Abstract

There is a widespread consensus that historical developments in the latter part of the twentieth century called into question widely shared and taken for granted assumptions about ‘modern society.’One of the most significant shifts which has resulted has been a growing recognition of the diversity of modern social forms, but attempts to theorize and conceptualize the pluralities of contemporary social experience have gone in different directions, and some of the most widely resonating new interpretive prisms have implicitly returned to assumptions about unity. This paper identifies the emerging paradigm of ‘multiple modernities’ as a more productive response to the complexities of modernity, and explores the thematic, perspectival and conceptual innovations which have contributed to its interpretive power.