Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular. The book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines – engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, biology to environmental studies. Leading sociologist Alain Touraine contributes a new text in which he reflects on the role of women, refugees and migrants, and the future of democracy. In their conclusion, the editors posit a fundamental ethical distinction between modernization and modernity and call for a new understanding of modernity that is globally distributed, informed by the voices of many, and concerned with crises that threaten all of us at the level of the species – a modernity-to-come.

Hatem N. AKIL, Southern New Hampshire University, USA – is a visual culture researcher who is interested primarily in the perception and representation of Arabs and Muslims. Among his publications “Cinematic Terrorism,” “The Martyr’s Vision,” and the monograph The Visual Divide between Islam and the West (Palgrave, 2016). He teaches in the Humanities department Southern New Hampshire University.

Simone MADDANU, University of South Florida, USA – earned his PhD at the EHESS of Paris in 2009. His research interests focus on social movements, commons, migration, Islam in Europe, global and postcolonial studies. He currently teaches Sociology and Contemporary Social Problems at the University of South Florida. He published several books and articles in different languages.

Preface
1. Connecting Modernities: A Global Update (Simone Maddanu and Hatem N. Akil)

Part I Modernity as We Know It
Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines

2. Technology and the Texture of Modernity (Alessandro Mongili)
3. Math and Modernity: Critical Reflections (Lucio Cadeddu)
4. Stranded Modernity: Post-war Hiroshima as Discursive Battlefield (Daishiro Nomiya)
5. The (In)Compatibility of Islam with Modernity: (Mis)Understanding of Secularity/Secularism in the Arab and Islamicate Worlds (Housamedden Darwish)
6. The Missing Body: Figurative Representations in Islamic Iconography (Hatem N. Akil)

Part II Modernity under Fire
Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions

7. Criticism of “Colonial Modernity” through Kurdish Decolonial Approaches (Engin Sustam)
8. Conflicting Modernities: Militarization and Islands (Aide Esu and Simone Maddanu)
9. Project Modernity: From Anti-colonialism to Decolonization (Shumaila Fatima and David Jacobson)

Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic

10. Modernity and Decision-Making for Global Challenges (Elizabeth G. Dobbins)
11. Public Health Confronts Modernity in the Shadow of the Pandemic (Richard Cooper)
12. Human Identity and COVID-19: Space and Time in the Post-modern Era (Rachid Id Yassine and Beatriz Mesa)

Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks
Democracy and Modernity-to-Come

13. Environmentalism: A Challenge to Modernity (Antimo Luigi Farro)
14. The Cognitive Immune System: The Mind’s Ability to Dispel Pathological Beliefs (Barry Mauer)
15. Representative Democracy as Kitsch, and Artificial Intelligence’s Promise of Emancipation (Marius C. Silaghi)
16. Subjectivation, Modernity, and Hypermodernity (Alain Touraine)
17. Toward a New Global? (Hatem N. Akil and Simone Maddanu)

Index