Modernity’s Discontents: Anti-Modern Thought and Culture
Friday, October 24, 2014
Modernity has been prized, fetishized, conflated with sundry co-developments—and vehemently opposed. This symposium seeks to address, from several disciplinary standpoints, the relationships between modernity and the categorical reactions to it. When, how, and why do people react to “modernity,” and to “modernism”? What gets blamed on modernity? How has the idea of modernity circulated, and how has it served heterogeneous ideological and cultural agendas? To what extent has modernity in fact invented or imagined its oppositions? Our speakers will consider ways in which individuals and groups self-consciously take up the idea of the modern in order to struggle against it.
The Potomac Center will host a graduate student workshop in conjunction with the symposium. The workshop will take place the following Monday afternoon, October 27, at the University of Maryland.
Below are audio recordings of the lectures from the Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity’s Fall Symposium on “Modernity’s Discontents: Anti-Modern Thought and Culture”.
Modernity in Motion: Brazil’s Struggle to Make the Nation
Joel Wolfe
Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
How to be Muslim in Modern India: A Lesson from Old Delhi’s “Muslim Club”
Kalyani Devaki Menon
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
DePaul University
To hear Dr. Menon’s lecture, please e-mail pcsm@umd.edu for the link. Thanks!
Cosmetics, Beauty and Modernity
Uta G. Poiger
Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Professor of History
Northeastern University
Does Modernism Remember? Can Anti-Modernism Forget?
Depolarizing the Past in Some 1930s Regionalist Manifestos
Jason Weems
Assistant Professor of Art History
University of California, Riverside
Response
Ben Cowan
Assistant Professor of History and Art History
George Mason University