Joel S. Kahn’s writings on Southeast Asian modernity are marked by an insistence on the inseparability and equality of Western and Southeast Asian thought and social–cultural experiences. His work explores continuities, breaks, and contradictions within and across each of these expansive worlds, showing omitted narratives to be no less constitutive of the modern. Drawing on conundrums over how to translate across irreducible sets of differences without taming difference under familiar or universal categories in my own study of radical politics in contemporary Malaysia, I explore how Kahn’s writings on Southeast Asian modernity provide a possible resolution to the problems of relativism and canonical predeterminations in the reconciliation of cultural difference. I argue that in a multipolar, uncertain, and divided age, Kahn’s work provides us with an inspiration to speak across spatially located ethical divides, bringing converging and contrasting critical outlooks together for mutual competition and enrichment of intercultural understandings of modern cultural diversity and human fulfillment without reinventing the place of power either in the West, Southeast Asia, or anywhere else.

中文翻译：

---

乔尔·卡恩和东南亚现代性的跨文化诠释

乔尔·S·卡恩 (Joel S. Kahn) 关于东南亚现代性的著作的特点是坚持西方和东南亚思想和社会文化经验的不可分割性和平等性。他的作品探索了这些广阔世界内部和之间的连续性、断裂和矛盾，表明省略的叙述同样是现代的构成。在我自己对当代马来西亚激进政治的研究中，我利用关于如何在不驯服熟悉或普遍类别下的差异的情况下跨越不可简化的差异集的难题，探索卡恩关于东南亚现代性的着作如何为相对主义和文化差异调和中的规范预设。我认为，在一个多极、不确定和分裂的时代，