"The book asks how far the model of the European City can be applied to the cities of Eastern Europe which massively expanded from the second half of the 19th century on but often lacked some of the fundamentals of the European urbanity in the Weberian sense. The authors employ a broad focus and look at metropolitan cities between Helsinki and Athens, Warsaw and Moscow. The period under investigation begins with the 1890s when East European societies entered an 'age of great acceleration' and stops with the outbreak of World War II which not only destroyed but also socially and ethnically altered many metropolitan cities of Eastern Europe. While before the First World War most of Eastern Europe was subsumed in the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires, new (nation-) states and socialist ideologies shaped post-1918 urban development. For the majority of the new capitals created by the post-war order the state remained the main proponent of change. Both, historical preconditions--the economic situation, the legacy of the empires--and the experience of the upheaval of 1917/18 contributed to this particularity of the region. On the other hand Western Europe and her urban experts continued to be and became even stronger points of reference. The volume discusses the peculiar relationship between state, city and the challenges of modernity in the Eastern Europe with a focus on urban planning in the wider sense of the word. In particular, the different chapters of the book ask how far--given the omnipresent, albeit often idealized example of Western metropolitan cities--a 'reflective modernization' may be identified as a common marker of cities in the region under observation"--Provided by publisher.

DIVA collection of essays arguing for a global and economically based modernity driven by capitalist development./div

Although the book specifically documents the depictions of Andean peoples, Poole's findings apply to the entire colonized world of the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.

In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes—the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954’s IV Centenário, the quadricentennial of São Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in São Paulo embraced a regional identity that emphasized their European origins and aptitude for modernity and progress, attributes that became—and remain—associated with “whiteness.” This racialized regionalism naturalized and reproduced regional inequalities, as São Paulo became synonymous with prosperity while Brazil’s Northeast, a region plagued by drought and poverty, came to represent backwardness and São Paulo’s racial “Other.” This view of regional difference, Weinstein argues, led to development policies that exacerbated these inequalities and impeded democratization.

In addition to her readings of a fascinating array of works---The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness --

Modernism as a global phenomenon is the focus of the essays gathered in this book. The term "geomodernisms" indicates their subjects' continuity with and divergence from commonly understood notions of modernism. The contributors consider modernism as it was expressed in the non-Western world; the contradictions at the heart of modernization (in revolutionary and nationalist settings, and with respect to race and nativism); and modernism's imagined geographies, "pyschogeographies" of distance and desire as viewed by the subaltern, the caste-bound, the racially mixed, the gender-determined.

An illustration of how indigenous and non-indigenous actors deployed concepts of time in their conflicts over race and modernity in postcolonial Guatemala.

Religion is a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly mentioned. In Modern Religion, Modern Race Theodore Vial argues that because the categories of religion and race are rooted in the post-Enlightenment project of reimagining what it means to be human, we cannot simply will ourselves to stop using them. Only by acknowledging that religion is already racialized can we begin to understand how the two concepts are intertwined and how they operate in our modern world. It has become common to argue that the category religion is not universal, or even very old, but is a product of Europe's Enlightenment modernization. Equally common is the argument that religion is not an innocent category of analysis, but is implicated in colonial regimes of control and as such plays a role in Europe's process of identity construction of itself and of non-European "others." Current debates about race follow an eerily similar trajectory: race is not an ancient but a modern construction. It is part of the project of colonialism, and race discourse forms one of the cornerstones of modern European identity-making. Why can't we stop using them, or re-construct them in less toxic ways? By examining the theories of Kant, Herder, and Schleiermacher, among others, Vial uncovers co-constitutive nature of race and religion, describes how they became building blocks of the modern world, and shows how the two concepts continue to be used today to form identity and to make sense of the world. He shows that while we disdain the racist language of some of the founders of religious studies, the continued influence of the modern worldview they helped create leads us, often unwittingly, to reiterate many of the same distinctions and hierarchies. Although it may not be time to abandon the very category of religion, with all its attendant baggage, Modern Religion, Modern Race calls for us to examine that baggage critically, and to be fully conscious of the ways in which religion always carries with it dangerous ideas of race.

A familiar cultural presence for people the world over, “the whiteman” has come to personify the legacy of colonialism, the face of Western modernity, and the force of globalization. Focusing on the cultural meanings of whitemen in the Orokaiva society of Papua New Guinea, this book provides a fresh approach to understanding how race is symbolically constructed and why racial stereotypes endure in the face of counterevidence. While Papua New Guinea’s resident white population has been severely reduced due to postcolonial white flight, the whiteman remains a significant racial and cultural other here—not only as an archetype of power and wealth in the modern arena, but also as a foil for people’s evaluations of themselves within vernacular frames of meaning. As Ira Bashkow explains, ideas of self versus other need not always be anti-humanistic or deprecatory, but can be a creative and potentially constructive part of all cultures. A brilliant analysis of whiteness and race in a non-Western society, The Meaning of Whitemen turns traditional ethnography to the purpose of understanding how others see us.

This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.