Modernity's Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5738643 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lynn M Thomas (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 116 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 727-740 |
| Publication date | 2011-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1086/ahr.116.3.727 |
| OpenAlex | W2326455938 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 22 |
| References cited | 8 |
AFRICA HAS LONG BEEN FOUNDATIONAL to discussions of the modern.For many Enlightenment thinkers, "Negroes" embodied the antithesis of modern reason.In the nineteenth century, Georg Hegel posited Africa as outside of "universal history."Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud ironically deployed "fetish," a term developed by European travelers and traders to gloss West Africans' seemingly irrational beliefs, to diagnose the ills of modern life.In a somewhat more positive vein, Pablo Picasso, at the height of Europe's imperial conquest of the continent, found inspiration for his modern art in "primitive" African sculpture.Decades later, social scientists turned to late colonial and early postcolonial Africa as a laboratory for testing theories of modernization.Throughout, popular discourses generated by imperial and international reformers, politicians, and journalists tended to figure Africa as the inverse of all things modern: a bastion of backwardness, or at best, tradition. 1 African history as a disciplinary subfield came into being partly by challenging racist, teleological, and condescending presumptions embedded in such conceptions of the modern.This genealogy helps explain why recent discussions of modernity among Africa scholars have been so contentious. 2Drawing insight from those debates, historians of Africa and elsewhere are well positioned to make scholarly discussions of modernity more concrete and analytically productive by developing two approaches.The first involves examining how historical actors have embraced var
Epistemology · Law and economics · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Political Philosophy and Ethics · History · Law · Philosophy
Bibliography of Books and Articles Published in English on Colonialism and Imperialism in 2011
Exile
Conclusion
Radio Soundings
Dialectics of Modernity
Comparative Criminal Justice in the Era of Modernity
Science in the Hands of Love’
The Vanguard of the Atlantic World
The cosmopolitan imperative
S.N. Eisenstadt and African modernities
Surface Tensions
Decolonizing the New Town
Freed Slaves, Missionaries, and Respectability
The Recreation of Modern and African Art at Achimota School in the Gold Coast (1927–52)
Policing the Medina
Prevention
Europe in world regional perspective
Institutions and Countercultures
Tax Farming, Liquor, and the Quest for Fiscal Modernity in Venezuela, 1908-1935
Education and extraversion
Beyond the Static
Tradition, Tribe, and State in Kenya
| Unique citing works | 22 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,57 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2026 (15) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 21 |