Historicizing the asynchronous modernity in the Global East

In this paper, we aim to forge potentially generalizable insights into “Eastern” urbanity and its confrontation with modernity. We radically historicize analytical categories such as modernity and take them as vernacular categories of practice utilized by actors in a given space and time. Grounding our theorizing in findings from a larger research project on modern self-perceptions in an industrial city (Łódź in today’s central Poland), we describe generic features marking modern self-perception in the Global East: self-perceived asynchronicity, translocal and moving benchmarks, rapidly shifting geopolitical frameworks, and a specific legacy of history. All these elements, which shape local attempts to be modern according to actors’ own changing and contested imaginations, constitute what we call asynchronous modernity.