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 examines cases of 'popular modernism′ in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia, drawing 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.