The Crisis of Global Modernity

Prasenjit Duara is the Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University, and taught at the University of Chicago between 1991 and 2008, where he served as Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies. In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942, which won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies, USA. Among his other books are: Rescuing History from the Nation (1995); Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003); an edited volume, Decolonization: Now and Then (2004); and A Companion to Global Historical Thought, co-edited with Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori (2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and several European languages.

• Introduction; 1. Sustainability and the crisis of transcendence; 2. Circulatory and competitive histories; 3. The historical logics of global modernity; 4. Dialogical and radical transcendence; 5. Dialogical transcendence and secular nationalism in the Sinosphere; 6. The traffic between secularism and transcendence; 7. Regions of circulation and networks of sustainability in Asia; 8. Conclusion and epilogue: of reason and hope; Index.

'Modernity in its Western guise has generated a degraded, unsustainable world. To find the basis for a more viable, 'post-Western modernity', Duara maintains that we must look beyond this tradition. Drawing on a capacious command of Asian history and society, Duara probes the region's older philosophies to offer a vision that might nurture a truly global commons. This is work that is ambitious in the best possible sense.' Jean Comaroff, Harvard University, Massachusetts