MFS Modern Fiction Studies

If space-time, the history of the disciplines, modernity, and sweeping theoretical overviews are your thing, then Saurabh Dube’s pair of studies, Subjects of Modernity: Time-space, Disciplines, Margins and Disciplines of Modernity: Archives, Histories, Anthropologies, are calling your name. The titles are part of a larger series that explores the unique structures and understandings of subjects of modernity in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In both books, Dube tests his own weight on the tensions that sustain modernity and modernism. Early in Subjects, Dube writes of his objectives: “The work straddles the standard splits between the contemporary and the historical as well as the theoretical and the empirical: indeed, their conjunctions spell the spirit and substance of the study” (22). The binary here— “splits” versus “conjunctions”—structures his approach through both volumes. [End Page 614]

Equally, the key terms in the titles mutually imbricate subjects and disciplines. Both terms must be understood expansively, so that subject in both volumes includes “subject to (shaped by) these [spatio-temporal] processes, but also subjects of (themselves shaping) these processes. . . . These propositions rescue modernity and its subjects from their ready conflations with exclusive images of the (Euro-American, often male) modern subject . . . I equally include subject as implying branch of learning and area of study, topic and theme, question and matter, and issue and business” (16). This last line connects the manifold subject to the equally diverse academic and bureaucratic disciplines by which modernity is structured. The books and their terms call back and forth to each other; they must be read as a pair if we are to understand either’s full import.

With modernity itself as the topic, Dube has set himself an ambitious task. He explores the implications of a spatio-temporal lens on modernity and its subjects and generates a consciousness of connections between the disciplines of History and Anthropology. In making explicit his own standpoint while theorizing, Dube produces the kind of archive and critique that he recommends become standard practice. He aims to treat the binaries and complications of modernity’s narratives as constitutive of its identity rather than as obstacles that it must overcome. For the most part, he delivers. His handling of the history of the disciplines actualizes the Foucauldian insight that disciplinarity itself constitutes the very subjects who make modernity.

Carefully charting his terms, Dube traces the dialectic of modernity and its subjects, notionally sifting the subjects produced by modernity from the subjects who produce modernity: an entire chapter of Subjects turns on “the inadequacy of conflating the modern subject with the subject of modernity” (68). The ostensibly historicist bent here falters somewhat, however, when Dube echoes Theodor Adorno’s treatment of modernism as “a principally ‘qualitative’ rather than a merely ‘chronological’ category” (66). This definition is a bit of an odd move given the otherwise dialectical framing Dube upholds, since, as plenty of critics have argued in the last thirty years, it risks segregating modernist cultural production from modernity. For Dube here, modernism holds a “mirror up to the characteristics, contingencies, contentions, and coordinates, especially of space and time, of that acutely authoritative universal: modernity” (67). Following his own logic about the subjects of modernity, one would expect Dube to note that modernism goes beyond holding up a mirror to, and in fact produces and participates in, modernity. By Dube’s own [End Page 615] logic the modernists should be understood as subjects of modernity as well as modern subjects. We don’t doubt that Dube would agree with this proposition, and yet in an uncharacteristic oversight, he is silent on it here.

In the end, Dube argues convincingly for an understanding of “subject” as a manifold and shifting category that itself indexes modernity’s variability. History and Anthropology are subjects of modernity. They also produce subjects of modernity by constructing epistemological categories into which individuals can be placed and by which they can be understood. Of course, such subjects themselves construct History and Anthropology as subjects. Disciplinarity is propaedeutic, academic, psychological, demographic, and ideological on all fronts. Understanding how it converges with, distorts, and diverges from subjectivity is the topic of the second book, Disciplines of Modernity.

In Disciplines, Dube tackles the relationship between modernity, academic disciplines, and epistemic privilege. He articulates a conception, only hinted at in Subjects, surrounding the fields of History and Anthropology: History and Anthropology are disciplines of modernity. The distinction between the two disciplines rests on their particular approaches to space-time, with Anthropology anchored by a commitment to tradition and culture, while History privileges history and development. Deconstructing the institutional separation of these disciplines, Dube re-animates a dialectical view in which History and Anthropology are canceled as antinomies and yet preserved in the hybrid discipline of historical anthropology. This new formation, which Dube both advocates and illustrates in these volumes, undertakes both a history of anthropology and an anthropology of history as well as charting a way to overcome the limitations of each by drawing on the other’s methods. It’s a dialectical view whose real import lies in the challenge it imposes to modernity’s own desire to sift and separate when messy inter-relation speaks a deeper truth.

The same commitment to dialectics manifests in concrete terms in Disciplines. Investigating the “splits” and “conjunctions” within and between how Dalit people understand their situation and the academic treatment of Dalit people, Dube introduces his own experience with the Hindu caste system growing up—especially in his schooling. Drawing on that background, he puts forth a nuanced conception of elites as a fluid category, expanding beyond clearly defined groups to include “claimants to elite-ness and entitlement” (72) that he notices in a range of people and spaces, from power brokers and capitalists to his own friends and colleagues. The book’s [End Page 616] broad focus on entitlement and privilege, rather than on a distinct group, derives from Dube’s personal interest. He reflects on his experiences with his graduating class from the Modern School, casting a curious eye over the interactions with class among a small, removed group in New Delhi. This is the first time he makes clear the essential distinction between writing what is reality and writing what one thinks reality ought to be. Turning from elites to Dalits, Dube extends his insights regarding the difference between modern subjects and subjects of modernity. Actual Dalit individuals are modern subjects, participants in modernity and agents of its progression. By contrast, the academic study of Dalits is a subject of modernity—it writes what it thinks reality ought to be, rather than what it in fact is. Just as Dube grew up as part of the elite, and yet deviates from the category, so Dalit individuals deviate from—and thus challenge or betray—the category of “Dalit subject” by which they are organized and disciplined. In disciplinary terms, Dalit subjects are written about from an anthropological perspective—treated as artifacts of the past aligned with culture and tradition—when they are equally historical subjects aligned with progress and development. Exposing this dichotomy through the nexus of Subject-Discipline, Dube indicates a synthetic path forward even as he admits that that there is no question of simply identifying and upending such complicated circumstances. Though he is clearly driven by a commitment to social justice, he offers no easy solutions. Instead, he chooses an ethical orientation that signals the writer’s commitments and yet allows the intricacies of the circumstances to stand in their own right. He asks readers to join him in his ongoing effort to unlearn privilege and entitlement while understanding their continued attachments to and investments in such privilege and entitlement.

The litmus test for any sweeping work of criticism and theory is, perhaps, its use to readers. Can it help illuminate a situation that is otherwise perplexing or resistant to interpretation? For us, the answer here is a resounding yes. Dube’s attention to the artificiality of the Western episteme, as naturalized in university disciplines and departments—to the self-deconstruction of those structures when they are pressurized—resonates for us with some contemporary Indigenous thought. As writers such as Mark Rifkin, Scott Richard Lyons, Jorge Sanchez-Perez, Juliana Hu Pegues, and LeAnne Howe have demonstrated, Indigenous conceptions of space-time resist incorporation into Western categories. Dube’s contributions here urge us to rethink modernist space-time as a project from which tradition (or culture)—that is, Indigeneity—is excluded, and yet in which Indigenous [End Page 617] people participate and which they help shape. Modernism’s self-conscious break with tradition has often been cast as a rejection of history, materiality, or politics. All three of those concepts coalesce in the notion of Indigeneity—precisely the Indigeneity whose suppression was the sine qua non of modernity as settler-colonialism. The confrontation between Indigeneity and settler-colonialism is constitutive of modernity. Equally and at the same time, it is produced by modernity as a myth of self-origin. Modernity exists in the clash between Indigeneity and settler-colonialism and can only flourish if Indigeneity is extinguished. And yet Indigenous people continue to exist. They make the space-time of modernity even as settler-colonial versions of modernity attempt to make their very existence the price of modernity’s realization. In Dube’s terms, the Indigenous space-time of modernity includes tradition, myth, community, the magical, and ritual; the settler space-time of modernity comprises the modern, history, the state, rationality, and systems. Their inter-implication and codependency lie at the heart of Dube’s way of thinking and of his deep conception of modernity. “Splits” and “conjunctions” indeed.

Perhaps the trickiest maneuver Dube undertakes is to use the tools of modernity to undercut modernity’s foundational premises. Following in the footsteps of thinkers as diverse as Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, Dube treads a necessarily thin line. It is equally a line that must be held, since Dube has no desire simply to dispense with the intellectual, bureaucratic, and epistemological infrastructure of modernity for its excesses—its investment in disciplinarity and subjection. Instead, he wants to restore to modernity its own complex commitment to self-overcoming. Thus, Dube recognizes that valuable contributions to human understanding have been made by the traditional Western episteme. At the same time, Dube sometimes risks generalizing from one situation to others where the same conclusions are harder to sustain. His claims about modernity and its subjects on a local scale with the Dalit people might not apply to other localized structures for Indigenous communities on Turtle Island. Such is the inherent risk of having such an expansive vision and vast topic: as any scholar of modernity will aver, you no sooner make a general claim than you discover a trove of counterexamples. This weakness is inescapable, though, and Dube should not be criticized for it. As Derrida once wrote, “But if no one can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little he may do so, this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are of equal pertinence” (282). The pieces themselves are examples of the academic work he proposes doing: [End Page 618] a critical look at the world, including the author’s own beliefs, as well as an archive marking the evolution of modernity. Even as Dube examines the systems people function under, he acknowledges his own tendency to slip into the false conceptual restrictions we must strive to undo in ourselves, such as the tensions within identities of universality/particularity and power/difference.

One of the most winning aspects of these volumes is Dube’s personal appearance in them. Taking his own theorization of the manifold subject of modernity, Dube starts Subjects as he means to go on: with a personal narrative of discovery and development that parallels the development of subaltern studies and postcolonialism. This narrative positions him as a subject of/to modernity and inscribes the tension between particular/general that he traces throughout the volumes. Dube’s biographical space-time is described here as a function of his disciplinary (de)formation, exposing the contradictions between how disciplines imagine both themselves and their objects, and how they (re)produce disciplinary subjects as scholars. Across the two volumes, there is a shift from a critical look at the oppressed subjects who live under and shape the modern conceptual framework to a questioning of the oppressive circles that study them as subjects/objects. Refusing the pose of objectivity so characteristic of modernity’s episteme at least since Immanuel Kant, Dube oscillates between setting the disciplinary and conceptual stage, and situating himself within disciplinary and pragmatic intricacies.

Dube concludes the second volume, Disciplines, with a hint of hesitancy: what will we lose in changing our ways in a modern world? Vigilance and curiosity are essential in Dube’s call for transformative disciplinary and personal academic practices. He embraces the importance of understanding privilege in order to unlearn it. These are essential takeaways moving forward in the study of modernism and modernity, and by nature ask of us more than a simple change in our methods. Solutions to the problems that rigid dominant systems of meaning and power have created require going beyond the neat solutions often posed within them. As a consequence, these volumes are intense. They are packed with Jamesonian sentences that often demand a pause to sort out their various clauses and dependencies. The topic itself is like that. It is varied, manifold, self- and inter-referential. These works constitute a personal, scholarly, and theoretical effort to disentangle some of the myths—even Dube cannot address them all—by which modernity continues to structure our daily lives. [End Page 619]