rethinking transnational processes & multiple modernities in the atlantic world

seminar 2009 | 2010

Among the key issues today among academics, policy makers, and publics at large, and salient on both global and local scales, are debates about the articulation of religion and modernity, the relationship between secularism and religion, and the memorialization of cultural and historical change over time. If we have never been "modern", as some scholars have argued, then it is the ideologies and practices which define modernity that require interrogation. in this seminar, we will take up the question of modernity and its key interlocutors in the Atlantic World, religion, diaspora, creolization, and secularism, exploring how such conceptual categories become constructed and meaningful in different moments of transnational processes. Our emphasis will be hemispheric, focusing on the demographic, cultural, and religious flows among Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe, from which the notion of modernity has emerged, being shaped particularly within western epistemology. The seminar will build on recent research suggesting how the Atlantic World has generated multiple modernities rather than single-trajectory transitions to "being modern".

Stefania CAPONE & Aisha KHAN

as a tribute to ClaudeLEVI-STRAUSS with "CNRS Images"...to learn more about Claude LEVI-STRAUSS