Alternative Modernities?: A View from the South

How do the political, ethical, and metaphysical ideas of the North look from the perspective of cultures of the South? Can this even be asked fruitfully in a time when it seems that those ideas have themselves comprehensively shaped the perspective of the South through a long period of colonization and now globalization? Akeel Bilgrami, the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy and Global Thought at Columbia, sets out to answer these questions systematically, thereby extending a form of inquiry started by Edward Said to questions that Said himself never asked. The July 9, 2013 lecture, "Alternative Modernities?: A View from the South," was sponsored by the School of Criticism & Theory.