Bryan S. Turner
London and

The problem of social and cultural diversity has been a classic issue in the
humanities and the social sciences throughout the period we refer to as the
modern age. With the rise of the world economy and cultural
globalization, this question of cultural difference has become even more
acute in contemporary politics. In the 1970s academics were interested in a
specific feature of this cultural problem, namely how Western
societies have understood and interpreted oriental societies through the
period of imperial expansion. The debate about orientalism (Said 1978a)
gave rise to a new approach to decolonization and the writing of history,
especially the writing of Indian history. These ‘subaltern studies’ (Guha
1981) marked the arrival of a new confidence and radicalism among third-world
academics in the struggle for decolonization at both the cultural and
political levels.