Theorizing Modernities Archives | Contending Modernities

Refusal as Method in Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja

Harini Kumar
May 20, 2025May 20, 2025

Refusal remains a potent idea across disciplinary silos, and the refusals in Judge’s book offer provocations that scholars will be contending with for some time.

Contention, Dwelling, and the Loss of Loss

Series: Symposium on Prophetic Maharaja

Randeep Singh Hothi
May 15, 2025

The caution against fixation radicalizes the possibility of learning, because neither method nor object can be guaranteed by the recuperation of what is lost.

Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition: India and the World

Series: Symposium on Prophetic Maharaja

Nirvikar Singh
May 13, 2025May 16, 2025

The material problems of Indian Punjab will not be solved by a Khalsa Raj. Political autonomy will do nothing by itself to shift Punjab’s economy out of a destructive and unsustainable trap of growing wheat and rice for India’s food security.

The Limits of Critique and the Horizon of Gender Abolition in the Sikh Tradition

Series: Symposium on Prophetic Maharaja

manmit singh
May 9, 2025May 9, 2025

The insistence that queerness and transness are everywhere is an insistence that the Divine is everywhere.

The Mute Eloquence of Impossible Histories

Series: Symposium on Prophetic Maharaja

Purnima Dhavan
May 1, 2025

There is room to embrace the ethics of the vision in this book while still historicizing profusely and even counter-historicizing.

Introduction to Prophetic Maharaja

Series: Symposium on Prophetic Maharaja

Joshua S. Lupo
May 1, 2025May 16, 2025

Judge suggests that the past never contains the certainties we like to project onto it, and thus that the present is unlikely to contain them either.

(Settler) Colonial Logics Beyond Europe

Series: Symposium on Colonizing Kashmir

Hafsa Kanjwal
April 15, 2025April 15, 2025

Values that are seen as having a “positive” valence, such as state-building, democracy, development, and secularism are often weapons of colonial occupation.

Sovereignty and Silence in Modern India

Series: Symposium on Colonizing Kashmir

Matthew Shutzer
April 9, 2025

Kanjwal’s book seeks to imagine a social world outside the varied bonds and discourses of states.

The Politics of Life as a Colonial Governmentality: The Bakshi Regime and the Indian Occupation of Kashmir

Series: Symposium on Colonizing Kashmir

Amen Jaffer
April 2, 2025

Understanding politics of life as a colonial governmentality directs attention to the desires, interests, and motivations that the Bakshi regime sought to produce in Kashmiri subjects.

Indian Occupation in Kashmir: From State Building to Dismantling the State

Series: Symposium on Colonizing Kashmir

Ather Zia
March 25, 2025March 25, 2025

The reduction of Kashmiris into simplistic tropes reinforces a colonizer-colonized dynamic, one which has enabled the Indian state to justify its control over the region.

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