Social Worlds of Imagination: An Analytic Guide

227 Pages·2016·40.09 MB·English

by  Chandra Mukerji

This is a thoughtful, ambitious and encompassing exploration of what has made us
modern. Going back to the 14th century and the collective trauma of the black plague as
our starting point, Mukerji offers a counterpoint reading of modernity, emphasizing the
role dreams, social forms and objects have had in conjuring humans anew. This is a tale
told by a crafts-woman and a scholar full of nuance and detail, revealing in her attention
to minutiae an immense topic. This book will force us to rethink what we know about
modernity and culture.
Claudio E. Benzecry, Northwestern University,
author of The Opera Fanatic
Chandra Mukerji’s take on modernity is wide-ranging, original, learned and alive with
sights, sounds, and meaning. From fashion to philosophy to religious wars to the Parisian
water supply, the book makes modernity poignantly real in its details and its broad sweep.
A tour de force!
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University in Exile Professor of Sociology,
New School for Social Research
Perhaps only Chandra Mukerji could write a book that glides so effortlessly across
centuries, tackling selfhood and state-making, high fashion and digital games, imagina-
tion and despair. This reader-friendly volume is a stunning synthesis by a preeminent
analyst of the cultures of modernity.
Steven Epstein, John C. Shaffer Professor,
Northwestern University
This is a remarkable book. Outstanding in its scope and ambition, outstanding too in the
brevity and focus with which this ambition is realised. On the one hand it covers centuries
of time, and does so with aplomb, guided by its main insight that cultural imaginaries and
materiality have to be understood if modernity is to be understood. On the other hand,
the narrative is constructed through the means of a myriad of brilliant cameos, ranging
from its reconstruction of a world broken by the Black Death to contemporary film and
video games. It is a very fine achievement.
Patrick Joyce, Emeritus Professor of History,
University of Manchester and Honorary Professor of History,
University of Edinburgh
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Modernity Reimagined:
An Analytic Guide
Winner of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award in 2012, Chandra
Mukerji offers with this remarkable new book an explanation of the birth and subsequent prolif-
eration of the many strands in the braid of modernity. The journey she takes us on is dedicated to
teasing those strands apart, using forms of cultural analysis from the social sciences to approach
history with fresh eyes. Faced with the problem of trying to understand what is hardest to see—the
familiar—she gains analytic distance and clarity by juxtaposing cultural analysis with history, ask-
ing how modernity began and how people conjured into existence the world we now recognize as
modern.
Part I describes the genesis of key modern social forms: the modern self, communities of stran-
gers, the modern state, and the industrial world economy. Part II focuses on modern social types:
races, genders, and childhood. Part III focuses on some of the cultural artifacts and activities of the
contemporary world that people have invented and used to cope with the burdens of self-making,
and to react against the broken promises of modern discourse and the silent injuries of material
modernism.
Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color photographs in its ten chapters, Modernity Reimag-
ined is not just an explanation, an analysis of how modern life came to be, it is also a model for how
to do cultural thinking about today’s world. The book’s companion website at www.routledge.com/
cw/mukerji provides a storehouse of additional images from the recent and not-so-recent past, as
well as suggested exercises by the author so that readers can tease out their own additional strands
from the braid of modern life.
Chandra Mukerji is known among students and scholars of culture as one of the titans of the field,
primarily because she crosses intellectual and disciplinary boundaries with ease, and also because she
has written so many prize-winning books that have astonished colleagues for their range and original
insight. She has won the American Sociological Association’s distinguished book award, the Merton
Award from the SKAT section of the ASA, and the Douglas prize from the Culture section, all for
different publications, but each examining important historical examples of how materiality shapes
social life. In tandem with her scholarly publications, she also taught a broad array of courses at the
University of California, San Diego to undergraduates—where she encouraged students to “theorize
about culture”—examining material, social, and organizational forms in original ways.
Also by Chandra Mukerji:
From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983).
A Fragile Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Rethinking Popular Culture, co-edited with Michael Schudson (University of California
Press, 1990).
Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton
University Press, 2009).
Upcoming Related Routledge Titles:
Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?: Essays on Art and Modernity,
1850–1900, edited by Hollis Clayson and Andre Dombrowski.
Imaginaries of Modernity: Politics, Cultures, Tensions, by John Rundell.
Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, edited by Susan Broomhall.
Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Teofilo
Ruiz, by Yuen-Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez.
Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria and the Puppet, by Nathan J. Timpano.
Modernity Reimagined:
An Analytic Guide
Chandra Mukerji
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of Chandra Mukerji to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and record-
ing, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-82533-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-82534-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74005-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro
by Cenveo Publisher Services
The author has developed an archive of historical materials and a set of pedagogical exercises based
on them that instructors can use (or not), and these are located on the publisher’s website associated
with this book. The website can be found at www.routledge.com/cw/mukerji. Additional information
about the archive and exercises can be found in the Appendix on Teaching Resources at the back of
this book.
In memory of my grandparents who taught me to think about history, and who
demonstrated to me the grief of modernity with their words, lives, and deaths:
Robert Childers Barton, Ethyl Dugan Mukerji, and Dhan Gopal Mukerji
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Contents in Brief
List of figures xv
List of tabLes xxi
PrefaCe: origins and the anaLysis of Modernity xxiii
aCknowLedgMents xxix
Part One
History of Modern Social Forms
1 Modern selves and fashion 3
2 Communities of strangers and infrastructure 23
3 Cultural imaginaries and Modern states 37
4 discursive Modernity and global industrial
Capitalism 51
Part Two
Genealogies of Modern Social Types
5 geopolitics and discourses of race 73
ix