FUTURES OF MODERNITY

Spuren Sarat Maharaj Cosmo2 Mary Caldor Cosmo3

COSMOPOLITANIZING EUROPEAN MODERNITY


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The Europe of today has become the major arena in which the hegemony of a Western modernity and its economic, political and cultural claims to global dominance are being fundamentally contested. Transnational movements - of people within and across European borders, and of goods and risks, ideas and histories from the "periphery" to the "centre" - are putting the national, but also the Europeanized, will to political control under pressure, and thus are proving to be a major force in cosmopolitanizing European societies and the modern traditions on which they rest.

Ultimately, these processes raise the question of how to acknowledge both theoretically and practically the simultaneous presence of "other" modernities within a truly global, cosmopolitan project of Reflexive Modernity which transcends Eurocentric restrictions.


Keynote Speaker: Sarat Maharaj

Sarat Maharaj was born in South Africa and educated in one of the segregated universities of the Apartheid years. He did his PhD in the UK on ʻThe Dialectic of Modernism and Mass Culture: Studies in Post War British Artʼ.

Professor of Art History at Goldsmiths University of London, where he is now Visiting Research Professor, he is currently Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems at Lund University, Sweden. He was the first Rudolf Arnheim Professor at Humboldt University, Berlin.

He was co-curator of Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002 and ʻFarewell to Postcolonialismʼ: Towards a Post-Western Modernityʼ, Guangzhou Triennial, 2008.


Discussants: Edgar Grande, Mary Kaldor, Natan Sznaider, Ulrich Beck

Chair: Regina Römhild


Literature:


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