Conscripts of Modernity

Milton has a great phrase; he says: ''A good book is the precious life-blood of a master's spirit.''But it is more than that.It is the result of the circumstances of the age playing upon a mentality and the circumstances of people who are central to it.i My most general concern in this book is with the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them.More specifically, my principal concern is with our own postcolonial present, our present after the collapse of the social and political hopes that went into the anticolonial imagining and postcolonial making of national sovereignties.This is our present, as I have put it…