Hannah Arendt's analysis of the transformation from the ancient Greek polity to modern societies offers an important examining perspective for understanding how modernization happens in the history of humanity and what happens to Western civilization during this transition. It therefore becomes an effective, widely used, reflected upon, and debated theoretical model to understand, explain, and criticize the modern and contemporary traits and modes of mobilization and association, including the subordination of politics to economic imperatives, the nation-state, and human identities — pathologies visible not only within Western societies themselves but also in the worldwide imposition of a Western-styled modernity, a process that, in Arendtian terms, amounts to anti-worlding rather than genuine world-building.

      In this seminar, I intend to invite papers and discussions to display and analyze how modernization happens to civilizations and cultures outside of the Western, with a focus on the following questions: how well does Arendt's account of the transition from the ancient Greek polis to the modern nation-state illuminate the modernization experiences of cultures and civilizations outside the West, and where does it fall short? With this question, I hope the seminar's concerns go deep with questions such as what the diverse developing cultural identities are that world the world differently, in hopes of enacting reflective moments to align modernization with cultural characteristics, and to inquire what a contemporary world can evolve into with new forces and intentions — whether it is with highly problematic nationalist narratives — a self-formed political identity that often adopts cultural identity narratives — or with the worlding manner that new technology, such as artificial intelligence, brings about. Meanwhile, we must also ask: how do we disentangle anti-Westernization narratives from modernization and anti-modernization ones in the narratives of political and cultural identities? With these questions, Arendt's theories should also be challenged and developed to open up Western cultural and theoretical presuppositions and beliefs to the rest of the world.