Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature By Nathanael O'Reil ...

I therefore want to go further than asserting the efficacy of a post-colonial reading of Australian literary culture to make a claim for its strategic value in coming to terms with the multiplicity of contemporary modernities. A substantial literature has developed on the related concepts of multiple modernities, alternative modernities, modernity at large, multiple globalizations, and the principles of fluidity, localization, and hybridization that they imply.¹ The overriding theme of these studies is that modernity is not synonymous with Westernization. It is incontestable that modernity as an epoch, a questioning of the present, an orientation to the future, and at the same time an ethic valuing the present over the past emerged in the West. But modernity is now (and perhaps has been for a long time) plural, and the historical trajectory of Western modernity was not simply a sign of temporal progress (an assumption embodied in the idea of “the modern”) but a culturally situated phenomenon. This is where literature can be critical in demonstrating the way in which cultural engagements and cultural transformation underpin the material adaptations of alternative modernities. This is because modernity is not something that just happens, that washes over societies like the wave of the contemporary. Modernity is culturally grounded and culturally transformed.

This suggests the need for a cultural theory of modernity—one that foregrounds place as well as time and resists the idea of modernity as inevitable, universal, and acultural. Alternative modernities emerge either by the development of hybridized cultural forms through the appropriation of those of Western modernity or by the cross-fertilization of various other non-Western modernities. Yet neither of these forms has emerged out of thin air; they develop through processes of appropriation, adaptation, and transformation that are present in all cultural change. Even where single-minded attempts to westernize economies are carried out, the development of a specific cultural form of modernity is inevitable. Thus, like post-colonial literatures, the most characteristic alternative modernities are those we might call “hybridized,” ones that appropriate and transform global cultural forms to local needs, beliefs, and conditions. This does not make them extensions of modernity, but new, culturally