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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2013
The dislocations associated with modernity have driven scholarly, literary, and philosophical inquiries in various directions since the 19th century: Marx's materialist critique, Ranke's historical empiricism, Baudelaire's flâneur, Simmel's studies of urban anomie and alienation, Durkheim and Weber's sociology, and so on into the 20th and 21st centuries, and now reflected in this issue of IJMES on queer studies. Although there are vast differences among them, they share a compulsion to explain what appeared as massive reconfigurations of time and space. The proliferation of subjective possibilities was pegged to an acceleration of the former and compression of the latter; accordingly, on our radar appear the bourgeois, middle class, and worker in the long 19th century and gay, lesbian, and transgender in the late 20th, two moments of rapid globalization and subject proliferation. We are to believe that in the fullness of time all will be free and all will be good. However, in the here and now some must be unfree and some bad. The modern distinction between free and unfree, good and bad, subjects relies heavily on uninterrogated assumptions about the spatial origins, temporality, and trajectory of modernity.
1 “Theory” does not adequately capture what is more like a constellation of critical stances that have expanded and morphed over the last two decades. The orbit of criticism has centered on different objects as the political universe threw out new targets, from gay marriage and neoliberal reforms to permanent war and “homonationalism.”
2 See, for example, Wong, R. Bin, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Bayly, Christopher, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Explorations in Connected History, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Colley, Linda, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon, 2007)Google Scholar; and Parthasarathi, Prasannan, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Catherine Hall makes this argument in her review of Bayly's Birth of the Modern World; see http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/420 (accessed 10 January 2013).
4 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
5 In this sense, Lockman's, ZacharyContending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is quite queer. See also Mitchell, Timothy, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Massad, Joseph, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257Google Scholar. It is not surprising that most of the articles in this special issue are by literature scholars, the tradition wherein the subject and subjectivity are most central and Benjamin is more likely to be read.
7 Gasper, Michael et al., Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
8 Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Jacob, Wilson Chacko, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
10 Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Amar, Paul, “Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13 (2011): 299–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
