Like many of her contemporaries, Marianne Moore became fascinated by all things Chinese as a young adult and sought to incorporate Chinese imagery, ideals, and philosophy into her own work.

Xiamara Hohman on Mei Lanfang’s effect on Marianne Moore

Much ink has been spilled on whether Amrita Sher-Gil’s work was “modernist” or “realist,” Eastern or Western, modern or traditional.

Vaishnavi Patil offers a fresh reading of Amrita Sher-Gil

The best way to show students how the term “modernity” is wielded in this way is to highlight the variety of lifestyles that exist parallel to each other in the same era…

Gina Elia responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

Episode 2.2 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast is live!

Through the guise of hypotheticals and future realities, authors of the genre can critique current conditions and disseminate their ideas to a broad, sometimes international, audience.

Andrew Latham and Erica Paley on Chinese science fiction

Official efforts to promote science fiction in support of national rejuvenation have the perverse effect of encouraging a genre that is shot through with powerful anti-totalitarian tropes.

Andrew Latham and Erica Paley on Chinese science fiction

The complexities of premodern interfaith relations are explored in all their surprisingly human dimensions, avoiding the tragic obscuring of this history that has occurred as the result of modern traumas.

Philip Dorroll reviews Orthodoxy and Islam in the Middle East

Hai Zi was a poet dedicated to an attempt to create a mythology of modernity; a poet as obsessed with the origins of modernity as he was with the challenge of reforging it.

Jake Grefenstette and poetic genealogies of Chinese modernity

Jansenist Orientalism, a sub-species of ‘Catholic Orientalism,’ matters as a French tributary to religious modernity as such—the overlooked contribution of a prominent if persecuted minority.

Richard Yoder on Orientalism in early modernity

Counterfactual history allows us to sharpen our judgment by juxtaposing what did happen with what could have happened.

Andrew Latham on thinking through counterfactuals and the bombing of Hiroshima

Our “doing” seems to be free from the static social narrative of the grand “to be” of the past. Instead, it is entrapping us in the ever-smaller understandings of “to be,” as if each of them were the grand narrative.

Takeshi Morisato on being and doing within Japanese modernity

What we see in Japanese modernity, according to Maruyama, is a national franchise of these “idols of the market place” through the continuous specialization and internal diversifications that multiply these groups.

Takeshi Morisato on how Japan became trapped in a hyper-specialized version of modernity

Su Xuelin's novel Thorny Heart is a reminder of the freedom with which different Chinese communities decided what could be counted as “modern” or as “traditional.”

Gina Elia examines the relations of modernity, religion, and tradition in early 20th Century China

Two containers with a temple complex: a ship and a mailbox. Both drip with blood drawn in white heat of colonial suspicions of rebellion and rights to autonomy.

Maggie Slaughter exposes colonialism and orientalism in a mailbox and a passenger ship

A central concern remains: the timing and nature of India’s encounter with modernity. Did modernity come with the East India Company or did modernity have more ‘native’ roots?

Devin Creed looks for a different modernity in the streets of New Delhi.