[PDF] China India And Alternative Asian Modernities eBook

Author : Sanjay Kumar
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 26,52 MB
Release : 2019-03-29
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0429536453

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The conception of modernity as a radical rupture from the past runs parallel to the conception of Europe as the primary locus of global history. The essays in this volume contest the temporal and spatial divisions—between past and present, modernity and tradition, and Europe’s progress and Asia’s stasis—which the conventional narrative of modernity creates. Drawing on early modern Chinese and Indian history and culture instead, the authors of the book explore the provenance of modernity beyond the west to see it in a transcultural and pluralistic light. The central argument of this volume is that modernity does not have a singular core or essence—a causal centre. Its key features need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations imagined. By studying the Bhakti movement, Confucian democracy, and the maritime and agrarian economies of China and India, this book enlarges the terms of debate and revisits devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authority, and rural as resources for modernity. This book will be of great interest to researchers and academicians working in the areas of history, Sociology, Cultural Studies, literature, geopolitics, South Asian and East Asian Studies.

Author : Eva Kit-Wah Man
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 37,76 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Asia
ISBN : 9783034300933

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This book is a collection of selected essays presented at the International Symposium on «Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality and Hybridity» hosted by the Humanities Programme of Hong Kong Baptist University in September 2006. As «modernity» has been used to describe the cultural, economic and socio-political conditions in the Western worlds, the time in which we now live and the Asian countries where capitalistic transformation is extensively carried out are already articulating their own descriptions. The essays collected here discuss the notions of «contemporary», «Asia» and «modernities» as they relate to the global trend of adopting capitalism. They probe into questions related to modernity as well as global modernity, ranging from China in particular to Asia in general. As reflected in the pluriversal meanings in the title, the book endeavours to make critical inquiries into the concept of modernity/modernities from different perspectives.

Author : Peter van der Veer
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 11,42 MB
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 0691128154

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A comparative look at religion and spirituality in postcolonial China and India The Modern Spirit of Asia challenges the notion that modernity in China and India are derivative imitations of the West, arguing that these societies have transformed their ancient traditions in unique and distinctive ways. Peter van der Veer begins with nineteenth-century imperial history, exploring how Western concepts of spirituality, secularity, religion, and magic were used to translate the traditions of India and China. He traces how modern Western notions of religion and magic were incorporated into the respective nation-building projects of Chinese and Indian nationalist intellectuals, yet how modernity in China and India is by no means uniform. While religion is a centerpiece of Indian nationalism, it is viewed in China as an obstacle to progress that must be marginalized and controlled. The Modern Spirit of Asia moves deftly from Kandinsky's understanding of spirituality in art to Indian yoga and Chinese qi gong, from modern theories of secularism to histories of Christian conversion, from Orientalist constructions of religion to Chinese campaigns against magic and superstition, and from Muslim Kashmir to Muslim Xinjiang. Van der Veer, an outspoken proponent of the importance of comparative studies of religion and society, eloquently makes his case in this groundbreaking examination of the spiritual and the secular in China and India.

Author : Shibsankar Jena
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 47,12 MB
Release : 2023-11-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1527552896

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The social science discourse on the power of modernity and its everyday negotiation with tradition and locality in India has been a matter of continuous debate and discussion among academicians since the colonial era. By taking agriculture as a special field of investigation, this book describes the condition of ‘modernity’ in the agrarian social system of contemporary India. Farming is not only an economic activity, but also a personality formation where ‘status’ plays a significant role in Indian society. Taking ‘culture’, and ‘social status’ as the two important variables in the local ‘agriculture as performance’, this book develops a sociology of knowledge approach towards agrarian modernity and development in postcolonial India.

Author : Meena Bhargava
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 27,40 MB
Release : 2022-11-30
Category : History
ISBN : 100927662X

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Did modernity arrive in South Asia with British colonialism? Or was South Asia already modern by then? What might have that modernity looked like? The Early Modern in South Asia engages with these questions. It brings together ten chapters, which collectively trace the contours of South Asia's early modernity between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. They do this by examining the nature of historical change in various domains, including philosophy, warfare, law, environment, politics, violence, religion, and society. The chapters argue that in all these fields, there were noticeable developments during this period, marking a shift from the medieval to the early modern. The introductory chapter contextualizes this by analysing the politics of periodization in history-writing across the world. It discusses the meanings of the relatively new concept of early modernity and the implications of its use for how we understand historical change and continuity in South Asia.

Author : Andrew N. Weintraub
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 44,73 MB
Release : 2017-07-31
Category : Music
ISBN : 0824874196

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The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of global historical changes. Female entertainers, positioned at the margins of intersecting fields of activities, created something hitherto unknown: they were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior, lifestyles, and morals. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures, of a newly emerging mass culture, and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Vamping the Stage is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music. Historicizing the artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and particularly as models for new life styles. Women’s voices, mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life.

Author : Derek Heng
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 92 pages
File Size : 25,61 MB
Release : 2023-01-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1108903479

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Since the late first millennium CE, Maritime Southeast Asia has been an inter-connected zone, with its societies and states maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with both China and Japan on the east, and the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East on the west. This global connectedness was facilitated by merchant and shipping networks that originated from within and outside Southeast Asia, resulting in a trans-regional economy developing by the early second millennium CE. Sojourning populations began to appear in Maritime Southeast Asia, culminating in records of Chinese and Indian settlers in such places as Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and the Gulf of Siam by the mid-first millennium CE. At the same time, information of products that were harvested in Southeast Asia began to be appropriated by pockets of society in China, the India and the Middle East, resulting in the production of new knowledge and usages for these products in these markets.

Author : Purushottam Agrawal
Publisher : Westland Non-Fiction
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 23,35 MB
Release :
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 939576757X

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A FASCINATING AND RIGOROUS EXAMINATION OF KABIR’S LIFE AND POETRY AND HIS RELEVANCE TODAY, FOR BOTH THE SCHOLAR AND GENERAL READER As the right wing tries to claim Kabir for itself, while other conservatives disown him and yet others portray him as a secular idol beyond religion, the poet has never been so misunderstood. Coming from the Nirgun bhakti tradition, the words of this fifteenth-century poet have the power to reach beyond time and speak to us today. Was he a Hindu or Muslim or was he beyond religion? Did he try to cultivate a new faith or did he eschew organised religion altogether? Was his modernity an exception or a reflection of the times he lived in? What does Kabir’s life and poetry tell us about this nation’s past and present? In this rare appraisal of Kabir’s writings and his life, Purushottam Agarwal approaches this timeless poet-revolutionary with little preconceptions, presenting him the way the poet wanted to be seen, rather than what his followers and fans want to see in him.

Author : Alexander Woodside
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 46,40 MB
Release : 2006-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674022171

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In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures. The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution. A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.

Author : Kai Kresse
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 23,95 MB
Release : 2022-12-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 3110733331

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As far too many intellectual histories and theoretical contributions from the ‘global South’ remain under-explored, this volume works towards redressing such imbalance. Experienced authors, from the regions concerned, along different disciplinary lines, and with a focus on different historical timeframes, sketch out their perspectives of envisaged transformations. This includes specific case studies and reflexive accounts from African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. Taking a critical stance on the ongoing dominance of Eurocentrism in academia, the authors present their contributions in relation to current decolonial challenges. Hereby, they consider intellectual, practical and structural aspects and dimensions, to mark and build their respective positions. From their particular vantage points of (trans)disciplinary and transregional engagement, they sketch out potential pathways for addressing the unfinished business of conceptual decolonization. The specific individual positionalities of the contributors, which are shaped by location and regional perspective as much as in disciplinary, biographical, linguistic, religious, and other terms, are hereby kept in view. Drawing on their significant experiences and insights gained in both the global north and global south, the contributors offer original and innovative models of engagement and theorizing frames that seek to restore and critically engage with intellectual practices from particular regions and transregional contexts in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. This volume builds on a lecture series held at ZMO in the winter 2019-2020