Seductions of Modernity

Thoughtful question Khaldoun.

I don't have an answer but first I would second Steve's reply in looking at 
Marshall Berman again. The Modern has its deeply liberating resonances too. As 
Steve suggests, most migrants to US, at least among those I have worked with, 
see themselves as "modern" in certain aspects and "traditional" in others - 
each seen as proper and good in their places. Which relates to Wallerstein's 
ideas about Liberalism as a hegemonic ideology - everyone is for modernity, up 
to a point. The differenes are about to what extent, with what speed, and in 
what spheres.

Perhaps even more relevant is the work of another Subalternist, Dipesh 
Chakrabarty in "Provincializing Europe" who does a nice job of looking at the 
complexities of "translating" iconic modern institutions such as the coffee 
house to India (particularly Calcutta). Where it ends up as "adda" in the 
interstices of the public and the private sphere - not at home, not in the 
cafe, but on the porch and at the street corner where men gather to "shoot the 
breeze" which subverts the productive and purposive logic of bourgeois 
modernity. It is in some senses Georg Simmel's "modernity of the streets".... 
echoing what the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin was to him and the arcades of Paris 
were to Walter Benjamin.  It also draws on Charles Baudelaire's notion of 
modernité, primarily its subjective side, as something transitory, fugitive and 
contingent.  

Best
Krishnendu Ray