Modernity 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.

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.

Thinking From Vulnerability, Enrique Dussel (Z”L)

Series: Remembering Dussel

Santiago Slabodsky
January 22, 2024January 25, 2024

Let us remember Enrique Dussel as someone who challenged us to keep building transmodern critical solidarity movements from the perspective of vulnerable exteriority.

When Politics are Sacralized?

Series: When Politics are Sacralized Symposium

Raef Zreik
October 6, 2022February 1, 2024

At its core, Zionism is not the political being sacralized, but the religious being politicized.

Modernity, Coloniality, and Interiority in Kindred Spirits

Series: Symposium on Kindred Spirits

Brenna Moore
May 4, 2022February 1, 2024

The affective, even queer way Maritain and Massignon carried themselves is “modern” in a sense because modernity creates space for the perpetuation of hegemonic norms as well as their subversion.

Modern Mystic Activist Scholars Resist Fascism, Colonialism, and Definitional Pigeonholing: A Comment on Brenna Moore’s Kindred Spirits

Series: Symposium on Kindred Spirits

Scott Appleby
April 26, 2022

The story Moore tells of these boundary-dwelling thinkers underscores the necessity to resist facile reliance on gender, race, and nation as stable categories by which to understand the fluidity of the modern period and modern identities.

Introduction to Symposium on Kindred Spirits

Series: Symposium on Kindred Spirits

Joshua S. Lupo
April 13, 2022December 9, 2022

By bringing Moore’s insights to their work, these contributors open up space for thought that break through the modern boundaries of nation, discipline, and thought.

Modern Religion, Modern Sign, Modern Ritual

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires

Niloofar Haeri
January 18, 2022January 25, 2024

When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others.

Religion, Modernity, and Experience: Reflections on Niloofar Haeri’s Say What Your Longing Heart Desires

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires

Ata Anzali
December 14, 2021January 20, 2022

A close analysis of ʿerfān and hāl, I believe, is very helpful in unsettling some of the dominant binaries through which religion is often understood in Iran.

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires">Read More →

Articles tagged as "Modernity"