General Information
Course Description
9541 - Modernity and its Others: Questioning Eurocentrist Discourses on the Modern - This course explores critical challenges to the discourse of modernity, in particular to its transmutation from a European ethical/political project into a powerful eurocentric narrative of the modern. The terms of European culture, civilization, and subjectivity–taken until recently to be abstractly human-universal, and, thus unquestioningly as constitutive of modern identity–have been challenged and shown to be the outcomes of a continuous dialectic between Europe and other regions. Moreover, this eurocentrism of modernity, as Dussel has argued, "lies in the confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe's position as center." Power, then, is at the core of the discourse of modernity. The course will proceed through an examination of certain key philosophical and historical texts, in addition to texts from other disciplinary traditions (e.g., literature, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology). We will trace the themes of "historicism", "rationality", and "the subject" which run through the texts and engage with the challenges posed–and alternatives proposed–by critics.
