Tag: Modernity

Free Download Mohammad H. Fadel, "Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Law, and Modernity "
English | ISBN: 1957454792 | 2023 | 386 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Mohammad Fadel’s scholarship on Islamic law and legal history ranges from medieval institutions and the history of Islamic legal interpretation to urgent problems relating to the modern reception and re-assessment of Islamic legal doctrine. Fadel’s intellectual concerns focus primarily on the compatibility of the Islamic legal tradition with modern liberal political arrangements, but in his research and writing he also delves into the realm of premodern Islamic legal thought and institutions. His Rawlsian approach leads him to a political reading of the Islamic legal tradition, which he accomplishes by teasing out jurists’ assumptions about politics, economics, and the domestic sphere. Fadel’s readings of Islamic legal sources suggest that Islamic law remains relevant to a society in which legitimate disagreements over law and morality seem intractable. At the same time, from the Rawlsian perspective he adopts, Fadel reminds us that premodern Muslim jurists formulated Islamic law also under conditions of substantial controversy over matters of law and morality, as well as over questions of religion, politics, theology, and metaphysics. The studies gathered together in this volume adroitly illustrate Fadel’s interest in Islamic law as a domain of Islamic political thought and as a framework that might be deployed in today’s pluralistic and secularized societies.

Free Download Max Saunders, "Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31"
English | ISBN: 0198829450 | 2019 | 448 pages | PDF | 4 MB
This study provides the first substantial history and analysis of the To-Day and To-Morrow series of 110 books, published by Kegan Paul Trench and Trubner (and E. P. Dutton in the USA) from 1923 to 1931, in which writers chose a topic, described its present, and predicted its future. Contributors included J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst, Hugh MacDiarmid, James Jeans, J. D. Bernal, Winifred Holtby, Andre Maurois, and many others. The study combines a comprehensive account of its interest, history, and range with a discussion of its key concerns, tropes, and influence.

Free Download Heba Arafa Abdelfattah, "Filming Modernity and Islam in Colonial Egypt"
English | ISBN: 139952075X | 2023 | 488 pages | PDF | 31 MB
This book studies the rise of cinema in colonial Egypt as a supplemental secular public sphere that is not anti-religion. To this end, it investigates the reception of film by three centers of powers: the colonial authorities, the Muslim clergy, and the Cairene bourgeoisie. It inquires about the representations of modernity in films produced during the time and the place filmmakers assigned to Islam in these representations. The result is a story of survival and coexistence told through the lens of cinema as modern art and popular culture negotiating its overt and covert censorship in the public sphere, despite colonization and war.

Free Download Jasmine Rault, "Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In"
English | ISBN: 0754669610 | 2011 | 196 pages | PDF | 24 MB
The first book-length feminist analysis of Eileen Gray’s work, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In argues that Gray’s unusual architecture and design – as well as its history of abuse and neglect – emerged from her involvement with cultures of sapphic modernism. Bringing together a range of theoretical and historical sources, from architecture and design, communication and media, to gender and sexuality studies, Jasmine Rault shows that Gray shared with many of her female contemporaries a commitment to designing spaces for sexually dissident modernity. This volume examines Gray’s early lacquer work and Romaine Brooks’ earliest nude paintings; Gray’s first built house, E.1027, in relation to Radclyffe Hall and her novel The Well of Loneliness; and Gray’s private house, Tempe à Pailla, with Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. While both female sexual dissidence and modernist architecture were reduced to rigid identities through mass media, women such as Gray, Brooks, Hall and Barnes resisted the clarity of such identities with opaque, non-communicative aesthetics. Rault demonstrates that by defying the modern imperative to publicity, clarity and identity, Gray helped design a sapphic modernity that cultivated the dynamism of uncertain bodies and unfixed pleasures, which depended on staying in rather than coming out.

Free Download Nita Mathur, "Consumer Culture, Modernity and Identity"
English | ISBN: 8132111273 | 2013 | 440 pages | EPUB | 1388 KB
This book offers analysis of articulation of consumer culture and modernity in everyday lives of people in a transnational framework. It pursues three broad themes: lifestyle choices and construction of modern identities; fashion and advertising; and subaltern concerns and moral subjectivities. It juxtaposes empirical studies with theoretical traditions in addressing questions such as: How do people imagine modernity and identity in consumer culture? What does modernity or ‘being modern’ mean to people in different societies? Are modernity and tradition antithetical to or develop an interface with each other? The chapters in the book trace manifestations and trajectories of consumer culture and modernity as they connect to develop a sense of renewed identity.

Free Download Alberto Burgio, "Adam Smith and Modernity "
English | ISBN: 1032293942 | 2023 | 382 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
This volume features 19 original chapters on Adam Smith’s conception of modernity. The contributions demonstrate the relevance of Smith as the great interpreter of modernity 250 years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations.

Free Download Modernity and its Futures Past: Recovering Unalienated Life
English | 2023 | ISBN: 3031321065 | 697 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 4 MB
The work reimagines emancipatory possibilities in the face of reified capitalist modernity. The enlightenment resulted in a ‘disenchanted’ world, stripped of ‘anthropomorphised’ meaning and purpose. This world, in its capitalistic figuration, alienates us from others, and from nature. To rearticulate emancipatory possibilities requires a non-alienated relation to society and nature. Yet, modernist disenchantment cannot be undone by returning to pre-modern ‘enchantment’. Rather, such rearticulation calls for the recovery of ‘unalienated life’ from within non-reified modernity, by renewing its universalist dimension.

Free Download Temple Davis Okoro, "Modernity and Destining of Technological Being: Beyond Heidegger’s Critique of Technology to Responsible and Reflexive Technology"
English | 2016 | pages: 458 | ISBN: 3631672888 | PDF | 2,3 mb
Facing Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, the author analyses the question of technology and ethical responsibility and the call for reflexivity towards technology. He examines Heidegger’s thoughts about how science and technology conceal the enigmatic and distinctive presencing of Being and exhibits how modern technology has brought unintended consequences and risks. The author extends the deliberation among diverse epistemologies, interested parties and laypersons, a component of reflexive modernization. Such epistemic community opens the way for a new reflexive democratization of technology, in which different actors should be involved in decision making about technology as it affects the society, the environment and individuals.

Free Download Susan Nance, "Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma"
English | 2015 | pages: 112 | ISBN: 1137562064 | PDF | 3,3 mb
The concept of ‘modernity’ is central to many disciplines, but what is modernity to animals? Susan Nance answers this question through a radical reinterpretation of the life of Jumbo the elephant. In the 1880s, consumers, the media, zoos, circuses and taxidermists, and (unknowingly) Jumbo himself, transformed the elephant from an orphan of the global ivory trade and zoo captive into a distracting international celebrity. Citizens on two continents imaged Jumbo as a sentient individual and pet, but were aghast when he died in an industrial accident and his remains were absorbed by the taxidermic and animal rendering industries reserved for anonymous animals. The case of Jumbo exposed the ‘human dilemma’ of modern living, wherein people celebrated individual animals to cope or distract themselves from the wholesale slaughter of animals required by modern consumerism.

Free Download Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene
English | 2023 | ISBN: 1009377574 | 243 Pages | PDF | 1.3 MB
While Thomas Pynchon is usually described as an American author who primarily writes about American reality, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene argues that his major novels, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, can profitably be read as a global trilogy that presents a coherent historical account of how the emergence and spread of European modernity across the world have had devastating consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. This book sets a new agenda in Pynchon studies, charting his early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including globalization’s demand for constant growth. It combines close textual readings with broad perspectives on large thematic arcs and stylistic developments across Pynchon’s entire career as well as an extensive dialogue with the rich reception of his work.