Theorizing Modernities Archives | Contending Modernities

(Settler) Colonial Logics Beyond Europe

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.

Introduction to Symposium on Colonizing Kashmir

Series: Symposium on Colonizing Kashmir

Joshua S. Lupo
March 25, 2025March 25, 2025

What happens when the postcolonial state itself becomes an agent of colonization and not merely one of its victims?

Muslim Mimesis: Almost The Same but Not Quite?

Series: Symposium on The Muslim Difference

Youshaa Patel
March 12, 2025March 12, 2025

We cannot allow [our] differences to transmutate into subjugation, violence, terror—lest we become monsters ourselves.

Imitatio Imam: Reimagining Imitation as a Bridge to the Other

Series: Symposium on The Muslim Difference

Haroon Sidat
March 6, 2025March 6, 2025

Muslims in the West, like others, can maintain and hold on to their theological claims, while beautifying their social presence with and among others.

The Difference Within Us: Our Humanity and Inhumanity

Series: Symposium on The Muslim Difference

Martin Nguyen
February 26, 2025

What is disclosed when we seek to understand the fine line of difference within us all?

The Necessary Alterity of Mimesis and its Effects

Series: Symposium on The Muslim Difference

Ashwak Hauter
February 19, 2025February 19, 2025

The unknowability and oscillation of the soul imbue individuals with a radical otherness or alterity.

Imitation as Becoming: Didactic Mimesis in Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference

Series: Symposium on The Muslim Difference

Anna Bigelow
February 13, 2025

Patel leads us to a generative space of inquiry, offering multiple routes of exploration as we seek to understand human nature and the human quest to know ultimate reality.

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