Martin Jay is one of America's leading intellectual historians. His work spans almost all important questions concerning the subject of modernity. Outstanding Polish scholars engage in a dialogue with Jay’s work, discussing significant problems of modernity and postmodernity. The book offers a broad panorama of contemporary thought approached from various angles. It is also a unique exercise of intercultural intellectual dialogue covering many areas from literature to politics. The book also includes an essay on photography by Martin Jay and his detailed response to the other contributors, which has the character of an extended conversation with them. The book can serve as an assessment of the uptake of Jay’s ideas, and equally well as a general introduction to the genealogy of modernity and postmodernity.

Reforming Modernity is a sweeping intellectual history and philosophical reflection built around the work of the Morocco-based philosopher Abdurrahman Taha, one of the most significant philosophers in the Islamic world since the colonial era. Wael B. Hallaq contends that Taha is at the forefront of forging a new, non-Western-centric philosophical tradition. He explores how Taha’s philosophical project sheds light on recent intellectual currents in the Islamic world and puts forth a formidable critique of Western and Islamic modernities. Hallaq argues that Taha’s project departs from—but leaves behind—the epistemological grounds in which most modern Muslim intellectuals have anchored their programs. Taha systematically rejects the modes of thought that have dominated the Muslim intellectual scene since the beginning of the twentieth century—nationalism, Marxism, secularism, political Islamism, and liberalism. Instead, he provides alternative ways of thinking, forcefully and virtuosically developing an ethical system with a view toward reforming existing modernities. Hallaq analyzes the ethical thread that runs throughout Taha’s oeuvre, illuminating how Taha weaves it into a discursive engagement with the central questions that plague modernity in both the West and the Muslim world. The first introduction to Taha’s ethical philosophy for Western audiences, Reforming Modernity presents his complex thought in an accessible way while engaging with it critically. Hallaq’s conversation with Taha’s work both proffers a cogent critique of modernity and points toward answers for its endemic and seemingly insoluble problems.

Most papers included were presented at a workshop in CSDS.

"The book provides a deeper understanding of modern art in the Brazilian context, moving the focus away from the self-declared avant-gardes and towards a broad panorama of modernizing tendencies throughout the period, 1890 to 1945. The backdrop of sertão, favelas, carnival and samba - often left out of accounts that restrict readings of modernism to erudite arenas like literature, fine art or architecture - are foregrounded in an attempt to situate artistic discourses within the social and political struggles of the period. Race, class and ideological conflict are given priority as tools for deconstructing complex debates, too often taken at face value or misread as merely reflexive of European phenomena. The anthropophagic movement (Antropofagia) rates special attention in teasing out the meanings of primitivism in the Brazilian context. The book examines a range of visual cultural materials including paintings, periodicals, graphics and photographs, revealing a hidden archive that calls into question the very essence of how modernism is usually perceived in Brazil. The enduring presence of archaism and violence behind an appearance of modernity reveals itself to be not an anomaly, but rather a product of the tensions inherent to the enduring oligarchical structures of Brazilian culture and society"--

The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.

The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this intervention, Fredric Jameson-perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity-excavates and explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the (provisional) disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive 'modernity' as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well. In this major interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted, but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both terms-which can probably not be banished at this late date-helps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.