In this article, I undertake several lines of enquiry in the history of ideological and political movements centered on the “modernity” polemic at the transnational level. By analyzing these movements in juxtaposition, I explore the possibility of more diverse narratives of modernity and antimodernity than are assumed by conventional dichotomies in contemporary academic writings. The results of my enquiry challenge several pervasive “dogmas” of post-colonial theory: that orientalism is a purely modernist intellectual project, while anti-orientalism is by necessity its more “local” discursive counterpart in a dualism of East and West.