This penetrating book reexamines the project of modernity. It seeks tooppose the abstract idealized vision of modernity with an alternativeethnographic understa... » 

This penetrating book reexamines the project of modernity. It seeks tooppose the abstract idealized vision of modernity with an alternativeethnographic understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity thatsituates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It examinescases of popular modernism in the United States Britain and colonialMalaysia drawing out the specific cultural and religious assumptionsunderlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in adiversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion. «