Agrarianism: A Critique of Colonial Modernity in Korea

Abstract

In Rescuing History from the Nation, Prasenjit Duara challenges the repressive power of the nation-state to frame historical narratives in modern China and India. According to Duara, dominant narratives in both countries have been based on a linear, evolutionary, Enlightenment model of history that stresses national progress toward modernity, whether through idealist evolutionism, anti-imperialism, or even Marxism. As a result, he argues, such narratives have excluded other important discourses on political community that rejected the modernist mode of thought. In order to provide a “multiplicity of historical representations of political community,” he examines a series of alternate narratives like federalism, which promoted goals other than the nation-state, or which expressed critiques of modernity through the promotion of “Asian values.” With this, he attempts to “rescue” historical narratives from the dominant, repressive power of the nation-state, by writing “histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress toward modernity.”Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).