The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)

Modern historians, in contrast, evaluate past events in their contemporary spatial and relational context and regard their archival remains in another time as ‘anachronisms’ or sources to interpret the past.

History is the circulatory and dynamic repository of live possibilities for future actions.

As we will see, nationalism inherited and reconfigured confessional polities rather than rejected or annulled religious politics in Latin Europe. As a kind of secularized confessionalism, the nation became an engine of conquest over peoples and nature.

The third category is methodological and conceptual. My goal as a scholar is to replace the still dominant ‘national-modernization’ model with the paradigm of ‘sustainable modernity’ for the humanistic disciplines.

Although characterized by brutal repression, it also attained levels of economic development and urbanization that were second only to Japan in all of Asia.

Top-down state mandated agendas, however, are unlikely to fulfill the task of environmental protection despite the commitment of the central government, in part because the state itself sends mixed messages and is constituted by different agencies and levels of government with varying if not contradictory attitudes towards the environment.

Antony Anghie goes still further to argue that sovereignty was developed in the confrontation with Indians in Spanish America.

If Ricoeur is right about the need for narrative to represent time, White insists that Ricoeur’s emphasis on narrative as “found” and not “constructed” avoids the necessarily political nature of narrative construction. “What is imaginary about narrative representation is the idea of a centered consciousness looking out on to the world and represent

I also referred to the phenomenon of traffic to explore how the yearnings and uses of transcendence migrate to ostensibly secular spaces.