Alternative Modernities:

Globalization and the Post-Colonial

Bill Ashcroft

Modernism and modernization have nourished an amazing va-

riety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the
subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them
the power to change the world that is changing them, to make
their way through the maelstrom and make it their own.
(Marshal Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air 16)

Modernities are everywhere, at precisely the time modernity as the

­epochal discourse of the West appears to be on its last legs. This is one
of the more paradoxical features of the global. One might declare the
end of modernity in a narrow sense as Jean-François Lyotard (and post-
modernism in general) does, but to declare its end even as an epoch is
either to fall into the fallacy that modernity has remained a Western
phenomenon, or to colonize the world with the Western paradigm of
the postmodern. The sense that modernity is at a turning point comes
not, I would suggest, from its imminent demise either through the “end
of history” (Fukuyama) or the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington), but
from its global, transcultural, and variegated character. Globalization
may now be characterized by the multiplicity of its modernities and
post-colonial theory provides a way to understand why this is so. How it
does that will require a closer look at the journey of post-colonial theory
itself and the pitfalls its alliance with globalization studies has opened
up.
The defining moment of the fallacy that modernity is the site of the
West’s cultural triumph occurs in Weber’s “Introductory Note” to his
Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion where he provides a list of
Occidental achievements defining its separation from the rest of the
world:

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… only the West developed proper scientific procedures, while

Babylonian astronomy lacked a mathematical foundation,
Indian sciences lacked rational experiments, Chinese histori-
ography lacked the Thucydidean paradigm and Asian jurispru-
dence lacked the strict juridical procedures of canonical law;
although musical understanding and polyphonic music could
be found everywhere in the world, only the West developed
rational harmonic music, musical notation, and instruments
such as the organ, the piano and the violin; while the prin-
ciples of pointed arch and dome were known and practiced in
the Orient, only the Occident developed them into a system-
atic style in medieval architecture; print was known in China,
but only the West acquired a press; … (Schultz-Engler 37–38)

The list goes on to include universities, the civil service, parliamentary

democracy and capitalism. We recognize in this triumphant declaration
the supreme self-confidence of the Orientalism that led to the expan-
sion of European empires into the rest of the world with their mission
civilatrice and quest for resources and markets, a self-confidence that
looks extremely dated in the face of the range of alternative modernities
that characterizes the ‘modern’ today.

I. Alternative Modernities
A substantial literature has developed on the related concepts of “mul-
tiple modernities,” “alternative modernities,” of modernity “at large,”
“multiple globalizations” and the principles of fluidity, localization and
hybridization that they imply.1 Eisenstadt, for one, claims that the con-
cept of multiple modernities is a refutation of the triumphalist theories
of modernization of the 1950s, which assumed that all industrial societ-
ies would one day converge. The so-called classical theories of mod-
ernization (Marx, Durkheim, Weber) all posited a cultural program of
modernity, which had its origins in Europe but was expected to become
universal in time. And yet, the progress of modernization showed
that “modernity” and “Westernization” were not identical (Eisenstadt
“Multiple” 1–3). The temptation to equate modernity with a capital-

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ist economy quickly runs aground. Communist Russia, for instance,

often regarded as a revolt against modernity, offered a model that might
“for all its disastrous flaws and irrationalities have been a distinctive but
ultimately self-destructive version of modernity rather than a sustained
deviation from the modernizing mainstream” (Arnason 61). Quite apart
from the familiar deployment of Soviet state power for industrializa-
tion, it is no accident that the first modernist dystopian novel, Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We, which ironically glorifies the triumph of the completely
mechanized society, was written in communist Russia in the 1920s. If
this is the case, if Russian communism is a distinct moment in moder-
nity, it offers a fascinating opportunity to consider the ways in which
multiple modernities have emerged and survived (some of them no less
oppressive than the Russian example). Taking into account the fascist
model and the expansion of modernity into the Americas, we see that
Western modernity itself was never a single phenomenon: “practically
from the beginning of modernity’s expansion multiple modernities de-
veloped, all within what may be defined as the Western civilizational
framework” (Eisenstadt “Multiple” 13).
To think of alternative modernities, and to accept that modernity is
not synonymous with Westernization, is not to abandon the fact that
modernity as an epoch, a questioning of the present, an orientation to
the future, and at the same time an ethic valuing the present over the
past, emerged in the West. But it does remind us that modernity is
plural, and it confirms the fact that the historical trajectory of Western
modernity was not simply a sign of temporal progress (an assumption
embodied in the idea of the modern) but a culturally situated phe-
nomenon. Arguments for alternative modernities confirm the need
for cultural theories of modernity—theories that foreground place as
well as time—but also lead us inevitably to the issue of local agency.
Alternative, or non-Western modernities emerge either by the develop-
ment of hybridized cultural forms through the appropriation of those
of Western modernity or by the introduction of innovative, and thus
truly alternative forms of modernity. Yet neither of these forms has
emerged out of thin air. They emerge out of a relation to other moderni-
ties and the processes of appropriation, adaptation, and transformation

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have been their characteristic features. Indeed, even where concerted

programs of Westernization have been undertaken by non-Western
elites the cultural transformation of Western models has been almost
unavoidable. Thus, like post-colonial literatures, the most characteristic
alternative modernities are those we might call hybridized, ones that
appropriate and transform global cultural forms to local needs, beliefs
and conditions. This does not make them extensions of modernity, but
new culturally-situated forms of modernization. Modernity is not so
much adopted as adapted and re-created, and increasingly, modernities
may adapt other alternative modernities.
Charles Taylor suggests that there are both cultural and acultural theo-
ries of modernity and the two can become confused. Western modernity
clearly emerges from a particular cultural milieu, but it is invariably seen
in acultural terms as the inevitable (and universal) march of progress to-
wards reason and enlightenment. A purely acultural theory, says Taylor,
not only impoverishes our understanding of the West but imposes a
falsely uniform pattern on the multiple encounters of non-Western cul-
tures with the exigencies of science, technology, and industrialization.
If we do not examine Western modernity “we will fail to see how other
cultures differ and how this difference crucially conditions the way in
which they integrate the truly universal features of modernity” (180).
Nevertheless, the term “alternative modernities” calls into question
what we mean by modernity. It is not clear, suggests Frederick Cooper,
“why an alternative modernity should be called a modernity at all. If
any form of innovation produces a modernity, then the term has little
analytic purchase” (114). This point is well taken and perhaps we should
remind ourselves that alternative means alternative to the West, and
increasingly, to other alternatives, rather than alternative to modernity
(although many advocate this option). This is a situation in which mo-
dernity itself becomes transformed and multiplied. Cooper asks further

is modernity a condition—something written into the exercise

of economic and political power at a global level? Or is it a rep-
resentation, a way of talking about the world in which one uses
a language of temporal transformation while bringing out the

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simultaneity of global unevenness, in which “tradition” is pro-

duced by telling a story of how some people became “modern”?
(114)

One answer to this is that, of course, it is both. The problem is that

“modernity” is a word, and like all words typifies the range of experi-
ences and actions, the conditions, it represents. The term “alternative
modernities” introduces the plurality of modernity, and the agency mul-
tiplying its forms. Alternative modernities emerge firstly through the
redeployment of modern Western cultural forms: material, discursive,
social and even ethical. “The phenomenon of ‘political modernity’,” says
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “namely, the rule by modern institutions of the
state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think of
anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and con-
cepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even
theological traditions of Europe” (4). Yet political modernity has been
appropriated and enculturated by post-colonies. Nowhere is this more
dramatic than in India.
The closer we look at Western modernity the more we see its cul-
tural features. As an epoch modernity is generally regarded as referring
to modes of social organization which emerged in Europe from about
the sixteenth century, broadly represented by the discovery of the new
world, the Renaissance and Reformation (Habermas “Modernity” 5).
Although these upheavals involve a radical break with cultural tradi-
tions, “that break was rationally motivated by the patterns of meaning
in the West’s cultural heritage” (Kirkland 138). In this way modernity
comes to be seen as a distinctive and superior period in the history
of humanity, a notion that became habitual as successive generations
saw their own present time enjoying a prominent position within the
modern. As European power expanded, this sense of the superiority of
the present over the past became translated into a sense of superiority
over those pre-modern societies and cultures which were locked in the
past—primitive and uncivilized peoples whose subjugation and intro-
duction into modernity became the right and obligation of European
powers. Ironically, an acultural view of modernity as historical progress

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and development went hand in hand with Western cultural dominance.

The prominence of reason as a philosophical mode (see Habermas
Philosophical), and the radical restructuring of time and space became
the most powerful discursive tools in the European construction of a
modern world reality.
Therefore as a cultural formation Western modernity has been tightly
linked to the political concept of the state and to the discourse of im-
perialism and its practice of territorial expansion. This expansionism
is a key feature of the cultural character of Western modernity, an as-
sumption of authority that enabled the large-scale regulation of human
identity both within Europe and its colonies. Modernity emerged at
about the same time as European nations began to conceive of their own
dominant relationship to a non-European world and began to spread
their rule through exploration, cartography and colonization. Europe
constructed itself as modern and constructed the non-European as tra-
ditional, static, and pre-historical. The imposition of European models
of historical change became the tool by which these societies were denied
any internal dynamic or capacity for development. The link between
globalization and the imperial domination of subject nations is clearly
articulated by Adam Smith whose view of the role of commodities in
distinguishing the civilized from the barbarous is deeply embedded in
the ideology of empire. Trade, for instance, has caused certain parts of
the world to progress, leaving others (such as Africa) in a “barbarous and
uncivilized state” (Smith lx).
Western modernity, then, may be usefully understood as coterminous
with both imperialism and capitalism.2 The inevitable effect of this was
that globalization came to be seen aculturally so that the diffusion of
capital, industrialization, urbanization and the spread of education
implied a unified world and a homogeneous program of development
available to all. But neither imperialism nor globalization can be de-
scribed simply as a program of homogenization because their operations
are characterized by multidirectional and transcultural interactions,
operating rhizomically rather than hierarchically or centrifugally. The
various transcultural interactions between imperial powers and colonial
cultures have a correlation in one of the most interesting features of the

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present globalized world: the degree to which local modernities have

come to characterize the global, in their adaptation of the principles and
technologies of modernity to local cultural conditions. Whereas moder-
nity relegated the local to the past “as an enclave of backwardness left
out of progress, as the realm of rural stagnation against the dynamism
of the urban, industrial civilization of capitalism” (Dirlik 464), the local
has been the site of the emergence of alternative modernities.
How then did we get to the present condition of alternative moderni-
ties? Did modernity simply travel from the West? Was it brought with co-
lonial conquest? Was it a gift of the civilizing mission? Can we talk about
modernity without invoking Western modernity? What does the concept
of alternative modernities mean to the structure of global relations?
From one point of view, according to Taylor, modernity is like a wave
“flowing over and engulfing one traditional culture after another.” In
terms of “the emergence of a market-industrial economy, of a bureau-
cratically organized state, of modes of popular rule—then its progress is,
indeed, wavelike” (Taylor 182). But the metaphor of a wave is typically
acultural. A cultural theory, in contrast, holds that modernity is not
simply a function of historical development but of cultural difference.
It always unfolds within a specific cultural or civilizational context and
different starting points for the transition to modernity lead to different
outcomes (17). Cultures are not necessarily engulfed by modernity, but
creatively adapt it to local needs. As Dilip Gaonkar writes,

Creative adaptation is not simply a matter of adjusting the

form or recoding the practice to soften the impact of moder-
nity; rather, … it is the site where a people ‘‘make’’ themselves
modern, as opposed to being ‘‘made’’ modern by alien and im-
personal forces, and where they give themselves an identity and
a destiny. (“On Alternative” 18)

Explaining forms of creative cultural adaptation has been a crucial func-

tion of certain forms of post-colonial theory in that they engage with the
material realities of colonized and diasporic peoples.
The people dominated and scattered in that immense aporia of the
Enlightenment—slaves, for example—have demonstrated this proc-

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ess most dramatically. Violently captured and transported, dispersed

throughout the New World, placed in plantations with speakers of dif-
ferent languages, deprived not only of a common tongue, but a common
history and birthplace, they eventually succeeded in articulating their
own post-colonial modernity. Paul Gilroy has problematized the African
diaspora’s relationship to the West, arguing that Afro-modernism and
the Black Atlantic represent a counterculture of modernity (Gilroy).
If this means, as it seems to, that African modernity is the antithesis
of Western modernity then it begs many questions. If “the cultures
of diaspora blacks can be profitably interpreted as expressions of and
commentaries upon ambivalences generated by modernity and their
locations in it” (Gilroy 17), then they become a significant feature of
modernity itself. If slavery is the counter-culture of modernity, it is
also its central, defining contradiction. We can more profitably see this
post-colonial modernity as an alternative, not only in its selective ap-
propriation of modern discourses and technologies, but in its profound
influence on modern global perceptions of transnational space and time.
The vast and dramatic African diaspora points to an historical phenom-
enon central to modernity and yet fundamental to the emergence of
alternative modernities: post-colonial literatures. The literatures writ-
ten by colonized people in the languages of their colonizers are both
a model for, and a key feature of the operation of late modernity itself.
Writers from the African diaspora are one source of the transformation
of modernity, which begins soon after colonial contact, when colonized,
invaded or enslaved people take hold of the imperial languages in which
modernity is systematized and diffused.

II. Post-colonial Theory and Modernity

At this point, in order to understand how post-colonial theory might il-
luminate global modernities, I want to examine how and why a quite spe-
cific post-colonial theory, developed to address the cultural production
of those societies affected by the historical phenomenon of colonialism,
quickly became dragooned into the role of the ‘Grand Theory of Global
Cultural Diversity.’ Post-colonial theory was conceived as a methodol-
ogy for analyzing the complex strategies by which colonized societies

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have engaged imperial discourse, and for studying the ways in which
many of those strategies are shared by colonized societies, re-emerging
in very different political and cultural circumstances. Developed fun-
damentally as a form of literary analysis, it was doomed from the start
to become a protean term, because, quite simply, by the late 1980s the
world was hungry for a language to describe the diversity of cultures and
the intersecting global range of cultural production. Post-colonial theory
provided that language, a way of talking about the engagement of the
global by the local, particularly local cultures, and, most importantly,
provided a greatly nuanced view of globalization that developed from its
understanding of the complexities of imperial relationships.
Although greatly exceeding its brief, a post-colonial-inspired language
became the language of globalization studies in the 1990s. Varied as the
discourses of postcolonialism and globalization might be, according to
Simon Gikandi,

… they have at least two important things in common: they

are concerned with explaining forms of social and cultural or-
ganization whose ambition is to transcend the boundaries of
the nation-state, and they seek to provide new vistas for un-
derstanding cultural flows that can no longer be explained by a
homogenous Eurocentric narrative of development and social
change. (627)

What made post-colonial theory so useful was its ability to compre-

hend the postmodern movement of culture beyond the nation state
at the same time as it addresses the particularity of the (largely non-
Western) local. This represented not just an appropriation of the lan-
guage of the post-colonial but also an unprecedented dominance of the
Humanities in the descriptions of global culture. It can be explained in
two ways: first, the systematization of post-colonial theory occurred at
about the same time as the rise to prominence of globalization studies in
the late 1980s. Second, and more importantly, it was around this time
that literary and cultural theorists became convinced that the debates
on globalization that had dominated disciplines such as sociology and
anthropology had become hopelessly mired in the classical narrative

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of modernity, in dependency theory and in centre periphery models.

It was within cultural practices where concepts that undermined the
Eurocentric narrative of modernity—difference and hybridity, diffusion
and the imaginary—were most evident. Not surprisingly, the interpo-
lation of post-colonial theory in the analysis of globalization and the
mainstreaming of cultural discourse has meant the reappearance of the
local, though characteristically, now a local culture much more am-
bivalent and much more globally inflected than that rural backwater
dismissed by modernity. But, it is nevertheless a local that compels a
re-thinking of the present proliferation of modernities. Clearly the cul-
tural turn in globalization studies, and the influence of a post-colonial
inspired language in that turn, meant that ‘post-colonial’ could now be
used to refer to all forms of cultural diversity, often rendering the term so
diffuse and endlessly employable as to be virtually useless. This process
might be hard to reverse in practice, at least until some other language
of global cultural diversity has been adapted, but I think that rather than
making the post-colonial synonymous with cultural globalization, there
are specific analytical tools developed within post-colonial theory that
help us to understand the present global dispersal of modernity. The
growing literature on multiple modernities recognizes the multiplicity
of Western modernity itself, the principle of creative adaptation, and
the processes of localization, and has provided many specific analyses,
but there is little theoretical explanation of the strategic principles by
which modernity has been localized, appropriated and adapted, nor any
recognition of their prevalence in other forms of cultural contact. We
make a critical start to this task when we recognize the prominence of
post-colonial literary and other cultural production in the shaping of
modernity. But the concepts that focus on how this shaping occurs are
those that emphasize local agency in the appropriation and adaptation
of literary writing: transformation and circulation.

III. Transformation
It is clear that the dissemination of modernity in imperial civilizing
projects produced consequences as unexpected as those that occurred
when English literature was deployed as the primary civilizing discourse

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of the British Empire. Whenever local writers appropriated the language

of English literature, the literatures that developed bore a complex rela-
tion to English Literature, either in its canonical forms or its filiative
relation to an historical tradition. This appropriation and transforma-
tion of literature can be taken as a metonym for what I have referred to
as the creative adaptation of Western modernity. This raises an issue of
great ambivalence captured in this statement by Achille Mbembe: “Like
Islam and Christianity, colonization is a universalizing project. Its ulti-
mate aim is to inscribe the colonized in the space of modernity” (634). If
colonization is a universalizing project, did it succeed? Did it “inscribe”
the colonized in the space of modernity, and if so was that a wave-like
engulfment, a cultural disorientation, or did the colonized take hold of
the pen and inscribe themselves in that space in a curious act of defi-
ance modeled by post-colonial writers? Such ambivalence now oper-
ates global­ly. The diffusion of global influence makes the relationship
between the local and the global all the more complex, because when we
examine local cultures we find the presence of the global within the local
to an extent that compels us to be very clear about our concept of the
local. The term “Glocalization” more adequately describes the relation-
ship between the local and the global as one of interaction and inter-
penetration rather than of binary opposites. “It makes no good sense,”
says Roland Robertson, “to define the global as if the global excludes
the local” (“Glocalization” 34). Neither is their interpenetration a one-
way process of contamination from an imperial discourse to a colonized
subject. The view that the local and the global should not be seen in a
simple homogenizing power relationship, but that the local contributes
to the character of the global, is now widely held. But how this occurs
is less clear, and it is precisely this phenomenon that the processes of
post-colonial transformation illuminate.
We can begin to understand the relationship between the local and
global by observing the dynamic of colonial engagements with dominant
imperial discourses. Post-colonial theory addresses these engagements
by analyzing the impact of imperialism on colonized societies, and the
transformative resistance demonstrated in local cultural production,
and by tracing the transcultural interactions that came to transform im-

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perial cultures themselves. The development of post-colonial literatures

can be described as follows. The appropriation by post-colonial societies
of the language and genres of English literature entailed the continuous
selection, reinterpretation, and reformulation of its themes, ideas and
techniques. These brought about continual transformation of the insti-
tution and practice of literature, with new forms of narrative and poetic
language emerging. Appropriation and transformation were marked by
a persistent ambivalence toward both the institution of literature and
the colonizers themselves, an ambivalence that pivoted on the relation-
ship between resistance and transformation.
This is a recasting, in terms of literary production, of Eisenstadt’s
description of the emergence of multiple modernities (“Multiple”
15). Despite the ambivalence towards both colonial culture and its
’Literature,’ transformation was a particularly enterprising form of re-
sistance that utilized the technologies of European modernity without
being engulfed by them. Post-colonial literatures therefore stand as a
metonym for alternative modernities: they are a specific practice, an
enterprise engaged by agents who locate themselves within a discourse
in a resistant, counter-discursive way through the transformation of
dominant technologies. They are specific examples of how individual
subjects could “change the world that is changing them” (Berman 16).
This does not mean that they act independently of the forces acting
upon them, but they act. Whereas development, the acultural theory of
modernization, acts to force the local into globally normative patterns,
transformation shows that those patterns are adjusted to and by the re-
quirements of local values and needs. Subsequently, the features of these
alternative modernities may be re-circulated globally in various ways.
Post-colonial literatures amplify the ambivalence we find in Mbembe’s
description of colonialism’s universalizing project. For instance, the ap-
propriation and creative adaptation of modern global culture is further
complicated by the strategies of multinational companies to adapt to
local conditions. Yunxiang Yan reports the example of a McDonalds’
manager in China claiming that “they were not a multinational compa-
ny, but a multilocal company,” and another where Kodak, after purchas-
ing seven Chinese film companies, claimed to be “a first rate Chinese

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company” (Yan 35). This ambivalent intersection of local appropriation

and global adaptation is almost a universal feature of multiple moderni-
ties, a chicken and egg situation in which agency is difficult to pin down
to individual subjects, but which seems rather to occupy a shared and
overdetermined discursive space in which actors are both subjects and
objects of globalization. At any given time the forces acting in global-
ization may include transnational companies, the state, state-controlled
and private media, intellectuals and other cultural elites, and ordinary
consumers of all kinds, who demonstrate the culturally productive ca-
pacity of consumption.
If we refer to the model of post-colonial writers as agents of alternative
literatures, we can see a similar dialectic between the colonial function
of language education, the cultural function of the canonical values of
English Literature, the economic aims of publishing companies capital-
izing on post-colonial writing (Heinemann African Writers Series being
the classic example), and the interpolation of these dominant systems
by writers appropriating and transforming literary language. The task
of identifying the origin of resistance in these intersections can be futile,
but transformative resistance flowers nevertheless, because in the liter-
ary example, the writing constructs a world audience. By appropriating
strategies of representation, organization, and social change through
access to global systems, local communities and marginal interest groups
can both empower themselves and influence those global systems. By
localizing and transforming technologies, the non-Western society may
re-circulate those technologies globally.

IV. India and China as Alternative Modernities

We can no longer be tempted to place alternative modernities on the
periphery of global interactions, nor should we, for that matter, see
them as necessarily heroic in their modernizations. But we find that
alternative modernities may also have alternative routes to modernity.
India and China, emerging as two of the largest global participants,
reveal with stark clarity something that has been becoming clearer for
some time: that alternative modernities are globalization. In addition,
just as in one way theories of globalization keep rendering the nation

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an obsolete category, in another these countries appear to have re-es-

tablished the nation as an open cultural site taking a significant place
in global economics. While the nation-state may be an exhausted if not
entirely absent structure as the global impact of the American sub-prime
crisis has revealed, the emergence of India and China may force us to
reconsider the importance of the nation as a cultural phenomenon, a
horizontal reality separate from the vertical authority of the state.
Within these nations the antiquity of diverse cultures is maintained at
the same time that innovative, modern interventions into global processes
are made. The questions become: Why have India and China taken to
globalization with such alacrity? Why is their involvement characterized
by the discourse of celebration, rather than the discourse of crisis that has
dogged the recipients of IMF funding? The politicized answer will say
something about the success of democracy in India and the freeing up of
socialism in China; the economic answer will say something about the
enormous consumer base, the opening of free markets, the proliferation
of technological innovation and the expansion of education. These
answers will all be partly correct. But fundamentally, the answer lies
in the relation of their modernities to the West and the civilizational
basis of their modern development. While China seems oddly placed in
a post-colonial analysis, never having been fully colonized, we cannot
overestimate its sense of the imperial dominance of the West, at least
since the Opium Wars, and its ambivalent sense of the imperialist
tendencies of Westernization. India, on the other hand, has proven to
be one of the most energetic transformers of imperial technologies.
Both represent entirely different approaches to the globalization
process that stem from the ancient character of their civilizations
and which have characterized their historical relationships with the
West. China operates from a long history of introspection in which it
regarded itself as the centre of the world and carefully protected itself
from cultural pollution. One of the consequences of this introspection
is the unshakable belief in the strength of Chinese culture, which has
withstood the turmoil of the last two hundred years in which a major
crisis has occurred in China about every fifteen years. This means
that it is impossible to talk meaningfully about “westernization” since

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imported culture is radically transformed and localized. “Do cultural

values and cultural products that originate in the West always belong to
the West,” asks Yunxiang Yan, “even after they are imported to a non-
Western society?” (32–33). This is similar to the question of whether
English continues to belong to Britain even after it becomes an African
or an Indian language.
Chinese modernity is complicated by the fact that it is managed by the
state and seems devoid of those political features that acultural theories
of modernity take for granted: the inevitable growth of instrumental
reason; the valuing of individual freedom; the emergence of a
participatory public political culture; the jettisoning of traditional ideas
and beliefs. Deng’s insistence on the four basic principles of the party-
state: the socialist road, dictatorship of the proletariat, leadership of the
Communist Party, and Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought, remain
the core of the old ideology as well as the symbol of Communist rule,
and challenges to them are severely punished (25). Chinese modernity
is characterized, then, by a separation of the state and the nation at the
very same time that the state attempts to control every aspect of the life
of the nation. Chinese modernity is a complicated intersection of the
local or ordinary social appropriations by individual agents, and those
made by state and corporate policies. This tension can lead to severe
ethical problems such as those involved in the Sanlu milk scandal.3
One culturally specific consequence of this state control is that many
businesspeople prefer to become “Confucian merchants,” or successful
scholar-businesspersons, similar to the scholarly officials in imperial
China. Here the term “Confucian merchant” refers to a businessperson
who is also a scholar, devoted to the promotion of cultural affairs, a
person whose “behavior must conform to Confucian norms, such as
benevolence, righteousness, propriety, intelligence, and sincerity” (Yan
24). The Confucian merchant is a response to the unique features of
the business environment in China. The State controls strategic market
resources, owns most of the large enterprises and firms, and can to a
great extent, determine the fate of private companies through the im-
plementation of specific policies and regulations. In most cases, special
connections to key people who are in charge of relevant government

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agencies are the key to business success. Thus the Confucian merchant
develops as an entrepreneur deeply embedded in the cultural verities of
Confucian values: such a figure embodies the principle of globalization
married to deep cultural internalization.
India’s approach is profoundly different from China’s, being in every
way exogenous, outward looking, and inquisitive, and for this reason
it is a society whose globalization may be much more implicated in
the circulation of its own cultural ideas and influences. It has a long
history of heterogeneity, argumentative reasoning and democratic
interchange, which reveal a more complicated route to democracy than
purely Western inheritance. According to Sen, “democracy is intimately
connected with public discussion and interactive reasoning” (13),
traditions that have existed in India for millennia. Despite common
assumptions, democracy does not gain its strength in India from the
strength of the modern nation state but from a long history of interacting
with, absorbing and transferring intellectual and cultural practices both
internally and externally.
The spirit of India’s fluidity, acceptance and capacity to change is
virtually embodied in the giant figure of Rabindranath Tagore, who
made perhaps the defining statement of post-colonial appropriation
when he said: “Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products
instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin” (qtd. in
Sen 86). This may be a common post-colonial, transformatory strategy
but it describes six thousand years of India’s cultural history as well, and
it is quite clearly the operating principle of an alternative modernity. In a
letter to C.F. Andrews in 1924, Tagore wrote that “the idea of India itself
militates against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s
own people from others” (qtd. in Sen 349). This remarkable statement
has two profound implications: first, it asserts itself against an idea of
India as a mixture of separated and alienated cultures and communities,
sharply distinguished according to religion or caste, or class or gender
or language or location. Second, it argues against an intense sense of
the dissociation of Indians from people elsewhere (349), particularly
the idea that local culture is so fragile it will break if exposed to outside
influences.

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Local transformations occur in virtually every aspect of cultures

throughout the world. But undoubtedly the transformation that
symbolizes the principle of local adaptation is the Ambassador Car of
India. The Hindustan Ambassador, manufactured continuously by the
Hindustan motor company near Kolkatta since 1957, is based on the
1954 Morris Oxford. It has maintained the body style and the basic
motor of the Morris until the present. The Ambassador has achieved
iconic status in India. As the preferred means of transport by the Indian
leadership (even today Sonia Gandhi uses one), it has become the Indian
car. In some respects this seems to fly in the face of the principle of mo-
dernity, particularly in the frenetic world of global automobile produc-
tion, in which motor cars must be on the cutting edge of modernization.
But the Ambassador, with a rugged body, an easily accessible motor,
cheap spare parts, easily maintained, represents the very principle of
an alternative modernity – the appropriation of a technology and its
transformation to adapt to local conditions.

A taxi-cab version of the Ambassador.

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The question is not why the Indian leadership has lately upgraded to
armoured BMWs, but why it has taken so long. The answer, in some
part, is that the Ambassador, with its insouciant rejection of the fashion-
able, its total suitability to local conditions, its democratic ambience and
material convenience, is the embodiment of India.
This suggests that the modernities created in India and China,
though they both rely to a large extent on the appropriation of systems
and technologies from the West, and deeply dependent on the global
circulation of capital and trade, operate in a curiously adversarial
position to Western modernity, a relationship that emerges from creative
adaptation. Both China’s and India’s alternative modernities, despite
their interdependence on global economy, demonstrate the scope of
transformation and its cultural grounding.

V. Circulation: The Transnation

The principle that complements local transformation and adaptation is
the circulation and re-circulation of locally adapted modernities. This
circulation is never equal or similar in character. Japan, which has been
one of the most energetic adapters of technology, has transformed itself
from a copy culture to one in which automotive and electronic products
have earned their reputation for reliability. Consequently, Japanese no-
tions and techniques of quality control have greatly influenced European
and American industry as well as consumer behaviour. Berger cites the
interesting case of Shiseido cosmetics that combines modern products
with traditional Japanese notions of aesthetics and finds that this has an
appeal beyond the borders of Japan (14). Tulasi Srinivas calls this the
principle of emission, and although the most prominent emissions from
Asia have been those emanating from religious culture, the emissions of
Indian fabrics and food have reached a truly global span.
However, I want to capture this principle of circulation in a concept
stimulated by the ambivalent concept of nation in post-colonial socie-
ties. Whereas the contemporary buzz-word for global cultural diversity
is cosmopolitanism, a venerable and evocative term meaning “at home
in the world,” I want to propose the concept of transnation that emerges
from the very different experiences of nation in post-colonial societies.

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The transnation is more than the international, or the transnational,

which might more properly be conceived as a relation between states.
The transnation does not refer to an ontological object. It is not a formal
reality in political space but a way of talking about subjects in their
ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the positivities by which
subjectivity is normally constituted. Transnation is the fluid, migrating
outside of the state that begins within the nation. This is possibly most
obvious in India where the nation is the perpetual scene of translation,
but translation is but one example of the movement, the betweenness by
which the subjects of the transnation are constituted. It is the inter—the
cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—
that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.
The concept of the transnation disrupts the structural relation
between the nation and the state, and while it is characterized by
dispersal and circulation it begins within the nation. The transnation
has had an impact on modernity in two ways, by demonstrating that
the nation as an imagined community may exceed the boundaries of
the state, and by revealing that the nation-state is already the scene of
migration, exile and diaspora. The claim here is that the circulation of
people constitutes a circulation of modernities as the corollary of human
movement. The example of Afro-modernity is a particularly significant
example of the first impact and it has had a powerful effect on global
modernity. Again India and China are examples of the second, internal
transnation, showing how the nation itself, however determinedly its
identity is managed by the state, is the beginning of the transnation.
The African example is useful not only because it is commonly held
to be the antithesis, or the Other, of modernity but also because “there
has been a popular academic tendency to diminish, deny, or neglect the
impact that African peoples, practices, and civilizations have had on
the West’s development, as well as to forget the extent to which these
populations have sought paths that have veered away from Western
modernities even while being interlocked with them” (Hanchard
273). This ambivalent relationship has been a feature of alternative
modernities, but there has been little attention to the impact of Afro-
modernity on the West.

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Furthermore, it makes no good sense to describe the African diasporic

subject as cosmopolitan, for such a subject is located in a supra-national
identity, an “imagined community” that is not territorially demarcated
but based on the shared belief in the commonalities of Western op-
pression experienced by African and African-derived peoples. This
community has developed alternative political and cultural networks
across nation-state boundaries, and critiques the uneven application of
the discourses of the Enlightenment and processes of modernization by
the West (Hanchard 275). The consequences of this particular transna-
tion can only be suggested in this short space, but the most prominent
are a) the development of the experience of racial time in multicultural
societies, b) the circulation of a supra-national identity back to African
states, and c) the deployment of that aspect of modernity that opens to
the future through a recollection of the past.
Whereas the cultural impact of Afro-modernity on Western modernity
is clear in popular culture in its music, fashion, art, and even sport, a
more subtle impact was that of the African diaspora on concepts of time.
Whereas modernity had “disembedded” time as Giddens puts it in The
Consequences of Modernity (21–29), the emergence of what Hanchard
calls “racial time” may be said to have ‘re-embedded’ it. “Racial time is
defined as an awareness of the inequalities of temporality that result from
power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups”
(Hanchard 280). These effects can be seen in the daily interactions of
multi-racial societies: inequalities of temporal access to institutions,
goods, services, resources, power and knowledge (281).
The re-circulation of a shared sense of oppression and purpose back
to newly independent African states is one of the more interesting
consequences of the African transnation. The emergence of the New
Negro and calls for transnational solidarity were heard in Ghana and
characterized Kwame Nkrumah’s demand for a free Africa. Although
Nkrumah was murdered, the tide that had begun in the African
transnation had turned against colonialism and the post-colonial
character of twentieth-century modernity was initiated.
The third consequence, and the most far-reaching, is the attitude
to the future that is shared with all post-colonial peoples and revealed

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particularly in their literatures. We see in a statement by the African-

American formulator of pan-Africanism, Alexander Crummel, the
beginnings of what I take to be a revolution in the post-colonial relation
between memory and anticipation:

What I would fain have you guard against is not the memory of
slavery, but the constant recollection of it, as the commanding
thought of a new people, who should be marching on to the
broadest freedom in a new and glorious present, and a still
more magnificent future. (13)

Crummel’s desire exemplifies a strategic utopianism that comes to be

one of the most powerful instances of the post-colonial transformation
of modernity. Where Western modernity became characterized by
openness to the future, we see now a situation in which that openness is
revolutionized by the political agency of memory. For Edouard Glissant,
“the past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as
history for us, is, however, obsessively present” (64). He proposes a view
of the past that projects into the future, a prophetic vision of the past.
Such a vision, claims Glissant, is neither “a schematic chronology” nor
a “nostalgic lament,” but a prophetic vision may be the most powerful
contribution of the transnation to the concept of modernity itself.
India and China have a complementary relation to this example of
Afro-modernity, because their size demonstrates the extent to which
diaspora begins at home. The circulation of the transnation is not
characterized simply by loss and absence from the nation-state. Such
circulation supervenes national boundaries, but inward as well as
outward. Transnation elaborates the way in which these two civilizations
tend to separate the concept of the nation from the state. Despite
assertions that Indian identity begins and ends in geography, principally
the great Bharat of mother India, the spiritual bond between child and
mother is made in 1821 places of pilgrimage (Kapoor 30–31). So it
is by pilgrimage, by movement and travel that the centrality of place
is established in the Indian psyche. The great centrality of the Hindu
self is already a traveling self. The antiquity and adaptability of Indian
civilization, and the nature of its engagement of the transnation

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with globalization, is suggested in its writing in which two magnetic

poles seem to organize the landscape of identity: the pole of memory
which perpetuates cultural tradition, and the pole of possibility which
represents an Indian identity whose overriding character­istic is one of
mobility and transnationality (Mishra 422).
Similarly China, despite its historic inwardness, “can no longer be
limited to the more or less fixed area of its official spatial and cultural
boundaries,” nor, conversely, as Ien Ang says, “can it be held up as
providing the authentic, authoritative and uncontested standard for
all things Chinese” (225). This dislocation represents a dialectical dis-
ruption of the linking of the nation and the state. For while diaspora
entails “a disruption of the ontological stability and certainty of Chinese
identity,” it does not negate the operative power of that identity as a
cultural principle. China’s diasporic writings in English demonstrate the
same cultural energy as the Indian transnation, though perhaps not with
the impact that the work of Rushdie and Mistry, Ghosh and Tharoor
have had on English literatures. Thus the phenomenon of Chinese and
Indian transnational writing provides a cultural framework through
which we may consider the possible movement of political economy in
globalization: dispersion, fluidity, asymmetry, the porosity of borders
and the transformation of the technologies of power.
The conclusion we can make from this is that alternative modernities
are modernity. When we use the example of post-colonial engagements
with dominant imperial technologies, and take particular account of
their transformation of imperial cultures, we see that these engagements
are both models for and agents in the transformation of modernity. In
some cases, such as India, the cultural engagements transfer seamlessly
into glocalizing encounters of various kinds as alternative modernities
both transform and re-circulate adapted versions of Western modernity.
Alternative modernities are a phenomenon in which socio-political
theories of modernity find a harmonious conjunction with post-colonial
cultural analysis. But the critical path of discovery opened up in this
conjunction is the further revelation of the degree to which Western
modernity (and the West itself ) has been transformed by the creative
adaptation of the formerly colonized world.

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Notes
1 See, for instance, a special issue of Daedalus on “Multiple Modernities”; see
also Feenberg; Appadurai; Gaonkar; Berger and Huntington; Cao; Cooper;
Eisenstadt. See Gikandi for the post-colonial language of globalization studies.
2 It is important to remember that the concept of “the West” really rose to promi-
nence in contrast to the Communist “East” rather than the older “Orient,” and
its capitalist modernity should be distinguished from that ‘alternative’ form of
modernity that arose in the USSR.
3 In 2008 children throughout China, but particularly in Hebei province, began
to develop kidney stones. Five children eventually died and sixty thousand more
fell ill. This was the result of an apparently long-standing practice in which dairy
farmers added melamine to milk to falsify its protein content. On August 2,
Fonterra, a co-operative dairy group of New Zealand farmers that owns 43% of
Sanlu, learned about the contamination and recommended a full public recall.
Sanlu dithered and requested a meeting with Shijiazhuang officials and insti-
tuted a partial trade recall. A full public recall was not made until September
when the New Zealand government, on information from Fonterra, urged the
Chinese central government to recall all Sanlu milk products. The chairwoman
of Sanlu, Tian Wenhua, Communist Party secretary for Hebei province, was
dismissed after it was discovered that Sanlu had known about the problem for
months.
  Mrs. Tian’s predicament highlighted the problems of a managed economy in
which party officials occupy senior management positions in ostensibly private
companies. When Fonterra first raised the issue on August 2, it was less than a
week before the opening of the Olympic Games. Every Chinese knew the games
took priority over everything else for the central government. Being good Party
cadres and without being told to do so, Mrs. Tian and her colleagues instinctive-
ly realized the repercussions that went with causing another food scare at a time
when the eyes of the world were focused on China. So great was the Chinese
commitment to the “one world” propaganda of the Games that the conflicts in
a manager who was also a Party official were insoluble. Critically, the policy of
non-transparency, which had been a central feature of Government control and
maintenance of public order and ‘social harmony,’ resulted in an impossible situ-
ation for Mrs Tian (Lo A14).
  What would have happened had the central government known about the
problem on August 2? One can only speculate that Mrs. Tian chose to save the
government the embarrassment of having to cover up the scandal itself. The
conflict that appears endemic in China’s alternative modernity is the conflict be-
tween a completely non-transparent political system and the apparent necessity
for transparency (or information) in a market capitalist system to maintain and
increase profit.

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