[M]odernity poses a question one cannot fully answer, since no single perspective or location can survey the social totality and each paradigm of thought must be critically scrutinized for what it encourages us to let go, forget, or disperse as historical detritus. The resulting research cannot seek merely to create a more inclusive “American modernity” by applying modern disciplinary knowledge to otherwise neglected social identities and histories. Rather, it needs to situate the formations of modern knowledge within global histories of contact, collaboration, conflict, and dislocation, examining in each instance how the category of the modern has distorted those global histories, producing unity out of hybridity and development out of displacement. These modernist misrepresentations are reproduced in the contemporary norms by which we feel and know ourselves to be modern subjects. But they also appear in the inability of modern knowledge to attend to “nonmodern” social practices and formations. In the contradictions of our late modernity, these emerging practices and formations offer the opening for a different politics of knowledge, what one scholar has called the “politics of our lack of knowledge” (Lowe 2006) about modern societies, their colonial histories, institutional forms, and possible futures.

This is an excerpt from Chandan Reddy’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 164).