Modernities Negotiated and Repurposed

Reference:

Rofel, L. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. University of California Press.

Le Normand, Brigitte. 2014. Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism and Socialism in Belgrade. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Prakash, Vikramaditya. 2002. Afterword. Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.  

Swyngedouw, Erik. 2006. “Metabolic Urbanization: The Making of Cyborg Cities.” In The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. N. Heynen, M. Kaika, E. Swyngedouw, eds. London: Routledge. Pp. 20-39.

Entering this week’s readings, I grapple with the questions:

1. How is ‘modernity' planned and designed through the built environment, taken in light of the intersectionality of culture, politics, and the built environment?
2. How does modernist planning unfold in the processes of building urban infrastructure?

As we continue to occupy ourselves with the modernity projects in the urban space, I am reminded of the pluralistic nature of any concept or phenomenon that pertains to infrastructure and modernity. I chose Lisa Rofel's book because of its intersections with the themes of modernist planning, cultural (gendered) aspirations and implementations, and socialist realities. But more so, because she keenly calls out the fact that there are other forms of modernities - imagined and pursued - that would not conform to the Western concepts of the term. As she boldly suggests in the title, there are infact other modernities beyond the academic writings on modernity at the time of her research in the late 1990s.

Rofel defines modernity in various ways in the book, but opens with a definition as “…an imaginary and continuously shifting site of global/local claims, commitments, and knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues about the place of those who move in and out of categories of otherness” (Rofel 1999:3).

Rofel, Prakash, and Le Normand all speak of the global-local duality in their ethnographies about how modernity is negotiated at the state level as well as how it is interpreted by the people. The tango is between the modernization projects as intended and/or implemented by the state and the subject formation in the lives of everyday people. As Prakash shows, Chandigarh's Le Crobusier is the contesting ground where state's desires coalesce with local practices: the city's claim to modernity through appearances, be it Indian or colonial (149); the village people's repurposing of the architecture and its space on the Esplanade in their daily practices (146-7). If Prakash asks, “Whose architecture is it?” then we can find Rofel asking in her book, “Whose modernity is it?”

In the three texts, the historical parallels and continuities in modernization projects reflect the many ways in which a nation and its people grapple with modernities and their processes. Through these projects, actors at all levels participate on their own terms to show how national identities are created, negotiated, and reconstructed - even how such identities are perceived from afar. These terrains bring us back to the power structure and struggles in infrastructures, as we follow Spivak’s call to question “the ethics of representation" (Prakash 2002: 152). The gaze from the West, for instance, can be occupied with “the binary poles of acting on and being acted upon" in  Malraux’s mediation on the “irreconcilability of the West and the East" (Prakash 2002: 150). In the case of postcolonial India, Spivak argues that “Modernism… as a failure because it did not put decolonization on stage" (152).

Authors we have read thus far allude to the complex undersides of modernity as exhibited in various forms of infrastructures. In Other Modernities, Rofel “addresses the cultural politics of modernity in the late twentieth century. It suggests how modernity is imagined, pursued, and experienced… in those places marked by a deferred relationship to modernity” (Roffle 1999:3). Early in this seminar, Swyngedouw reminds us that, “Urban modernity is a particular set of processes of socio-metabolic transformations promises exactly the possibility of the active, democratic, and empowering creation of those socio-physical environments we wish to inhabit. In this sense, modernity is not over; it has not yet begun” (2006).