1.11                Imperialism & colonialism in modern history 

Imperialism: `the policy and practice of forming and maintaining an empire', usually refers to the overseas empires of Europe during the past five hundred years.

Imperialism involved: (1) The systematic and organized domination of peoples and nations by a single nation, brought about through (2) territorial annexation or conquest, and (3) economic control and exploitation.

Motives for territorial expansionism: (1) economic, (2) strategic, (3) colonizing.

Factors enabling imperialism & colonization: (1) technological superiority: navigation, guns, etc. (2) organizational skills, (3) highly developed sense of national interest, (4) highly developed trading skills, (5) aggressive self-interest.

Disabling factors for the colonized: (1) poor technology, (2) poor organization, (3) poor sense of national self-interest, (4) naive trading practices, (5) confused, self-divisive motives.

Consequences of colonization for the colonizer: (1) wealth & power, (2) territory, (3) sense of national superiority, destiny, & a role in world history, (4) sources of raw materials for its trade and industries, (5) markets for its trade and industries.

Consequences of colonization for the colonized — Negative: (1) depletion of wealth and resources, (2) retarded political, economic, and social development, (3) habits of dependency, (4) lack of self-identity and self-confidence, (5) deracination or confused cultural identity, (6) `orientalization'.

Consequences — Positive: Modernization: (1) access to colonizer's language, culture, system of education, (2) access to colonizer's technology and expanded trade options, (3) access to colonizer's institutions of government, law, organization, etc.

1.12                Ecological Imperialism & colonialism in geographical terms

Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986): Asians, Black Africans, Amerindians, Australian Aborigines, Eskimos, Melanesians, Polynesians, Micronesians - all these people have expanded geographically - but they have expanded into lands adjacent to or at least near to those in which they have already been living. Europeans, in contrast, have leap frogged around the globe. Why? .... Between 1840 & 1930, the population of Europe grew from 194 million to 463 million, double the rate of increase in the rest of the world. Between 1750 & 1930, the total population for the Neo-Europes increased by almost fourteen times over, whereas that of the rest of the world increased by only two & one-half times.

1.21  Orientalism

Edward Said's notion of Orientalism (1978): ... the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience .... The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles .... Because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action .... Senses of the notion of Orientalism: (1) the academic disciplines which study the Orient, (2) a style of thought based on a distinction between Orient & Occident, (3) the corporate institution of dealing with the Orient (starting from the late 18th c.).... the whole network of interests brought to bear on the Orient .... The Orient is an idea that has a history.... The Orient that appears in Orientalism ... is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.

1.22  Decolonization

(a)  Ngugi wa Thiong'o, in Decolonising the Mind (1986): The real aim of colonialism was to control the people's wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relation to others .... For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people's culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people's language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised .... Colonial alienation takes two interlinked forms: an active (or passive) distancing of oneself from the reality around; and an active (or passive) identiification with that which is most external to one's environment.

(b)  Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth (1967), identifies 3 phases to the evolution of the nationalist intellectual: (1) the intellectual assimilates the culture of the colonizer, (2) he tries to remember who he is, but only as an alienated self going to the past (personal or communal) for relief, & (3) the fighting phase, in which he becomes a wakener of his people.]

(c)  Clifford Geertz, in After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press (1995), explains the link between de-colonisation and modernisation thus: `When the colonial system in its classical form, wealth-collecting metropoles carrying off products from wealth-yielding possessions, began to break down during and after the Second World War, the relation between countries in which industrialism, science, and the like had settled in and those in which they had not had to be phrased in a more forward-looking way. And for that, the modernisation idea seemed especially well made, convenient at once to ex-masters and ex-subjects anxious to restate their inequalities in a hopeful idiom. There were advanced (developed, dynamic, rich, innovative, dominant) societies that had been modernised, and there were backward (underdeveloped, static, poor, hidebound, dominated) ones that had not, or not yet, and the challenge ... was seen as turning the second into the first. The whole pattern of global connections was reformulated in these terms—as an effort to "close the gap", bring the world up to speed'.

1.3  The invention of community: Ethnicity, Gender, Nation

(a)  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1967): Colonialism imaged itself as a mother restraining a perverse, suicidal and evil offspring (266). Negro-ism (negritude) & the racialization of thought teaches the native intellectual to speak more of an African culture than of national culture: according to Fanon, this is a blind alley (267). The exaltation of continental against national cultures is racial in origin. The native intellectual who is historically conditioned by Western culture, into which he seeks assimilation, ends up taking a `universal standpoint', and finds his own native predicament a degrading, savage, and terrifying void .

(b)  Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments (1988), asks for African opposition to colonialist stereotypes (summary): colonialist thought assumes that the native is simple to understand, and that understanding the native goes hand in hand with controlling him. When natives acquired the colonizer's culture, the colonist treated the results with `the man of two worlds' theory, which maintained that the native could never truly acquire the colonizer's culture, & in trying to do so, became worse than the `unspoilt' native ignorant of the colonizer's culture. An African experience, & destiny, and the English-speaking Union as a desirable fraternity. Every literature must speak of a particular place, evolve out of the necessities of history, & the aspirations and destiny of its people. The work of a Western writer is automatically informed by universality. It is only others who must strain to achieve it. Writers (like Naipaul) are seduced by the blandishments of colonialist criticism. Earnestness is appropriate to my situation. The earnest shaping of colonialist missionaries and empire-builders cannot be undone by levity.

(c)  Chinweizu et al, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1985) (summary): Three attitude in African writing towards the past, the first two stemming from imperialist vilification of Africa: shamefaced rejection; romantic embrace; realist appraisal. Tigritude champions neo-Tarzanists! The need to rehabilitate and repossess one's true history. African nationalism is indebted to negritude, but in its romantic forms, it is an imprisonment in the past (286-87).

(d)  Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976) (summary): Drama with a Western cast of mind compartmentalizes itself into aspects like allegory, eternal truths, naturalism, surrealism, holism, absurdism, neo-classicism, etc. African drama shows a cohesive understanding of irreducible truths, and is based on man's knowledge of fundamental, unchanging relationships between himself and society as well as the larger universe (e.g. mask-drama: a symbolic struggle with chthonic presence). It resolves conflict in a harmonious resolution for plenitude and the well-being of the community. The audience contributes to this symbolic representation of earth and cosmos. As an author Soyinka believes in a social vision, not a literary ideology (which, to him, is associated with the West, with a congealment which kills the creative process, & wit the idea of literature as an objective existence of the medium of language).

(e) Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996): At its most militant, postmodernism has lent a voice to the humiliated and reviled, and in doing so has threatened to shake the imperious self-identity of the system to its core. The politics of postmodernism, then, have been at once enrichment and evasion (23)....  Its [postmodernism's] rich body of work on racism and ethnicity, on the paranoia of identity-thinking, on the perils of totality and the fear of otherness: all this, along with its deepened insights into the cunning of power, would no doubt be of considerable value. But its cultural relativism and moral conventionalism, its scepticism, pragmatism and localism, its distaste for ideas of solidarity and disciplined organization, its lack of any adequate theory of political agency: all these would tell heavily against it (134).

1.31  Gender

Analogy between postcoloniality and feminism: colonialism is to postcoloniality what patriarchy is feminism: both involve suppression, exploitation, forced (or false) dependency, marginalization & silencing of one class or group by another.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), on patriarchy: The notion of Man is treated as if it represented `the positive & the neutral', as if man designated `human beings in general'. `Thus humanity is male & man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him'. `He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other'; & on woman under patriarchy: Woman is treated as Man's Other: an unessential & dependent object; Woman is defined in terms of lack and defectiveness; `she is simply what man decrees ... she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being'.

1.32  Nation

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso (1983, rev. 1991): ... the very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men's minds. The first of these was the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth .... Second was the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centres - monarchs who were persons part from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation .... Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical. Combined, these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above all death, loss, and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption from them.

                The slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties, first in Western Europe, later elsewhere, under the impact of economic change, `discoveries' (social and scientific), and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history .... the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation .... The `last wave' of nationalisms, most of them in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa, was in its origins a response to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism .... Official nationalism ... led in turn to what, for convenience, one can call `Russification' in the extra-European colonies .... intended in part to produce the required subordinate cadres for state and corporate bureaucracies .... to an unprecedented extent the key early spokesmen for colonial nationalism were lonely, bilingual intelligentsias unattached to sturdy local bourgeoisies.

1.4  Displacement: marginalization, exile, diaspora

Vijay Mishra & Bob Hodge, `What is Post(-)colonialism?' (1991) define it as an always present tendency in any literature of subjugation marked by a systematic process of cultural domination through the imposition of imperial structures of power .... They identify two kinds of postcolonialism: `Complicit' & `Oppositional'... Complicit postcolonialism - an always present `underside' within colonization itself ... Oppositional postcolonialism - three principles: (a) racism, (b) a second language, (c) political struggle.

1.5  Hybridity: ethnic, linguistic, cultural

(a)  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1975, tr. 1981), p. 358: What is a hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor...

(b)  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994), pp. 112-15: Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal .... Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other `denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.... Such a reading of the hybridity of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse non-dialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference.

(c)  Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture & Race ( (1995), pp. 22-3: Hybridity... involves an antithetical movement of coalescence and antagonism, with the unconscious set against the intentional, the organic against the divisive, the generative against the undermining.... For Bhabha, hybridity becomes the moment in which the discourse of colonial authority loses its univocal grip on meaning and finds itself open to the trace of the language of the other, enabling the critic to trace complex movements of disarming alterity in the colonial text .... The hybridity of colonial discourse thus reverses the structures of domination in the colonial situation. It describes a process in which the single voice of colonial authority undermines the operation of colonial power by inscribing and disclosing the trace of the other so that it reveals itself as double-voiced.... Bakhtin's intentional hybrid has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant cultural power.... While hybridity denotes a fusion, it also describes a dialectical articulation, as /24: in Rushdie's `mongrelization'. This doubled hybridity has been distinguished as a model that can be used to account for the form of syncretism that characterizes all postcolonial literatures and cultures.

(d)  Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996): It is one of the more glaring errors of postmodernism to forget that the hybrid, plural and transgressive are at a certain level as naturally coupled with capitalism as Laurel is with Hardy (39).

2.1  Modernity and modernization

(a) Jürgen Habermas The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1985, tr. 1987):  Modernity refers to `the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources; to the development of the forces of production and the increase in the productivity of labor; to the establishment of centralized political power and the formation of national identities; to the proliferation of rights of political participation, of urban forms of life, and of formal schooling; to the secularization of values and norms' (2). Baudelaire the art critic emphasizes an aspect of modern painting: "the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the lie of our day, the characteristic traits of what, with our reader's permission, we have called `modernity' (9). Hegel sees the modern age as marked universally by a structure of self-relation that he calls subjectivity: `The principle of the modern world is freedom of subjectivity, the principle that all the essential factors present in the intellectual whole are now coming into their right in the course of their development' (16). In this context, the term `subjectivity' carries primarily four connotations: (a) individualism: in the modern world, singularity particularized without limit can make good its pretensions; (b) the right to criticism: the principle of the modern world requires that what anyone is to recognize shall reveal itself to him as something entitled to recognition; (c) autonomy of action: our responsibility for what we do is a characteristic of modern times; (d) finally, idealistic philosophy itself: Hegel considers it the work of modern times that philosophy grasps the self-conscious (or self-knowing) Idea. The key historical events in establishing the principle of subjectivity are the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. With Luther, religious faith became reflective; the world of the divine was changed in the solitude of subjectivity into something posited by ourselves .... the principle of subjectivity determines the forms of modern culture .... The moral concepts of modern times follow from the recognition of the subjective freedom of individuals (17). Modern art reveals its essence in Romanticism; and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of Romantic art. The divine irony conceptualized by Friedrich Schlegel mirrors the self-experience of a decentered self "for which all bonds are broken, and which only will endure to live in the bliss of self-enjoyment."  (Hegel). Expressive self-realization becomes the principle of art appearing as a form of life ... Reality attains the status of artistic expression only through the subjective refraction of the sensitive soul .... In modernity, therefore, religious life, state, and society as well as science, morality, and art are transformed into just so many embodiments of the principle of subjectivity (18).

(b) Perry Anderson, `Modernity and Revolution', in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson & L. Grossberg, 1988, pp. 325-28: European modernism in the first years of this century ... flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future. Or, to put it another way, it arose at the intersection between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent, or semi-insurgent labour movement .... It was the Second World War that destroyed all three of the historical coordinates I have discussed and therewith cut off the vitality of modernism. After 1945, the old semiaristocratic or agrarian order and its appurtenances were finished, in every country. Bourgeois democracy was finally universalized. With that, certain critical links with a precapitalist past were snapped. At the same time, Fordism arrived in force. Mass production and consumption transformed the West European economies along North American lines. There could no longer be the smallest doubt as to what kind of society this technology would consolidate: an oppressively stable, monolithically industrial, capitalist civilization was now in place ... Finally, the image or hope of revolution faded way in the West. The onset of the Cold War, and the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, cancelled any realistic prospect of a socialist overthrow of advanced capitalism for a whole historical period. The ambiguity of aristocracy, the absurdity of academicism, the gaiety of the first cars or movies, the palpability of the socialist alternative, were now all gone. In their place there now reigned a routinized, bureaucratic economy of universal commodity production, in which `mass consumption' and `mass culture' had become virtually interchangeable terms.

(c) Alex Callinicos, Against Posmodernism: A Marxist Critique, 1989: Modernity came to be conceived of as the society in which the Enlightenment project is realized, in which the scientific understanding of the human and physical worlds regulates social interaction (32).... `Modernization' ...  the development of industrial capitalism ... Modernity as the kind of civilization formed by the development and global dominance of the capitalist mode of production (36).

2.2  Modernity versus literary modernism

(a) Literary Modernism - a negative view: Georg Lukács, `The Ideology of Modernism', The Lukács Reader, ed. Arpad Kadarkay. Oxford & Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1995, pp. 187-209: Man is ... a social animal .... The ontological view governing the image of man in the work of leading modernist writers is the exact opposite of this. Man, for these writers, is by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings .... If man's inwardness is identified with an abstract subjectivity, human personality must necessarily disinte­grate .... The disintegration of personality is matched by a disintegration of the outer world .... Man is reduced to a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments; he is as inexplicable to others as to himself .... Lack of objectivity in the description of the outer world finds its complement in the reduction of reality to a nightmare .... Distor­tion becomes as inseparable a part of the portrayal of reality as the recourse to the pathological .... The denial of history, of development, and thus of perspective, becomes the mark of true insight into the nature of reality .... The obsession with psychopathology in modernist literature as a desire to escape from the reality of capitalism .... As the ideology of most modernist writers asserts the unalterability of outward reality ... human activity is, a priori, rendered impotent and robbed of meaning .... By separating time from the outer world of objective reality, the inner world of the subject is transformed into a sinister, inexplicable flux .... To establish the allegorical character of modernist literature ... In the light of this vision history appears, not as the gradual realization of the eternal, but as a process of inevitable decay .... The notion of objective time is essential to any understanding of history ... the notion of subjec­tive time is a product of a period of decline .... In realistic literature each descriptive detail is both individual and typical. By de­stroying the coherence of the world, they reduce detail to the level of mere particularity ... Modernist literature thus replaces concrete typicality with abstract par­ticularity .... Modernism leads not only to the destruction of traditional literary forms; it leads to the destruc­tion of literature as such ... modernism means not the enrichment, but the negation of art.

(b) Literary Modernism - a positive view: T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1984, p. 31: The modernity of art lies in its mimetic relation to a petrified and alienated reality. This, and not the denial of that reality, is what makes art speak.

(c) Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism, 1985, pp. 34-7: Four defining characteristics of Modernism: self-reflexivity (self-consciousness), montage (simultaneity, juxtaposition), ambiguity (paradox, uncertainty), dehumanization (demise of the integrated individual).

(d) Alex Callinicos, Against Posmodernism: A Marxist Critique, 1989, pp. 54-6): [after Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, 1984] l'art pour l'art and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism represent different ways of rejecting bourgeois society, one retreating into a reflexive exploration of the `art institution' itself, the other seeking to resolve art back into the social world as part of the struggle to revolutionize that world .... By undermining the traditional view of the work of art as a self-contained ideal world mirroring the real world beyond it, Cubism also challenged the notion of art as an autonomous institution distinct from the rest of social life .... Modernism therefore prepared the way for the avant-garde. It took over a conception of art first developed by classical German idealism and central to Romanticism, in which aesthetic experience represents a higher form of consciousness than the merely discursive understanding provided by scientific knowledge. Art thus conceived is a refusal of `the means-end rationality of the bourgeois everyday', a retreat from a social world pervaded by commodity fetishism'. By disassembling the organic work of art, by openly displaying their creations as agglomerations of discrete fragments, the Cubists and the great literary Modernists sought to respond to what Eliot called `the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history'. They thus opened the door to a conception of art as continuous with and participating in–rather than a refuge from–a social world whose fusion with aesthetic practices would be central to its transformation.

2.3  Modernism and colonialism

(a)     Fredric Jameson, `Modernism and Imperialism', in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, Terry Eagleton, Fredric

Jameson, Edward W. Said. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 43-66: I want in fact to suggest that the structure of imperialism also makes its mark on the inner forms and structures of that new mutation in literary and artistic language to which the term modernism is loosely applied. This last has of course multiple social determinants: any general theory of the modern - assuming one to be possible in the first place - would also wish to register the informing presence of a range of other historically novel phenomena: modernization and technology; commodity reification; monetary abstraction and its effects on the sign system; the social dialectic of reading publics; the emergence of mass culture; the embodiment of new forms of the psychic subject on the physical sensorium .... One of the more commonly held stereotypes about the modern has of course in general been that of its apolitical character, its turn inward and away from the social materials associated with realism, its increased subjectification and introspective psychologization, and, not least, its aestheticism and its ideological commitment to the supreme value of a now autonomous Art as such. None of these characterizations strikes me as adequate or persuasive any longer; they are part of the baggage of an older modernist ideology which any contemporary theory of the modern will wish to scrutinize and dismantle.

2.4  Modernity and Postmodernity

(a) Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity", New German Critique, 22 (Winter 1981, rpt in Postmodern Perspectives, ed, Howard Risatti, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1991, pp. 54-66): Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes which find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time.... The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied territory.... But these forward gropings, this anticipation of an undefined future and the cult of the new mean in fact the exaltation of the present.... The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive, and the ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.... Historical memory is replaced by the heroic affinity of the present with the extremes of history - a sense of time wherein decadence immediately recognizes itself in the barbaric, the wild and the primitive.... Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebellion against all that is normative.... This aesthetic consciousness continuously stages a dialectical play between secrecy and public scandal; it is addicted to a fascination with that horror which accompanies the act of profaning, and yet is always in flight from the trivial results of profanation.... The modern, avant-garde spirit has sought to use the past in a different way.... Because of the forces of modernism, the principle of unlimited self-realization, the demand for authentic self-experience and the subjectivism of a hyperstimulated sensitivity have come to be dominant.

Alex Callinicos, Against Posmodernism: A Marxist Critique, 1989, pp. 2-3:

Postmodernism represented the convergence of three distinct cultural trends:

                History of art/architecture                    Postindustrial society                      Poststructuralist Philosophy

                                ¯                                                                 ¯                                                           ¯         

         [Rebert Venturi, James Sterling]                [Daniel Bell, Alain Tourraine ]                [Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze]

                                ¯                                                                 ¯                                                        ¯

 Rejection of International style in architecture    Transition from mass industrial growth   Fragmented, plural reality

 Rejection of Bauhaus functionalism & austerity  to systematic theoretical research            Incoherent human subject

                                                                            as engine of growth

Postmodernity ... is merely a theoretical construct, of interest primarily as a symptom of the current mood of the Western intelligentsia (9).

2.5  Modernism and Postmodernism

(a) Jean François Lyotard,`Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?' (1982), tr. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition, tr. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 81-2: Here, then, lies the difference: modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is in an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.

  The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, Chat amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization (mise en oeuvre) always begin too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).

(b) Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Corresponddence 1982-1985 (1992): the `post‑' of `postmodern' does not signify a movement of comeback, flashback, or feedback ‑ that is, no movement of repetition but a procedure in `ana‑': a procedure of analysis anamnesis, anagogy, and anamorphosis that elaborates an `initial forgetting.'

2.6  Postmodernity and Postmodernism

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996): The word postmodernism generally refers to a form of contemporary culture, whereas the term postmodernity alludes to a specific historical period. Postmodernity is a style of thought, which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities. This way of seeing, so some would claim, has real material conditions: it springs from an historic shift in the West to a new form of capitalism — to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of `identity politics'. Postmodernism is a style of culture which reflects something of this epochal change, in a depthless, decentred, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, eclectic, pluralistic art which blurs the boundaries between `high' and `popular' culture, as well as between art and everyday experience. (vii)

2.7  Literary postmodernisms

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996): Postmodernist culture has produced, in its brief existence, a rich, bold, exhilarating body of work across the whole span of the arts, which can by no means be laid at the door of a political rebuff. It has also generated more than its share of execrable kitsch. It has put the skids under a number of complacent  certainties, prised open some paranoid totalities, contaminated some jealously protected purities, bent some oppressive norms and shaken some rather frail-looking foundations. As a result, it has properly disoriented those who need to know who they are in the face of those only too willing to tell them. It has produced in the same breath an invigorating and a paralysing scepticism, and unseated the sovereignty of Western Man, in theory at least, by means of a full-blooded cultural relativism which is powerless to defend either Western or eastern Woman against degrading social practices. Postmodernism has demystified the most stubbornly naturalized of institutions by laying bare the conventions which govern them, and so has sometimes run headlong into a brand of neo-Sophism for which, since all conventions are arbitrary anyway, one might as well conform to those of the Free World (27) .... It has brought low the intimidating austerity of high modernism with its playful, parodic, populist spirit, and in thus aping the commodity form has succeeded in reinforcing the rather more crippling austerities generated by the marketplace.... It is brimful of universal moral prescriptions — hybridity is preferable to purity, plurality to singularity, difference to self-identity — and denounces such universalism as an oppressive hangover of Enlightenment. Like any brand of epistemological anti-realism, it consistently denies the possibility of describing the way the world is, and just as consistently finds itself doing so. At once libertarian and determinist, it dreams of a human subject free from constraint, gliding deliriously from one position to another, and holds simultaneously that the subject is the mere effect of forces which constitute it through and through (28).

2.8 Postmodernism in Architecture

Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1987): Contrary to common belief Post-Modernism is neither anti-Modernist nor reactionary. It accepts the discoveries of the twentieth century .... it acknowledges the debt to Modernism but transcends this movement by synthesising it with other concerns (11).... Modernism, in its several forms, had become an orthodoxy by the 1960s, at least in America. It was built in the business centre of every growing city, taught in the literature and art departments of major universities and, as a form of art, collected by the major galleries and institutionalised by the Museum of Modern Art. But the very success of Modernism as a style and ideology, its adoption by bureaucratic power structures and its fatal alignment with the program of modernisation, left it morally weak and aesthetically boring. The Modern Movement which was radical, critical and lively in the 1920s had now coopted by the Pax Americana and corporate life (17) .... The Modern Movement in architecture promoted industrialisation and correspondingly demoted local communities and the existing urban fabric, as it did virtually everything that stood in the way of the bulldozer. There was a tragic, indeed fatal, connection between Modern architecture and modernisation which was more or less directly opposed by the Modern Movement in the other arts.... Architects, to protect their livelihood, must adopt an upbeat attitude towards development, towards the new technology and increased efficiency. here is no such thing as a Dadaist or Existentialist architecture because the profession, or an individual within it, could not bear the contradiction of building a better world for a nihilistic world view (27) ....  the more outstanding canons that lie behind the new art and architecture: 1) In place of Renaissance harmony and Modernist integration is the new hybrid of dissonant beauty, or  disharmonious harmony; 2) pluralism, both cultural and political; 3) The most commonly held aim of Post-Modern architects is to achieve an urbane urbanism; 4) Almost as favoured as contextualism is the Post-Modern trope of anthropomorphism; 5) parody, nostalgia, pastiche... anamnesis, or suggested recollection; 6) return to content; 7) double-coding, use of irony, ambiguity and contradiction; 8) When several codes are used coherently to some purpose they produce another quality sought by Post-Modernists, multivalence; 9) the displacement of conventions, or tradition reinterpreted; 10) Another way of renewing past conventions is by consciously elaborating new rhetorical figures; 11) This return to the absent centre is one of the most recurring figures of Post-Modernism (330-46).

2.9  Global versus Regional postmodernity

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996): Much postmodernism has sprung from the United States, or at least has taken rapid root there, and reflects some of that country's most intractable political problems. (122)

2.10  Postmodernism and Politics

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996): Wherever else postmodernism may spring from — `post-industrial' society, the final discrediting of modernity, the recrudescence of the avant-garde, the commodification of culture, the emergence of virtual new political forces, the collapse of certain classical ideologies of society and the subject —it is also, and centrally, the upshot of a political failure which it has either thrust into oblivion, or with which it has never ceased to shadow-box (21).... Postmodernism, which tends to both anti-elitism and anti-universalism, thus lives a certain tension between its political and philosophical values. It seeks to resolve this by short-circuiting universality and returning in a sense of pre-modern particularise, but now to a particularism without privilege, which is to say to a difference without hierarchy. Its problem is how a difference without hierarchy is not to / collapse into pure indifference, so becoming a kind of inverted mirror-image of the universalism it repudiates.  This universality must apply to ethics too. One kind of postmodern sceptic of universality believes in culturalist style that moral values are just embedded in contingent local traditions, and have no more force than that (113).... postmodernism is neither liberal nor conservative but libertarian, though strangely ... a libertarianism without much of a subject to be liberated (119).... postmodernism is ... both radical and conservative together..... The logic of the marketplace is one of pleasure and plurality, of the ephemeral and the discontinuous.... Yet to hold all this potential anarchy in place requires strong foundations and a firm political framework.....a lot of postmodernism is politically oppositional but economically complicit... Postmodernism is radical in so far as it challenges a system which still needs absolute values, metaphysical foundations and self-identical subjects; against these it mobilizes multiplicity, non-identity, transgression, anti-foundationalism, cultural relativism. The result, at its best, is a resourceful subversion of the dominant value-system, at least at the level of theory.... But postmodernism usually fails to recognize that what goes at the level of ideology does not always go at the level of the market (131-32).

3   Postmodernism and Postcoloniality  

Kwame, Anthony Apiah, `Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?', Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 336-57: modernity ... the incorporation of all areas of the world and all even formerly `private' life into the money economy... [ not the triumph of Enlightenment Reason, not secularization, not the disenchantment of the world] ... but commodification... Postmodernism can be seen, then, as a retheorization of the proliferation of distinctions that reflects the underlying dynamic of cultural modernity, the need to clear oneself a space. Modernism saw the economization of the world as the triumph of reason; postmodernism rejects that claim, allowing in the realm of theory the same proliferation of distinctions that modernity had begun (345-46).... Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them both through the West they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Africa (348).... Now postmodernism is, of course, postrealist also...[Realism  sought to naturalize nationalism, and when that failed, realism was rejected] The national bourgeoisie that took the baton of rationalization, industrialization, and bureaucratization in the name of nationalism turned out to be a kleptocracy. Their enthusiasm for nativism was a rationalization of their urge to keep the national bourgeoisie of other nations, and particularly the powerful industrialized nations, out of their way (349-50).... Africa's postcolonial novelists, novelists anxious to escape neocolonialism, are no longer committed to the nation: in this they will seem ... misleadingly postmodern. But what they have chosen instead of the nation is not an older traditionalism but Africa—the continent and its people .... Postrealist writing, postnativist politics, a transnational rather than a national solidarity—and pessimism: a kind of postoptimism to balance the earlier enthusiasm ... Postcoloniality is after all this: and its post-, like that of postmodernism, is also a post- that challenges earlier legitimating narratives. And it challenges them in the name of the suffering victims of `more than thirty African republics' (353). If there is a lesson in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by each other, that there is no longer a fully autochthonous echt-African culture awaiting salvage by our artists... (354)