Introduction: Enchantments of Modernity

Abstract

Introduction: Enchantments of ModernityThe idea of modernity rests on rupture.It brings into view a monumental narrative-the breaching of magical covenants, the surpassing of medieval superstitions, and the undoing of hierarchical traditions.The advent of modernity, then, insinuates the disenchantment of the world: the progressive control of nature through scientific procedures of technology, and the inexorable demystification of enchantments through powerful techniques of reason.Indeed, it is possible to argue that the privileged dispensation of legislative reason within regimes of modernity gathers together nature and humanity as conjoint attributes of a disenchanted world.Yet processes of modernity also create their own enchantments.Enchantments that extend from the immaculately imagined origins and ends of modernity, to the dense magic of money and markets, to novel mythologies of nation and empire, to hierarchical oppositions between myth and history, ritual and rationality, East and West, and tradition and modernity.Intensely phantasmic but concretely palpable, tangible representations and forceful practices, such enticements order and orchestrate the past and the The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Fall .

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.