This penetrating book re-examines `the project of modernity'. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative `ethnographic' understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It illustrates these categoric and methodological imperatives by examining cases of `popular modernism' in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia. The author draws out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion. The book also shows that particular forms of racial and cultural exclusion are never inevitable, by revealing and challenging the circumstances of exclusion, modernism can become inclusive of those previously excluded. This book is a notable addition to the growing literature on the meanings and contradictions of modernity. It will be required reading for students of social theory and modernity//postmodernity. -- Publisher description.