as well as the limited political traction their work obtains. Again the proposed solution is a certain localism, this time dubbed internationalist localism, which ‘looks for new political possibilities emerging out of the practices and experiences accumulated during encounters between local history and colonial history’.[ii] Chen is interested in using such localised practices and experiences as a basis for creating inter-Asia networks for critical intellectual and political activities.
What needs to be asked is why a commitment to alternative modernities must involve such a retreat to the local. It is crucial to question the progressive narrative of modernisation that has animated so many discourses and practices of development. But why must this approach imply a spatial politics that privileges any one particular geographical scale above another – in this case, the local whether conceived in sub-national terms or as a practice of regional inter-referencing? The alternative modernities perspective recognises different paths to and outcomes of modernity, but it remains invested in quite a traditional geopolitical view of the world. Its interest in flows, hybridities, overlappings and contestations is somehow not enough to displace a geographical vision that rests in civilizational narratives and divides the globe into continental, national or cultural regions that tend to replicate the established categories of area studies: Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, etc.
Perhaps it is no accident that the alternative modernities thesis has so often articulated itself as a critique of that other, less subtle version of civilizational thought that emerged in the 1990s – Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations.[iii] Advocates of this approach effectively criticize Huntington’s rigid civilizational divides as well as his assumption of imminent conflict between different world cultures. But they also tend to reproduce this same civilizational order in identifying the sites of the various alternative modernities. Thus while Huntington talks about Islamic civilization, a critic like Nulifer Göle discusses Islamic modernities.[iv] The fit between the geographical and civilizational visions of the two perspectives is never perfect. For instance, while Huntington divides Sinic and Japanese civilizations, the alternative modernities approach tends to identify East Asian modernities. Nonetheless, these two opposed perspectives, one touting civilizational conflict and the other advocating cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism, emerged alongside one another in the early 1990s.
The alternative modernities thesis has strong twentieth century precedents, whether in the histories of pan-Africanism and pan-Asianism (as epitomised by figures such as W.E.B DuBois and Rabindrinath Tagore) or in the writings of Japanese intellectuals like Yoshimi Takeuchi. But it was in the early 1990s that this approach gained a strong foothold in discussions about postcolonialism and globalisation. Like Huntington’s thesis, it was to some extent an attempt to confront the contours of a post-cold war world where tensions between capitalism and communism seemed to have calmed (although curiously this was not the case in East Asia where explorations of alternative modernities became quite prevalent). Both approaches were responses to the ways in which geo-cultural regions and their attendant spatiotemporal hierarchies were being reorganised. Both represented a turn away from economic or ideological conceptions of regionalism toward a cultural conception of regionalism, grounded principally in the constructs of civilization and nation. Both tried to displace a modernisation narrative of the West versus the rest with the vision of a multi-polar world. Both placed attention on the interactions between large transnational cultural formations in order to explain local cultural conflicts and social practices. Both questioned the ‘three worlds’ model of global inequalities and sought to account for the rise of regions like China and India. Finally, both placed an emphasis on culture in ways that did not necessarily grapple adequately with the profound transformations of capitalism that accompanied the onset of present globalisation.
I am not trying to suggest that the alternative modernities thesis is a secret sharer in the narrative of the clash of civilizations. Rather this approach presented perhaps the most coherent and powerful critique of Huntington’s view, particularly in its emphasis on the overlapping and bleeding between civilizations. Yet in its very commitment to open and inclusive modernities, the alternative modernities thesis partook in a particular moment of thought about globalisation. In some respects, it was an effort to maintain civilizational thought amidst an emphasis on flows, deterritorialization, postnationalism and imaginaries. There is, however, a need to understand global regionalism as something more than the cultural filter of modernity. Living in a world of flows does not mean that the relations between different kinds of flows are unstructured or merely disjunctive. The mere fact that the world has become more open to the circulation of capital but increasingly closed to the circulation of labour attests the unevenness and even the determination that invests different kinds of global mobilities. It also helps us understand how flows can create, reproduce and transform geographical spaces. Far from the vision of a borderless world, there is a need to recognise that the contemporary world is marked by a proliferation of borders or what some have called a gated globalisation.
To focus on borders as crucial devices for the articulation of space and time in global capitalism is to shift the attention from approaches that stress large scale blocs or containers of social and cultural forms, whether under the sign of the clash of civilizations or alternative modernities. It is of course important to problematise the progressive narrative of modernisation by which all other cultures recognized themselves as particular with respect to Euro-American universalism. In this respect, it is necessary to grapple with the existence of multiple modernities and universalisms that enter into various processes of dialogue and hybridisation as well as undergoing different kinds of interactions with forms and processes such as industrialisation, science and technology, secularisation and so on. But these forms of distinctiveness and mixing, whether conceived under the harmonious sign of global civil society or the more alarming notion of the ‘clash of fundamentalisms ‘, acquire a different meaning and value from the perspective of the border.
An emphasis on borders requires an ongoing questioning of the very unity and distinctiveness of regions and nations within which modernity would take alternative shapes. This is certainly a point that needs to be made with respect to area studies, since diasporas, knowledge circulation, networked forms of distribution and so on imply a multiplication of the conflicts and tensions that crisscross each ‘area’. The more fundamental point, however, is rather that the discourse of alternative modernities tends to congeal the dimension of culture, isolating it from the material forces that shape societal modernisation and producing the appearance of their neutrality. Differential inclusion, which is the primary process of selection and segmentation that occurs at the border, is not a neutral mechanism that is then culturally inflected in diverse societal or geographical contexts. Rather, it is a charged and often violent process that organizes the distribution of subject positions from which both culture and the effects of the material forces of societal modernisation are experienced.[v]
In other words, we can say that governance of borders, far from being a neutral process, is a process that produces its own semblance of neutrality. This is clear when we consider how the discourses and practices that swirl around notions such as equity, due process, security and even justice are crucial to the maintenance, functioning and policing of borders. While not totally incompatible with established discourses of alternative modernities, the processes of differential inclusion remain seriously under-analyzed in these and other attempts to move beyond a Eurocentric version of modernity. A deep consideration of the proliferation of borders is warranted if we wish to move the discussion of global regionalism beyond mere references to culture and civilization. There is a need to restore historical weight to the debate, to wrestle with the transformations wrought by global capitalism, and to recognize that world regionalism is no more about civilization as it is about the provisional assemblage of markets and states.
[i] Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (2001) On Alternative Modernities, in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed. Alternative Modernities, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 15-16.
[ii] Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Durham: Duke University Press, p. 223.
[iii] Samuel Huntington (1993) The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72: 22-49.
[iv] Nilüfer Göle (2000), Snapshots of Islamic Modernities, Daedalus 129.1: 91-117.
[v] Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2008) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour, Transversal, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en; Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2010) Frontières et inclusion différentielle, Rue Descartes 67 : 102-108.
