Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America

By Nadia R. Altschul

A postcolonial study of the conceptualization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America as medieval and oriental

If Spain and Portugal were perceived as backward in the nineteenth century—still tainted, in the minds of European writers and thinkers, by more than a whiff of the medieval and Moorish—Ibero-America lagged even further behind. Originally colonized in the late fifteenth century, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were characterized by European travelers and South American elites alike as both feudal and oriental, as if they retained an oriental-Moorish character due to the centuries-long presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. So, Nadia R. Altschul observes, the Scottish metropolitan writer Maria Graham (1785-1842) depicted the Chile in which she found herself stranded after the death of her sea captain husband as a premodern, precapitalist, and orientalized place that could only benefit from the free trade imperialism of the British. Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888), the most influential Latin American writer and statesman of his day, conceived of his own Euro-American creole class as medieval in such works as Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845) and Recollections of a Provincial Past (1850), and wrote of the inherited Moorish character of Spanish America in his 1883 Conflict and Harmony of the Races in America. Moving forward into the first half of the twentieth century, Altschul explores the oriental character that Gilberto Freyre assigned to Portuguese colonization in his The Masters and the Slaves (1933), in which he postulated the "Mozarabic" essence of Brazil.

In Politics of Temporalization, Altschul examines the case of South America to ask more broadly what is at stake—what is harmed, what is excused—when the present is temporalized, when elements of "the now" are characterized as belonging to, and consequently imposed upon, a constructed and othered "past."

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297201

Book preview

Politics of

Temporalization

Politics of

Temporalization

Medievalism and Orientalism

in Nineteenth-Century

South America

Nadia R. Altschul

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for

purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book

may be reproduced in any form by any means without

written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Altschul, Nadia, author.

Title: Politics of temporalization : medievalism and orientalism in nineteenth-century South America / Nadia R. Altschul.

Description: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046218 | ISBN 9780812252279 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Medievalism—South America—History—19th century. | Orientalism—South America—History—19th century. | South America—Civilization—Medieval influences. | South America—Civilization—Islamic influences. | South America—Civilization—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC F2210 .A58 2020 | DDC 980.03/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046218

To Joel, for his unconditional support

And to my former colleagues, for their courage

CONTENTS

Introduction. Iberian Premodern Conquests and Postcolonial Multiple Temporalities

Chapter 1. Medieval Belonging and Oriental Otherness in Figurations of Iberia

Chapter 2. Maria Graham’s Premodern Chile: British Neocolonialism and Creole Government

Chapter 3. Maria Graham’s Oriental Chile: India, Spain, and Moorish Civilizational Remains

Chapter 4. The Chronopolitics of Medieval Argentina in Domingo Sarmiento’s Thought

Chapter 5. Facundo’s Afterlife: Feudal Temporalization from Dualism to Modernization to Dependency

Chapter 6. Orientalism and Self-Orientalization in Domingo Sarmiento’s South America

Chapter 7. Divided by Time: Medieval Brazil in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões

Chapter 8. The Shadow of the Moor: Gilberto Freyre’s Moorish Brazil

Coda. Medieval Now

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Iberian Premodern Conquests

and Postcolonial Multiple Temporalities

Geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.

—Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other 144

What is lost in opposing a European … modernity to alternative modernities or a space of the nonmodern is the boundary-crossing struggle over the conceptual and moral bases of political and social organization. The asymmetry of conceptual power … is all the more reason to keep one’s focus on how such concepts were used in historical situations.

—Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question 149

Ibero-America was colonized in the late fifteenth century by Iberian nations that had allegedly not progressed from the medieval to the modern age. According to this narrative, these lands colonized by still-medieval conquerors also continued the existence of a functional medieval or premodern past. As explained by the foremost Spanish medieval historian of his generation, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, exiled in Argentina in the 1930s, the conquest of Spanish America was a projection of the Hispanic middle ages in space and in time.¹ As he states, only a medieval society with its unencumbered individualistic soldiers could have achieved the conquest of the new continent. Openly following suit and expanding this vision, the Mexican historian Luis Weckmann clarifies further in two extensive studies the out-of-sync temporality of Iberia in the medieval-modern divide: his portentous 1984 book on the medieval heritage of Mexico, which was followed in 1993 with a similar book on the medieval heritage of Brazil, in which he studies the continuation of the Middle Ages in both locations. Weckmann posited that medieval trends were, overall, stronger in Spain than elsewhere in Europe, because Spain had lagged behind European modernity and had seen no waning of the Middle Ages during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.² For Spain, the autumn of the Middle Ages happened only during the first two centuries of European modern history, as the country had striven against all odds to keep medieval ideals alive and dominant. According to Weckmann, Iberian medieval civilization had in fact flowered both later in time and elsewhere in space. Since medieval civilization in Spain achieved its highest point later than any other country in western Europe, Spain had transmitted its Middle Ages as a living product to the Americas, such that this living Spanish Middle Ages found its last expression in the colonies.³ Supplied with such background, Leslie Workman, the foundational figure of the study of medievalism, stated in his first editorials for the flagship journal of the discipline that the society which Spain planted in the New World was medieval by almost any definition.⁴

As Weckmann shows in his book on the medieval heritage of Brazil, the same applied to Portugal and its Portuguese American offspring.⁵ As a contemporary Brazilian historian observed, the modernizing reach of the Renaissance in Portugal was limited, such that Iberians’ modern colonial experience had in a certain way prolonged their medieval colonial experience. Against an English colonization that was accomplished by modern segments of society, the Portuguese process of conquest and colonization had been accomplished by social sectors that were still medieval.⁶ The medievality of Iberia and its Ibero-American colonies, in other words, is predicated on an invidious contrast with a core of Europe that had successfully progressed into modernity and left the Middle Ages behind. As Cooper’s epigraph suggests, however, to merely reject this discourse of Ibero-American premodernity as spurious would obscure more than it would illuminate the moral and political boundary crossing lodged in the medieval/modern divide and the particular lineaments of an Iberian medievality that contrasts with European modernity. On a more explicit level, the asymmetry of conceptual power between Iberia and the so-called core of Europe meant that the post-Enlightenment empires had the ability to determine the backwardness of Spain and Portugal as a matter of fact instead of a matter of naming.

This book delves further into the politics of the medieval/modern divide and its attendant concepts of modernity, alternative modernities, and the premodern by investigating these historical boundary-crossing struggles in the Ibero-American context. The notion that Ibero-America was medieval or that the British Empire would bring modern ways of life to the Spanish American premodern backwaters was not the purview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars but was already evident in early ethnographic and autoethno-graphic texts from the nineteenth century. To start examination of deployments of the medieval and the oriental in Spanish South America and Brazil, as well as to understand the implications of a split temporality between Iberian/Ibero-American medievality and European modernity, this introduction first delves into the presence of the medieval in theoretical conceptualizations of contemporaneity. To examine what Cooper called the opposing fields of modernity, alternative modernities, and the premodern, we start by examining the thought of Dipesh Chakrabarty as the most influential understanding of modernity and temporality that addresses medieval contemporaneity.

Contemporaneous Middle Ages

The commonplace according to which Iberia was a throwback medieval land while its geographical peers had progressed into an early modern period is an example of what Johannes Fabian critiqued as the denial of coevalness or allo-chronicity, a view of temporality by which contemporary populations studied by anthropologists were considered as living at an earlier stage of the western civilizational timeline. According to this division, Iberia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a Renaissance land but an out-of-sync location that didn’t evince the beginning of modern futurity, a noncoeval medieval continuation vis-à-vis Europe’s early modernity. In this book, I critique this denial of coevalness and out-of-sync presence of the medieval but also the derived and complementary proposition of the coexistence of multiple temporalities in postcolonial locations like the former colonial holdings of Portugal and Spain.

The notion of coexisting temporalities was proposed within postcolonial studies in opposition to the allochronous status projected onto colonized populations. The most influential opinion regarding the presence of the medieval in this temporal multiplicity is offered by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Associated with his Provincializing Europe, the contemporaneity of the medieval was welcomed as a rejection of the alterity and radical separation of the medieval from the modern and as a critique of the construct of modernity as it sets itself against others, whom it constructs negatively. The contemporaneous presence of the medieval in the modern responds to the denial of coevalness by arguing that the past is active in the present because the present is always made up of elements reaching us from the past. Chakrabarty has argued for two facets of contemporaneity. On one hand, he pointed out that any practices, populations, or institutions existing at a particular present time are fully contemporaneous with each other. This means that there can be no real past time or place. But this is because to recognize the existence of something we call the past means that this past holds a presence within us. The past, then, lives in us, and as long as we recognize them to any extent, these past worlds are never completely lost.⁷ On the other hand, because of this inner presence, humans experience time not as linear but in time knots wherein past and present coincide, and even when we classify ourselves as modern, we inhabit the fragments of the past. The present, then, as Chakrabarty points out, is non-contemporaneous with itself; it is not an insulated temporal unit but always temporally heterogeneous and buzzing with the living manifestations of the past.⁸

A main example of how the past continues to live in us was the contemporaneity of the medieval in Europe. This provided an example of the multiple character of time and showed how Europeans themselves inhabited a living past, similarly to how Indian peasants inhabited living pasts. Addressing medieval contemporaneity, Chakrabarty identifies how the core culture that defines modernity and views itself as altogether modern inhabits its own medieval fragments. Chakrabarty admires how medievalists like Jacques LeGoff have noticed the way in which modern European populations maintained an attachment to medieval superstitious practices like astrology and fortune telling, noting that such a presence of premodern times in the now was not intrinsically different from the allegedly premodern religious beliefs of Indian subjects. Praising it as a break with linear temporality, this surviving medievality is an example of contemporaneity that accomplished a break with the strict temporal separation of the medieval from the modern.⁹ As part of this break with linear temporality, Chakrabarty applauds the fact that medievalists had been able to use living populations outside Europe to explain and demonstrate life as it existed in the Middle Ages in Europe: In the writings of Aaron Gurevich, for example, the modern makes its pact with the medieval through the use of anthropology—that is, in the use of contemporary anthropological evidence from outside Europe to make sense of the past of Europe.¹⁰ That positive view of contemporaneity stemming from medievalists like Gurevich, however, forgets that some contemporaneous populations and ways of living had to be denied coevalness in order for them to function as serviceable examples of a desired medieval past for the modern scholar. Likewise, as Geraldine Heng explains, an alarming problem for proposals of heterogeneous temporalities is that these views match quite closely the politics of temporality espoused by extremist groups that the same scholars reject, such as jihadists and the western political right.¹¹ As she writes in language that purposefully echoes the praise of the contemporaneity of the medieval, jihadists understand contemporary time to be multiple, interleaving within it earlier temporalities, so that the past inhabits and is coextant with the present, is experienced as contemporaneous, and estranges the present from itself.¹² As for the western political right, echoing the theory of a clash of civilizations espoused by Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, it likewise recognizes that modernity bears within itself earlier temporalities and that the medieval erupts within modern time because medieval time has not ended and it continues as an internal cleavage within modernity, making modernity noncoincidental with itself.¹³

As Harry Harootunian underscores, however, that different temporalities should be present within the core modernity of Europe is a given, because the present is always a thickly filled temporality with multiple, commingling pasts, even though these pasts purposefully remain unseen and unacknowledged beneath dominant unifying narratives.¹⁴ The spectacle of untimeliness, the spectacle of multiple commingling temporalities, was always internal to European societies, and it was exported as part of the effort to displace and relocate elsewhere the experience of untimeliness that existed at home.¹⁵ The point for Harootunian, then, is not the presence of discordant times within the modern, since they have always existed for everyone, but the narratives that hide the discordance. The surprise of finding allegedly past times in the modern is predicated upon the supersessionary temporality of the industrialized North, which sets itself apart from an allegedly more traditional world where temporality is attuned to the supernatural and the cyclical rhythms of nature. As Akhil Gupta observes, however, this enabling belief that the industrialized west is defined by a linear and progressive notion of time related to technology—vis-à-vis a developing world identified by circularity, contact with natural cycles, and tradition—is merely a self-conception.¹⁶ Against the linear, continuous, unidirectional, and progressive character of dominant western self-portrayals, what resides within industrial capitalist societies, however unacknowledged, are notions of time commonly attributed to the so-called Third World: cyclicality, concreteness, rhythms, even rebirth.¹⁷ As in the business cycle, central metaphors used to understand capitalist economy are ones of circularity. And in the daily experience of time, the repetitiveness of tasks points to a nonlinear sense of time, from the repeated patterns of the Monday-to-Friday workweek to the annual recurrence of festivals and national holidays. It is also a misleading notion that in industrial societies, time is severed from the rhythms of nature, since the daily routine of commuters leaving at dawn and returning at sunset or the seasonality of construction workers in cold areas of the globe is not more pronounced or less rhythmic than that of a shepherd taking the herd to pasture or the seasonality of an agricultural laborer in the so-called Third World. Overall, then, the lived experience of time in the modern industrialized world is poorly explained by the opposition of linearity to cyclicality, and what one should question instead is the employment of these temporal self-representations in the construction of differences. As Gupta continues, in an identification that is particularly significant for an examination of the Ibero-American archive, This silence is politically important because it allows the Western narrative of progress to go unchallenged and enables the continued management and surveillance of the ‘third world’ in the guise of ‘development.’¹⁸ The key point of Gupta’s study is not that there are different multiple times lodged within modernity and the industrialized west, but that modernity has successfully circulated a misleading temporal self-representation against natural, religious rhythms of community and cyclicality that are also found within itself. Similarly, the temporal self-deception of modernity and capitalist modernization camouflaged not only western nonlinear temporality but also, especially significant here, the developmental unevenness that resides within industrialized western societies themselves.

As another facet of western self-conceptions, Harootunian clarifies that modernity displaces the fact that capitalist modernization creates developmental unevenness, then promotes an illusion of completion and wholeness, and then upholds this fantasy as an attainable goal of achievement for societies in the periphery.¹⁹ Following Harootunian’s investigation of temporality, capitalism, and the nation, the presence of untimeliness is found in every nation and is tied to the incorporation of capitalism into its social metabolism. Although capitalism creates temporal unevenness—such that untimeliness occurs everywhere—its presence is generally only imputed to the global peripheries: The charge of unevenness has always been leveled at sites outside Euro-America, even though it is an active and unwritten law of capitalism from which no region can claim exception.²⁰ Because of capitalism’s production of developmental asymmetries, in the societies incorporated into its fold, the historical present [is] always filled with reminders of mixed temporalities generated by uneven development.²¹ These untimely reminders disrupt the nation’s singularity, stability, and fixed identity, showing that there is no unity in the fictional homogeneous time of the capitalist nation-state. Formations that differed from a universalized notion of transition to capitalist modernity were considered anachronic practices, most of them atavisms that had failed to transform into capitalist modernity. In contrast, the global core viewed itself as fully transitioned to capitalist modernity and, as part of its imaginary trajectory, denied involvement in generating developmental lags. According to the core’s fictional trajectory of itself, then, while peripheries were underdeveloped or plagued by their own inability to resolve internal temporalities, the core had no struggles with developmental unevenness. At the economic core, the storyline goes, all were living or able to live the capitalist promise, and even when some developmental differences existed, all were living in a modern world, a temporally homogeneous world that was not divided by the coordinates of time. Euro-America was thus believed to be the only region that had realized completed development, and elsewhere the vexing developmental differences that existed were explained away, specifically through the fiction that capitalism (modernity) would eventually realize self-completion and eliminate all traces of its antecedents.²² In the periphery, the prescriptive lesson provided by the completed development or alleged developmental homogeneity of the core was that capitalist modernity would also eliminate all traces of temporal antecedents: the assurance that the peripheries would also reach that stage of homogeneous temporality through capitalist modernization. As Gupta discusses, that enabling fantasy also entailed the necessary masking of an evident lack of completed development at the capitalist core. As many immigrants could attest, part of the appeal of western capitalist societies is precisely that misplaced expectation that industrialized societies do not suffer from the manifest inequalities that are present in other parts of the world. Born in Brazil and raised in Argentina under the implicit understanding that my countries lagged behind the completed development of the English-speaking Americas, I remember my own disbelief when first encountering the favelas and dilapidated dwellings of New Haven as a twenty-something at the beginning of graduate school. While living in the United States, I found this lack of completed development was likewise visible in urgent requests for food donations so that everyone may have a decent hot meal on a special holiday or the favelalike areas of a city like Baltimore, which can only be glimpsed safely from the high tracks on the train. These glaring examples of unevenness at the core are not supported by the imaginary trajectory of capitalist progress, yet it must be underscored that these areas and contemporary citizens, even when facing extraordinary unevenness of economic development, are not intellectually relegated to the temporalities of living anachronisms or of surviving residues of social lives pertaining to the past. Instead, and we must highlight this temporal differentiation, in the Ibero-American periphery, certain populations are identified as still living in feudal socioeconomic arrangements, while living foreign enemies, particularly Muslim, are routinely described as medieval people shockingly adept in deadly twenty-first-century technology. As we will continue to see, temporalization is a selective political device, and medievalization is a significant tool in its arsenal.

Another aspect in the critique of temporalization notes that tradition and community, or the premodern and the medieval, are not true alternatives but enabling mirror images to capitalist modernity. As identified above by Cooper, among others, the contemporaneity of the medieval as the intra-European traditionalism, religiosity, and sense of community that modernity left behind inverts the evaluation but preserves the categories. And as noted by Russell West-Pavlov in discussing postcolonial time in Temporalities, the binary of modernity and premodernity, even when its negative term is recast as a positive force, may continue to poison the emancipatory project it informs.²³ A similarly incisive point is made from within Latin American studies by José Rabasa, who states that in searching for alternatives to the medieval-modern matrix, we face the "exigency to imagine elsewheres from the modern, not necessarily as antimodern or even countermodern, but just as not-modern.²⁴ My own position in the critique of medieval contemporaneity, to be illustrated and developed throughout this book, does not agree with the contemporaneity of the past in the present but follows more closely in the footsteps of Johannes Fabian’s call for the radical contemporaneity of humankind.²⁵ In Chakrabarty, we observed an answer to the denial of coevalness that considers the past as active in the present and the present as always made up of elements reaching us from the past. Given Fabian’s background of full coevalness, I will not investigate how the past" can be discovered in the now but will engage instead with that previous recognition that there is something we call the past.

This book investigates how, why, and by whom certain elements of the contemporaneous were named as pertaining to the past. Because elements have to be associated with the past before they can be identified as lingering manifestations that buzz like living things in the now. The notion that we inhabit the past or that time is noncontemporaneous with itself is predicated on a previous acceptance that—instead of full coevalness—the now is made up of different past and present temporalities that can coexist with one another. As I will argue in this book in terms of medievalization, however, any supposedly medieval practices are medieval only through our temporalizing of these elements as belonging to the medieval past. Our ability to stratify the contemporary into different hierarchical time slots based on origins comes from the application of the tool of historical consciousness to our surroundings. It is by applying historical consciousness that when one gets a mobile call while visiting a medieval building, one is able to identify the phone as belonging to the now and the building as belonging to the premodern past. The definition of traits and elements according to their origins has been the dominant paradigm of thought in the industrialized west for at least two centuries, as can be attested by the search for national origins that inaugurated the philological study of medieval texts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Shifting away from ontologically defining origins, a main point made here about coevalness is that practices, traits, or objects are not defined by their first moment of existence—their origin—but instead by their presence in whatever chronological times they have existed. Historians of science like Bruno Latour have usefully identified this apparent problematic in discussing tools in We Have Never Been Modern.²⁶ Because many may consider Notre Dame of Paris a medieval building (although greatly restored in the nineteenth century and, soon again, after the 2019 fire) and a cell phone a modern device, but we will not identify a hammer as Neolithic. As Latour points out in the context of history of science, however, hammers were first used in Neolithic times: I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands.²⁷ We, however, do not temporalize hammers; to us, they are no more prehistoric than mobile phones or laptop computers. Hammers are a functioning vital element of the now—whether the twelfth century now or the twenty-first century now—regardless of the fact that they were first used hundreds of thousands of years ago. Once we approach temporal divisions as stratifying tools, we enter a changed landscape. The daily grind of repetitive work, checking our horoscope, hammering a nail, using a handheld device, entering a structure first built a thousand years ago—all become our temporally homogeneous now without the need to separate and define each item according to a putative origin that divides the now into noncontemporaneous elements. In theoretical terms, this position may be for many too close to a flattening out of historical depth. Tellingly, Latour reaches the opposite conclusion than mine and states that contemporary elements are always polytemporal and no activity is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time.²⁸ Heuristically, however, radical contemporaneity allows us to recognize the politics of temporal naming that remains naturalized under the perspective of continuity. It is by denaturalizing these temporalizations that we can focus on how and to what end specific aspects of the present were given the status of belonging to the past. The methodology in this book is therefore to dislodge the still-operative Romantic identification of contemporaneous elements according to an assigned origin in order to examine why, by whom, and to what end certain objects or contemporary practices have been identified as belonging to or continuing the past.²⁹

Alternative Modernities, Global Medievalisms

The contemporaneity of the past cannot be easily disentangled from the concept of alternative modernities and the close concept of global medievalisms (and global Middle Ages). The notion of alternative or multiple modernities is elaborated in a special issue by that title of the journal Daedalus, edited by the sociologist Shmuel N. Eisenstadt in 2000. Its position goes against the assumed notion that all modernizing societies would converge and become similar to industrialized Europe, becoming authentically modern in due course and arguing that even fundamentalist movements in contemporary times were in line with the basic tenets of modernity.³⁰ The concept of alternative modernities is also theorized by Dilip P. Gaonkar in his 2001 edited volume Alternative Modernities.³¹ According to Gaonkar, every nation/culture presents and activates key elements of modernity in a variety of combinations, each creating an alternative modernity with unique flavors that were created in response to those local conditions.³² As he states, however, modernity spread from the West to the rest of the world, and in thinking about alternative modernities, one does not abandon the western discourse of modernity.³³ As Gaonkar himself remarks, though, the notion of alternative modernities is not new. In Latin American studies, for instance, examination of so-called alternative modernities is found in many seminal discussions. Notable ones include peripheral modernity of 1920s and 1930s Argentina by Beatriz Sarlo (1988), divergent modernities by Julio Ramos (1989), and the burden of modernity by Carlos Alonso (1998). Alonso, for instance, discusses the intense desire to be modern and how mastering the discourses of modernity gave Latin Americans access to effectively deviate from this discourse—that is, to propose or produce alternative discourses of modernity from within. These earlier considerations of Spanish American modernity—with their appropriation of key elements of western modernity and their own alternative flavors—exemplify how theoretical engagements from and of Ibero-America remain unknown and uninfluential within the English-French-German core of academic production, even when published in English and in reputed venues. As Joshua Lund has written, ideas emanating from Latin America are generally ignored or erased in the core areas where so-called universal knowledge is produced.³⁴ This is particularly visible regarding dependency approaches, which are further discussed in Chapter 5 and which, although they are the stepping stone for vital discussions in the academy today, their origins in Latin American theory and examples are almost completely erased from view.³⁵

Returning to alternative modernities, as noted above, they are not an engagement with alternatives to western modernity but an engagement with alternative formations of a modernity that spread from the west to the rest. While modernization theory proposed the convergence of all societies into a Eurocentric form of modernity, this culturalist view posits that this same Eurocentric modernity unfolds differently in nonwestern or postcolonial contexts with particular cultural and civilizational backgrounds, leading to alternative local formations. Alternative modernities may seem to provide equality in difference—or full contemporaneity in access to modernity instead of not-yet-fully-modern presents marked by denial of coevalness—but this equality is only available after the world has been subsumed to capitalism. As Arif Dirlik reveals, the concept of alternative modernities is marked by the lack of alternatives. The globalization that spreads modernity and within which alternative modernities thrive is the worldwide dispersion of capitalist modernity.³⁶ Culturalist or multiple modernities are a deflection of political and economic issues to the cultural realm. Claims that revivals of local elements like medieval or autochthonous traditions offer evidence of alternative modernities or accomplish some form of liberation from colonial modernity are mirror images that preserve the categories without offering a true elsewhere to capitalism. As Dirlik explains, these culturalist claims take for granted the victory of capitalism in material life and then leave it to culture to carry the burden of showing difference—a burden that must be achieved without succumbing to capitalist modernity’s parallel demand for cultural simulacra to be reproduced, branded, and sold.³⁷ In terms of temporality, Harry Harootunian takes a similarly oppositional view and argues that alternative modernity remains captive … to the logic of the same.³⁸ The postcolonial demand for recognition of an alternative modernity, with its valorization of otherness through the appeal to a difference supplied by identity, is no more than compensation for having been consigned to the precinct of a temporal unevenness.³⁹ For Harootunian, alleged alternatives are thus not about coevalness in modern times but a way of valorizing the status quo of uneven development—a multiculturalist plot that assuages and compensates only at the level of cultural identity. Instead of taking for granted the victory of capitalist modernity and proclaiming the multiplicity of modernities from within it, the task at hand should be to understand the deployment of culture in struggles for power.⁴⁰ As Dirlik continues to elucidate, in a world of competing claims on modernity, what are nevertheless left standing are the efforts to sustain colonial power relations intrinsic to capitalist modernity, as they were formed around Europe and North America.⁴¹ Within these power relations, the recognition of one’s alternative modernity is tied to successful entry to global capital. Those who are most successful in presenting their own alternative projects of modernity—or alternative medievalisms, as discussed below—are precisely those who have acquired partnership in the world of global capital.⁴²

The question of alternative modernities brings to the fore the mirror question of alternative medievalisms. In particular, the Islamic State’s pursuit of contemporaneity with the Islamic medieval past has created the impression of a paradigm shift from denial of coevalness to the contemporaneity of alternative medievalisms.⁴³ In my view, the significant shift occurring in the politics of the Middle Ages is not a shift away from ascribing non-coevalness to others—whereby the west keeps its power of naming—but rather a shift in the west’s own perceptions of its own medievality. As noted by Heng, not only jihadists but also the western political right proposes the contemporaneity of the medieval past, and as medievalists have been documenting, western fundamentalism buttresses a pure and white Middle Ages in much of the industrialized world.⁴⁴ As further noted in the Coda, the industrialized world itself is developing the self-perception that the medieval is contemporaneous in the west. While fundamentalist Islamism is deemed as living a contemporaneous medievalism, the United States after the economic crisis of 2008 may have also started to deem itself as living in an eerily dystopian medievality of its own. At the core of the non-western or postcolonial contemporaneity of medievalisms, then, is not a shift away from an older denial of coevalness but more likely a change in power relations. The reason, as Julia McClure hints, is that a number of non-western countries became sufficiently empowered by capitalism to reclaim their own modernity and enter the battle of the politics of the Middle Ages.⁴⁵ Economic empowerment is what allowed non-westeners to be deemed contemporary by the west and enter the combat zone of multiple medievalisms and their use in the construction of multiple modernities.⁴⁶ Bluntly, then, had these groups and countries been insufficiently empowered by capitalism to threaten the global order, their medievalisms and modernities would have remained—like Ibero-American medievalisms—quite irrelevant and safely locked in the not-yet of the peripheries. Because in contrast to Islamic medievalism, the several centuries of Ibero-American medievalisms and alternative global modernities remain irrelevant (i.e., nonthreatening) to the economic global order and thus unknown.

Problems found in the notion of alternative global medievalisms and modernities are also evident in projects related to a global Middle Ages. In contrast to Dirlik’s