‘Race’, Time and the Revision of Modernity

The revision of Western modernism, Homi J. Bhabha suggests, requires both the linguistic investiture of the subject and a practice of diasporic performance that is metaphorical. The 'public culture' project that Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai have initiated focuses on the transnational dissemination of cultural modernity. The postcolonial passage through modernity produces that form of repetition, the past as projective. The time-lag of postcolonial modernity moves forward, erasing that compliant past tethered to the myth of progress, ordered in the binarisms of its cultural logic: past/present, inside/outside. The problem of progress is not simply an unveiling of human perfectibility, not simply the hermeneutic of progress. In the performance of human doing, through the veil, emerges a figure of cultural time where perfectibility is not ineluctably tied to the myth of progressivism. Making problematic its own discourse not simply 'as ideas' but as the position and status of the locus of social enunciation.