Rethinking Modernity Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination

Rethinking Modernity presents a fundamental reconstruction of the idea of modernity in contemporary sociology and social theory. It criticizes the abstraction of European modernity from its colonial context as well as the way in which the experiences of non-Western 'others' are regarded as having no contribution to make to such understandings. In challenging the dominant, Eurocentred accounts of the emergence and development of modernity, Gurminder Bhambra presents an argument for the recognition of 'connected histories' in the reconstruction of historical sociology at a global level. She addresses three supposedly 'founding moments' in the narrative of modernity - the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolutions - in order to identity myths of origin which remain embedded in dominant accounts of modernity, whether of modernization theory or multiple modernities. Book jacket.

GURMINDER K. BHAMBRA is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Keele, UK. She has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Sussex and the London School of Economics. She has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex and a Research Associate at the Five College Women's Studies Research Centre at Mount Holyoke College, USA, where she was also Visiting Professor in Critical Social Thought.