Modernity's Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts Author(s): By LynnM.

Thomas Reviewed work(s): Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 727-740 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.727 . Accessed: 28/08/2012 07:05
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AHR Roundtable Modernitys Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts

LYNN M. THOMAS

AFRICA HAS LONG BEEN FOUNDATIONAL to discussions of the modern. For many Enlightenment thinkers, Negroes embodied the antithesis of modern reason. In the nineteenth century, Georg Hegel posited Africa as outside of universal history. Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud ironically deployed fetish, a term developed by European travelers and traders to gloss West Africans seemingly irrational beliefs, to diagnose the ills of modern life. In a somewhat more positive vein, Pablo Picasso, at the height of Europes imperial conquest of the continent, found inspiration for his modern art in primitive African sculpture. Decades later, social scientists turned to late colonial and early postcolonial Africa as a laboratory for testing theories of modernization. Throughout, popular discourses generated by imperial and international reformers, politicians, and journalists tended to gure Africa as the inverse of all things modern: a bastion of backwardness, or at best, tradition.1 African history as a disciplinary subeld came into being partly by challenging racist, teleological, and condescending presumptions embedded in such conceptions of the modern. This genealogy helps explain why recent discussions of modernity among Africa scholars have been so contentious.2 Drawing insight from those debates, historians of Africa and elsewhere are well positioned to make scholarly discussions of modernity more concrete and analytically productive by developing two approaches. The rst involves examining how historical actors have embraced varFor very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Jennifer Cole, Gabrielle Hecht, Nancy Rose Hunt, Lisa Lindsay, Julie Livingston, Uta G. Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Janelle Taylor, and the anonymous reviewers for the AHR .
1 Important works that examine this guring of Africa include Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Race, Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1985); V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, Ind., 1988); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Calif., 2001); William Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish, pts. 1, 2, and 3a, Res 9 (Spring 1985): 517 and 13 (Spring 1987): 23 45; Simon Gikandi, Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference, in Sarah Nuttall, ed., Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (Durham, N.C., 2006), 3159; Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); Owen Sichone, The Social Sciences in Africa, in Dorothy Ross and Theodore Porter, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2008), 466 481; and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1992). 2 For a trenchant discussion of how the burden of responding to racism has limited writing and thinking about Africa, see Achille Mbembe, African Modes of Self-Writing, trans. Steven Rendall, Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 239273; and Mbembe, On the Power of the False, trans. Judith Inggs, Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002): 629641.

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ious denitions of the modern to make political claims and envision different futures; the second entails focusing on mid-level or intermediate analytical concepts.

FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, much historical scholarship on Africa and the African diaspora has sought to discredit thinking that positions Africa as non-modern. West African pastors, seeking to foster patriotism and Christianity, pioneered this retort in the late nineteenth century by writing histories of their own country like those that existed for England . . . Rome and Greece.3 In 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois challenged arguments that Africa lay outside of universal history by chronicling ancient kingdoms. Although Du Bois shared his ages perspective that contemporary Africa lagged behind Europe, he argued that this was due not to the inferiority of its inhabitants but rather to inhospitable geography and the destruction wrought by the Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades.4 Subsequent scholars similarly questioned commonplace conceptions of Africa as backward and marginal. C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, argued that enslaved Africans in the New World fueled Europes industrial growth, and hence the creation of the modern world.5 Many of the rst Ph.D.s in African history to graduate from U.S., European, and African universities during the 1950s and 1960s wrote histories of precolonial states and trade networks to counter perceptions of Africas past as primitive and unchanging.6 Partly inspired by anticolonial movements, such scholarship contributed to nation-building by providing accounts of precolonial complexity and innovation. A commitment to refuting the continents status as the antithesis of the modern motivated much early African historiography. Notably, African history as an academic subeld emerged at the height of the Cold War and during the heyday of modernization theory. At the same time that historians of precolonial Africa were reconstructing usable pasts for newly independent nations, social scientists predominantly U.S. sociologists, economists, and political scientistscharted their futures using modernization theory. Elaborated to make sense of and help manage postcolonial countries, modernization theory pro3 Quotes from Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, ed. Obadiah Johnson (Lagos, 1921), vii. Johnson completed his manuscript in the 1890s. On early West African historical writing, see Toyin Falola, ed., Yoruba Historiography (Madison, Wis., 1991); Paul Jenkins, ed., The Recovery of the West African Past: African Pastors and African History in the Nineteenth CenturyC. C. Reindorf and Samuel Johnson (Basel, 1998); and Philip S. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville, Va., 2000). 4 Quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; repr., Oxford, 2007), 1, 2. See also Joseph C. Miller, History and Africa/Africa and History, American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (February 1999): 132. 5 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Touissant LOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London, 1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944). 6 For example, K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 18301885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford, 1956); Cheikh Anta Diop, Lunite culturelle de lAfrique noire: Domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans lantiquite classique (Paris, 1959); Jan Vansina, Les anciens royaumes de la savane (Le opoldville, 1965); A. Adu Boahen, Topics in West African History (London, 1966); J. D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa (Evanston, Ill., 1966); Bethwell A. Ogot, History of the Southern Luo (Nairobi, 1967); David William Cohen, The Historical Tradition of Busoga, Mukama and Kintu (Oxford, 1972); Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom: A History (Madison, Wis., 1974); and Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu, 15001900 (Nairobi, 1974).

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vided U.S. policymakers with an ideological rejoinder to communism. Optimistically, it promised that through state-guided capitalist development and the cultivation of new social and political values, impoverished and insular traditional societies could achieve a modernity that looked a lot like postWorld War II U.S. society.7 Although historians accounts of varied and dynamic precolonial institutions belied such easy distinctions between traditional and modern societies, few of these historians directly critiqued modernization theory. That was left to a new generation of historians who engaged Marxist and feminist theory. Decrying modernization theory as ethnocentric and duplicitous, these critiques developed in three directions during the 1970s and 1980s. First, inspired by dependency theory, some historians argued that African countries could never duplicate Western development, as it had relied upon the exploitation of a weaker periphery through slavery and imperialism, strategies unavailable to most nations by the midtwentieth century. In pursuing this approach, scholars of underdevelopment such as Walter Rodney primarily examined inequalities between different regions of the world or between discrete, often racially dened, social groups.8 By contrast, the Marxist and feminist social historians who followed focused on economic and political struggles within regions and, at times, racial groups. Modeling their work after Anglo-American social historians who had demonstrated that the Wests modernization was anything but smooth and instead was marked by tremendous class and gender conict, these Africa scholars examined the contradictory and often violent social transformations that ensued from the slave trades, European imperialism, and decolonization.9 Finally, Africa historians challenged modernization theorys divide between the modern and the traditional by engaging Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers argument about the invention of tradition to explore how institutions previously presumed to be primordial, such as ethnicity, chieftainship, and customary law, were, in fact, relatively recent creations of the colonial period. Such insights questioned modernization theorys foundational categories by revealing the novelty of tradition.10 The sizable scholarship inspired by these three counterargu7 Dean C. Tipps, Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective, Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 2 (March 1973): 199226; Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and Nation Building in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000). 8 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar es Salaam, 1973). See also Robin Palmer and Neil Parsons, The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1977); and Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Berkeley, Calif., 1979). 9 For an insightful discussion of how Anglo-Marxist social historians such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm critiqued modernization theorists for portraying Britains transition to capitalism and democracy as peaceful, see Simon Gunn and James Vernon, Introduction: What Was Liberal Modernity and Why Was It Peculiar in Imperial Britain? in Gunn and Vernon, eds., The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley, Calif., 2011). Seminal works of African social history include Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 19001933 (London, 1976); Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1977); Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, eds., Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 18701930 (London, 1982); Elias Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 18591960 (Madison, Wis., 1990); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990); and Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riots: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856 1888 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995). 10 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). Key Africanist studies that engaged and rened this argument include Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and

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ments meant that African historiography largely came of age through debunking modernization theory. The considerable intellectual energy expended to criticize this theory helps explain why some historians of Africa were taken aback when, in the early 1990s, at the dawn of what many dubbed the age of globalization, modernity reemerged as a commonplace in academic discourse. As Frederick Cooper writes, For someone of my generation, coming of intellectual age in the 1970s, there is an irony to the modernity fad of the 1990s and 2000s. We cut our eye teeththe ones that chew up conceptson modernization. What his post-1968 generation had found so repugnant, Cooper explains, was modernization theorys ethnocentrism and its insistence that large-scale change was self-propelled, leaving little room for the actions of human agents or for the importance of struggle.11 From this perspective, the high abstraction of modernity raised similar concerns. By contrast, scholars who engaged modernity as an analytical concept or ideological construct argued that they were not resuscitating postWorld War II modernization theory but instead addressing the most pressing intellectual and political issues of the late twentieth century. During the 1980s, postmodern theory prompted considerable debate over what modernity actually was, and encouraged some to defend it as a progressive political project.12 Meanwhile, the rise of the so-called Asian tigers and the Soviet Unions collapse suggested to some that many countries were, in fact, converging around a Western capitalist model.13 Among scholars of Africa, philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji and Kwame Anthony Appiah responded to these intellectual debates, as well as economic stagnation and political disappointment on the continent, by insisting on the importance of modernity and rationality to Africas past and future.14 As Simon Gikandi has insightfully observed, these philosophers defense of categories that were under siege in European and American theory was both a response to European philosophys positioning of Africa as outside of reason and a prescription for addressing fe mi Ta wo ` has recently sought postcolonial Africas crisis.15 In this same vein, Olu to demonstrate how colonialism preempted modernity in Africa by crushing West
the Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985); Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J., 1996); and Carolyn Hamilton, Terric Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 11 Frederick Cooper, Modernity, in Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 113149, quotes from 117. 12 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Introduction, in Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago, 1993), xi; Bruce M. Knauft, Critically Modern: An Introduction, in Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 1013. 13 Wolfgang Kno bl, Modernization Theory, Modernization and African Modernities: An Outsiders View, in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt, eds., African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Portsmouth, N.H., 2002), 163166; Knauft, Critically Modern, 1517. 14 Paulin J. Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 1996); Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York, 1992). See also Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reections on the African Experience (Oxford, 1997). 15 Simon Gikandi, Reason, Modernity and the African Crisis, in Deutsch, Probst, and Schmidt, African Modernities, 135157.

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Africans enthusiastic engagement of subjectivity, reason, and progress, politicophilosophical concepts introduced by European missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century only to be contravened by the establishment of formal colonial rule a few decades later.16 For many historians of Africa, however, these philosophical discussions of modernity have been less inuential than those in sociocultural anthropology. African history and anthropology have long been in close, if often contentious, dialogue. Since the early 1980s, when anthropologists became more historically minded and historians became more interested in cultural subjects and the less distant past, the divide between the two groups has become increasingly blurred. Jean and John Comaroff prompted much discussion of modernity within African studies by situating it as an ideological formation at the heart of mission Christianity in nineteenthcentury southern Africa.17 Their work emerged from a broader effort among anthropologists and historians to demonstrate how formations conventionally deemed modernsuch as nationalism and liberalismcame into being through colonialism.18 It also intersected with Arjun Appadurais and Carol Breckenridges observation that intensied forms of media and migration in the late twentieth century had given rise to a new, global era of modernity.19 These anthropologists and others distinguished their historical and contemporary analyses of modernity from modernization theory by rejecting the latters optimism in favor of the more ambivalent views of modernity developed by social theorists such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, mile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Michel Foucault who considered both the E liberatory and oppressive potential of post-Enlightenment political institutions and postIndustrial Revolution material transformations.20 Moreover, they sought to avoid the teleology and Eurocentrism of modernization theory by arguing that rather than being singular, modernity had multiple alternative, parallel, vernacular, colonial, or even African forms.21
Olu fe mi Ta wo ` , How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 2010). John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1997); John Comaroff, Governmentality, Materiality, Legality, Modernity: On the Colonial State in Africa, in Deutsch, Probst, and Schmidt, African Modernities, 107134, esp. 130 n. 40. The Comaroffs have sought to clarify their use of modernity as an ideological formation rather than an analytical concept while admitting that we social scientists constantly slip between using the term to describe an ideological or folk category and deploying it as an analytic construct. Interview with Jean and John Comaroff, NAB: Newsletter of African Studies at Bayreuth University 1, no. 1 (2002): 3. 18 For example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1983); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Calif., 2002). 19 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996); Carol A. Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis, 1995). 20 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot, in Knauft, Critically Modern, 220237; Peter Pels, Introduction: Magic and Modernity, in Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford, Calif., 2003), 138; Peter Geschiere, Birgit Meyer, and Peter Pels, Introduction, in Geschiere, Meyer, and Pels, eds., Readings in Modernity in Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 2008), 17. 21 On the multiplying of modernity, see Knauft, Critically Modern, 1820. Key texts include Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Difference-Deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal, History Workshop 36, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 134; Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of
16 17

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For several reasons, many Africa scholars have been attracted to this ambivalent and multiplying conception of modernity. Identifying modern formations in Africa appears as a powerful and ironic antidote to persistent global imaginings of the continent as mired in tradition. Like the invention of tradition approach, modernity scholarship seeks to subvert dehistoricizing and exoticizing representations by situating Africa as connected to and coeval with the rest of the world.22 For instance, scholars now frequently evoke modernity when discussing practices of witchcraft and magic, phenomena long regarded by Western observers as epitomizing Africas nonmodern character.23 Modernity also appeals to African and other non-Western specialists because it appears to make research in seemingly peripheral places relevant to wider audiences. By evoking modernity to make sense of a remote village in Togo or Maasai men in Tanzania, scholars position their work as being in dialogue with central concerns of social theory.24 Following the publication of Appadurais and Breckenridges edited volumes in the mid-1990s, inclusion of modernity in ones book or article title became a shorthand way to signal that ones work was au courant with broader scholarly discussions. Equally important, Africa scholarship on modernity has been propelled by the prevalence of talk about the modern and the traditional on the ground in Africa. More than one researcher has had the unsettling experience of listening to informants who sound like an out-of-date sociology textbook as they explain the difference between African tradition and European modernity.25 While scholars were preoccupied with debunking modernization theory, its key tenets became entrenched in folk epistemologies. The enduring purchase of the modern and traditional as explanatory concepts in contemporary Africa, some argue, makes the study of modernity an analytical imperative.26 As already noted, scholarly engagements of modernity have confronted trenchant criticism within African studies. Some argue that despite its best efforts, this scholarship reproduces the vague simplications of modernization theory. The multiplying of modernity, according to Cooper, does not overcome the concepts limitations. Rather, it introduces new obfuscations as the practitioners of this approach fail to
Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C., 1997); Brian Larkin, Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities, Africa 67, no. 3 (1997): 406 440; Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley, Calif., 1999); Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (New York, 1999); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, On Alternative Modernities, Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 118; Multiple Modernities, Special Issue, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000). 22 This emphasis is part of a broader response to Johannes Fabians criticism in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983) that anthropologists create their subjects as others by representing them as occupying a time that is behind rather than contemporaneous. 23 Comaroff and Comaroff, Modernity and Its Malcontents ; Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, trans. Peter Geschiere and Janet Roitman (Charlottesville, Va., 1997; orig. French ed. 1995); Meyer and Pels, Magic and Modernity; Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, eds., Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft, and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (New York, 2001). 24 Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, 1999); Dorothy L. Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors: Modernity and the Production of Maasai Modernities, in Hodgson, ed., Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives (New York, 2001), 105145. 25 Quotes from James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 84. 26 Comaroff and Comaroff, Introduction; Geschiere, Meyer, and Pels, Introduction.

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specify the commonalities that link the various forms, leaving the term to encompass seemingly everything and nothing.27 Moreover, Cooper argues, in constructing alternative modernities, scholars often rely on a caricatured conception of post-Enlightenment European history that is devoid of debate and struggle.28 Taking a different tack, James Ferguson argues that the multiple modernities approach fails to acknowledge the profound material inequities that structure todays world. Whereas visiting anthropologists might identify and even celebrate the ingenuity of alternative modernities in contemporary Africa, permanent residents most often emphasize the lack of modernity epitomized by bad roads, poor health care, crumbling buildings, and precariously improvised livelihoods.29 For many living in areas of Africa that have experienced economic decline and increased political instability in recent decades, the failure of a universal modernity feels more like a nightmare than an achievement. Still others criticize modernity scholarship for imposing a chronologically shallow metanarrative on historically deep and socially complex realities. David Schoenbrun contends that emphasis on modernity reies the divide between the precolonial and colonial/postcolonial periods, underestimating how meanings and practices rooted in centuries of African history continued to shape life after European conquest.30 Similarly, some scholars criticize modernity scholarship for fostering ethnographic misrepresentations that foreground analysts predetermined conceptual categories at the expense of developing them through dialogue with their informants. In making out-of-the-way locales appear more relevant to social theory or more connected to global politics, they insist, scholars ride roughshod over the practices and beliefs of those they study, and presumptively prioritize cultural rupture over continuity.31 These critiques raise one of the most challenging questions faced now by multiple generations of scholars: how to counter the pernicious and persistent positioning of Africa as outside of the modern while simultaneously acknowledging the historical depth, complexity, and difference encompassed within its social domains.
27 Cooper, Modernity. For this same criticism, see also Deborah Spitulnik, Accessing Local Modernities: Reections on the Place of Linguistic Evidence in Ethnography, in Knauft, Critically Modern, 194 219; and John D. Kelly, Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to Modernity: Getting Out of the Modernist Sublime, ibid., 258286. 28 Cooper, Modernity, quote from 148. This point is in line with Bruno Latours argument in We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993; orig. French ed. 1991), that Western claims to modernity have been predicated upon reducing complex phenomena to puried and spurious dualities. Responding to Cooper, Prasenjit Duara and Lynn Hunt have argued that his critique of modernity scholarship trips on its own logic by presuming the distinctiveness of the post-Enlightenment era and by depending on a very modern conception of time. Duara, To Think Like an Empire, History and Theory 46, no. 2 (May 2007): 292298; Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest, 2008), 104 106. 29 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, N.C., 2006), quote from 33. For critiques of Fergusons account of modernity talk in contemporary Zambia, see Karen Tranberg Hansens review of Expectations of Modernity in American Anthropologist 103, no. 3 (2001): 863864; Owen Sichone, Pure Anthropology in a Highly Indebted Poor Country, Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 369379; and Spitulnik, Accessing Local Modernities. 30 David L. Schoenbrun, Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa, American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 14031439. See also Florence Bernault, Body, Power and Sacrice in Equatorial Africa, Journal of African History 47, no. 2 (2006): 207239. 31 Harri Englund and James Leach, Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity, Current Anthropology 41, no. 2 (April 2000): 225248.

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ONE PRODUCTIVE WAY THAT HISTORIANS can respond to this question is to pay greater attention to how people have used the term modern to make political claims and envision different futures. Given the disciplines concern with recovering prior and frequently forgotten ways of apprehending the world, historians are well-situated to reconstruct how people in the past have variously dened the modern, how those denitions have shifted over time, and how they have been part of important struggles. Rather than historians engaging modernity as a static ideological formation or our own category of analysis, such an approach considers the modern as a native category for claiming and denying political inclusion and imagining newoften betterways of being. This fundamentally historicist tack contributes to often highly abstract discussions of modernity by demonstrating just how diverse and dynamic denitions of the modern have been, and how those denitions have emerged from specic material relations, strategies of rule, and social movements. Moreover, it builds on historians heightened appreciation, since the linguistic turn, for the power of language or discourse to help shape political realities. Within African historical studies, this approach has already yielded results. Prominent among its practitioners is Frederick Cooper, already mentioned as a critic of much recent modernity scholarship. Cooper has demonstrated how British and French colonial ofcials used modern in the immediate postWorld War II period to describe more interventionist policies. Whereas European colonizers had long evoked the civilizing mission to denote efforts to transform African society, they deployed modern in the 1940s to signal a greater commitment to dismantling traditional social institutions and involving school-educated Africans in local governance. Although ofcials intended these modern policies to quiet metropolitan and African critics, they provided a framework for trade union activists and nationalists to demand greater reform, culminating in calls for independence. The profound contradiction between material inequality and universal aspiration raised in these negotiations, Cooper argues, is what social scientists of the 1950s sought to resolve through modernization theory.32 It is this same contradiction that the rst generation of postcolonial leaders, from Jomo Kenyatta to Le opold Senghor, sought to address through modern policies of development. Across Africa, claims to and visions of being modern remained salient following political independence. In Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Ferguson documents how during Zambias copper boom of the 1950s and 1960s, mineworkers and many of their compatriots came to share with modernization theorists a faith that their lives would look increasingly like those in the West. For these Zambians, being modern meant having steady salaries and pensions, schools, health clinics, protable cash crops, and the means to purchase commodities manufactured elsewhere. As coppers buying power on the world market slumped in the mid-1970s and Zambia slid from being a middle-income to a highly indebted country, Ferguson explains, many Zambians felt cheated out of modernity.33 Considering the same time period in Ethiopia, Donald Donham demonstrates how the modern, dened as the notion that some societies are
32 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996). 33 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.

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ahead and others are in need of catching up, spurred the varied political projects of Emperor Haile Selassie, evangelical Christians, and Marxist revolutionaries.34 For all of these historical actors, the modern signaled entitlement to membership in more prosperous political communities. Feminist scholars have shown how claims to and fantasies about being modern circulated in mid-twentieth-century African popular culture, and how those circulations frequently stirred anxieties over changing gender and sexual relations. Before colonial ofcials and African nationalist leaders argued over what the modern meant, writers in Anglophone black newspapers debated whether modern innovations, including schooling for boys and girls, romantic love, and greater equality between the sexes, were laudable developments or damaging to African tradition.35 Through discussing who and what was modern, young men and women, in particular, envisioned new ways of looking, living, and loving. As elsewhere in the world, familial relations and female roles marked as modern could generate considerable unease.36 In her history of Nigerian railway workers, Lisa Lindsay demonstrates that it was in dening the ideal family form that colonial ofcials vision of modernization during the 1950s and 1960s differed most from o `laju , the local Yoruba-language term for enlightenment and civilization. Whereas proponents of both modernization and o `laju valued schooling and salaried employment, colonial ofcials embraced the nuclear family, while many Yorubaspeaking men and women valorized the big man whose household might include multiple wives, extended kin, and clients.37 Debates over whether modern gender relations were appropriate for Africans only intensied after independence. During the 1960s and 1970s, male politicians in East Africa routinely denounced modern women who wore miniskirts and wigs, used cosmetics, and demanded legal equality as corrupters of African culture.38 While in one register these nationalist leaders
34 Donald L. Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1999). On the modern under other socialist regimes in Africa, see James C. Scott, Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization, in Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 223261; Jay Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 2009). 35 Shula Marks, Patriotism, Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness, in Vail, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, 215240; Stephanie Newell, An Incident of Colonial Intertextuality: The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for Mr. Shaw, in Newell, Ghanaian Popular Fiction: Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life and Other Tales (Athens, Ohio, 2000), 7087; Lynn M. Thomas, The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa, Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 461 490; Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, eds., Love in Africa (Chicago, 2009). 36 Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman-Nation-State (London, 1989); Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York, 1992); Partha Chatterjee, A Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J., 1993); Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarco n, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham, N.C., 1999). See also see the Modern Girl Around the World project, discussed below in fn. 45. 37 Lisa A. Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003). 38 Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, Calif., 2003); Thomas, Schoolgirl Pregnancies, Letter-Writing, and Modern Persons in Late Colonial East Africa, in Karin Barber, ed., Africas Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, Ind., 2006), 180207; Kenda Mutongi, Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya (Chicago, 2007); Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, N.C., 2011).

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evoked the modern to afrm their commitment to economic development, in another they used it to criticize some womens political claims and self-fashioning by casting them as saboteurs of tradition. New technologies, neoliberal structural adjustment policies, and the AIDS epidemic have all contributed to new denitions of what it means to be modern. Through videos and DVDs, satellite TV, and the Internet, people gain in-depth knowledge of the lives of the global rich, ways of being that stand in stark contrast to the growing impoverishment that pervades so many African locales. This disjuncture generates, in Achille Mbembes words, an economy of desired goods that are known . . . but to which one will never have material access.39 In francophone West Africa, la vie moderne remains a widespread aspiration, while the imagined routes for obtaining it have been transformed by shrinking state resources and increasing scarcity, debt, and warfare. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, Basile Ndjio and Janet Roitman argue, state ofcials with advanced schooling embodied the pinnacle of modern success, today the most striking role models are entrepreneurs who have amassed wealth through illegal nancial schemes and transborder trade. By dening lives built on illicit activities as modern, smugglers and bandits claim achievement amid dire circumstances.40 Some of the most disapproving evocations of the modern in contemporary Africa are tied to AIDS. Unlike some international observers who have attributed the scale of the epidemic in Africa to the persistence of traditional practices, many in Africa blame the modern, dened by the increased circulation of money and commodities, and the greater mobility and independence of young women.41 What counts as modern has shifted several times since the mid-twentieth century, when it began being routinely evoked in discussions of and in Africa. Yet throughout, the term has remained a discursive tool for claiming political inclusion and envisioning different futures. By examining competing claims and visions, feminist scholars have revealed how modern has also been used as an epithet to disparage those whose gender and sexual politics are deemed too disruptive. Other areas of historical investigation would similarly benet from close attention to deployments of the term. For instance, historians of the postcolonial state or scholars of science and technology could gain greater insight into the promises and perils embodied in various
39 Mbembe, African Modes of Self-Writing, 271. For more on this disjuncture, see Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony, American Ethnologist 26, no. 2 (May 1999): 279303; Jennifer Cole, Fresh Contact in Tamatave, Madagascar: Sex, Money, and Intergenerational Transformation, American Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 571586; Ferguson, Global Shadows ; and Brad Weiss, Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania (Bloomington, Ind., 2009). 40 Basile Ndjio, Evolue s and Feymen: Old and New Figures of Modernity in Cameroon, in Geschiere, Meyer, and Pels, Readings in Modernity in Africa, 205214; Janet Roitman, A Successful Life in the Illegal Realm: Smugglers and Road Bandits in the Chad Basin, ibid., 214 220. 41 Brad Weiss, Buying Her Grave: Money, Movement, and AIDS in North-West Tanzania, Africa 63, no. 1 (1993): 1935; Philip W. Setel, A Plague of Paradoxes: AIDS, Culture, and Demography in Northern Tanzania (Chicago, 1999); Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington, Ind., 2005); Jean Comaroff, Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order, Public Culture 19, no. 1 (2007): 197219. Similarly, homosexuality has often been cast as a modern ill. Zackie Achmat, Apostles of Civilised Vice: Immoral Practices and Unnatural Vice in South African Prisons and Compounds, 18901920, Social Dynamics 19, no. 2 (1993): 92110; Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Athens, Ohio, 2008).

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institutions and innovations by examining how historical actors have evoked the modern to describe or contest them. Such examinations would further elucidate the terms continually evolving salience as a native category for apprehending and altering the world.

HISTORIANS CAN ALSO MAKE discussions of modernity more concrete and productive by focusing on mid-level or intermediate analytical concepts. Too often, scholars researching historical topics in colonial and postcolonial Africa or other seemingly peripheral places evoke modernity to make their ndings appear more widely relevant. In my experience, some of the most striking instances of this strategy can be found in graduate student applications for research and writing fellowships. For example, an applicant studying the history of automobiles in colonial Accra or censuses in late-nineteenth-century Brazil will cast his or her projects broader signicance as a contribution to scholarship on modernity or alternative modernities. In the leap from rich but specic historical materials to the high abstraction of modernity or modernities, many vague generalizations are repeated and few fresh insights are gained. To avoid such conceptual cul-de-sacs, scholars could instead relate their research to what have classically been viewed as the ideological and institutional formations that make up modernity, using those formations to inspire more intermediate analytical concepts. This approach invites comparative examination of formations and concepts that social theorists ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Foucault and Marx to Ju rgen Habermas have considered constitutive of modernity but encourages that examination to encompass locations that those theorists often deemed outside of the modern. Although social theorists, like other historical actors, have notably disagreed about how to dene modernity, their characterizations tend to cluster around some core formations. These include political divisions between the religious and the secular and the public and the private; the cultivation of scientic rationality and critical self-reection; liberal political ideals that challenge social hierarchies rooted in kin, class, gender, or race; constitutional, representative, and bureaucratic forms of government; industrial production and expanded markets; mechanical reproduction and mass media; heightened urbanization, monetization, and consumption; accelerated transportation and communication; and a future-oriented conception of time that gures the present as a radical rupture from the past. Rather than providing a comprehensive or coherent denition of modernity, this list suggests the variety of important formations commonly lumped together that individually could generate more useful, mid-level analytical concepts.42 To return to the example of projects on automobiles in Accra and censuses in Brazil, their broader signicance would be better framed in relation to comparative scholarship on accelerating forms of transportation within urban landscapes, or the racial logics of bureaucratic systems.
42 Such formations are in keeping with what C. A. Bayly refers to as the out there of modernity, trends, and processes, including the rise of centralized nation-states, expansion of global commercial and intellectual links, international spread of industrialization, and a new style of urban living that produced a distinct era of world history extending from the late eighteenth century to the present day; Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914 (Malden, Mass., 2004), 11.

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Given most historians commitment to providing robust and often detailed accounts of past events and processes, such intermediate analytical concepts would better highlight the depth and texture of our methodological labors than the more distant abstraction of modernity. By being more attentive to the specicity and richness of historical materials, such concepts would encourage rigorous cross-regional and cross-chronological comparisons.43 In contrast to analyses motivated by modernization theory, this approach does not conceive of modernity as a package of intertwined ideologies and institutions that inevitably and optimistically all societies will embrace. Instead, it seeks to subject formations long associated with modernity to fresh scrutiny by tracking the circuitous routes and jagged political terrains through which they travel, and reconstructing their contradictory and ambivalent afterlives. By using colonial and postcolonial locations as the starting points for such histories, scholars can develop substantive insights for rening conceptions of modernity. A good illustration of this approach is Brian Larkins 2008 historical ethnography Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. What, Larkin asks, would a theory of media . . . look like if it began from Nigeria rather than Europe or the United States? With this question, he aims not so much to document difference as to elucidate features common to media everywhere but often overlooked. For example, he argues that while much scholarship building on the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer has posited early cinema as inextricably linked to the commodity form, the emergence of lm in 1930s Nigeria reveals that relationship as highly contingent, as early cinema there was developed to buttress hierarchical relations between colonizer and colonized rather than as part of consumer culture. Furthermore, Larkin considers the challenges posed to media theory by places such as postcolonial Nigeria where the electrical infrastructure upon which so many technologies depend is prone to collapse. Alongside highlighting how breakdown and repair are part of all media systems, Larkin demonstrates that where infrastructural failure is commonplace, modernitys hallmark speeding up of life is accompanied by a widening gap between actual and potential acceleration, between what technologies can do and what they do do. This gaplike the disjuncture mentioned earlier between knowledge of afuent lives elsewhere and increasing immiseration at homeproduces an experience of modern formations marked by considerable political tension.44 Through the mid-level analytical concepts of
43 For other recent calls for mid-level categories, especially between the local and the global, see Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox, Anthropology, by Comparison (New York, 2002); K. Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Agrawal, eds., Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (Stanford, Calif., 2003); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, Calif., 2006); and Jennifer S. Hirsch, Holly Wardlow, Daniel Jordan Smith, Harriet M. Phinney, Shanti Parikh, and Constance A. Nathanson, The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV (Nashville, Tenn., 2009). 44 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, N.C., 2008), quotes from 253, 12, 235. Other examples of scholarship that use African material to insightfully historicize and re-theorize modern formations include Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodication, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C., 1996); Keith Breckenridge, We Must Speak for Ourselves: The Rise and Fall of a Public Sphere on the South African Gold Mines, 1920 to 1931, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 1 (1998): 71108; Mariane Ferme, Staging Politisi: The Dialogics of Publicity and Secrecy in Sierra Leone, in John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, eds., Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa (Chicago, 1999), 160191;

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infrastructure and audiovisual media, Larkin contributes to theoretical discussions of modernity by making them accountable to a wider range of structures and contingencies. Other intermediate analytics could emerge from identifying and examining phenomena that materialized from the nexus of ideological and institutional formations often associated with modernity. For example, a collaborative research group of which I was a member developed the modern girl as a heuristic device for examining the transnational emergence of consumer culture, mass media, and new conceptions of gender and race. Together we found that during the 1920s and 1930s, people in cities from Beijing to New York, Tokyo to Bombay and Johannesburg used the modern girl and related terms including modeng xiaojie, appers, moga, and kallege ladki to denote young women who embraced an explicit eroticism, appeared to disavow domestic duties, and used commodities such as cigarettes and lipstick. In our volume The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, we used the near-simultaneity of this global phenomenon to question narratives of modernitys simple diffusion from Europe and the U.S. to everywhere else, and to foreground the multidirectional and rapid commercial, aesthetic, and ideological linkages that gave rise to the modern girl in any given locale. Moreover, we sought to understand how all manifestations of the modern girl entailed the entanglement of imperial and transnational processes with meanings and practices rooted in local and regional histories. Thus the modern girl became a mid-level analytic for comparing modern formations under a variety of cultural conditions and political regimes.45

MODERNITY HAS BEEN A FRAUGHT, if pivotal, concept within African historical scholarship. As an academic subeld, African history developed partly through refuting the ethnocentrism and teleologies embedded in classical conceptions of modernity and postWorld War II modernization theory. Such origins help explain why recent engagements of modernity have been so contested among Africa scholars. By examining the modern as a discursive tool deployed by historical actors, however, we can avoid some of the failings of previous scholarship and elucidate how claims to the modern have stirred political struggles and inspired fresh visions of the future. Similarly, attention to intermediate analytical concepts rather than the grand abstraction of modernity directs us away from essentializing contrasts between the West and the rest. It encourages us, instead, to examine how ideological and institutional formations deemed modern have movedoften by surprising routes and

Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C., 1999); Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 2000); and Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, N.H., 2004). 45 The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group (Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow), eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, N.C., 2008). We combined both of the approaches advocated in this essay. In addition to using the modern girl as a mid-level analytic for exploring the reworking of formations classically dened as modern, we investigated how and why contemporaries variously dened the modern girl as modern.

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unexpected reformulationsbetween and through colonies, metropoles, empires, and nations.

Lynn M. Thomas is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (University of California Press, 2003). Thomas is co-editor with Alys E. Weinbaum, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008) and with Jennifer Cole of Love in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Currently, she serves as one of the editors of the Journal of African History and is writing a monograph on the transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa, East Africa, and the United States.

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