Loomba – The End Post-Modernism and Postcolonial Studies Conclusion

Postmodernism Postmodernism is about the end of “answers,” the end of “truth,” the end of “meta-narratives.” It asserts that all stories must be understood to be equally relevant. It is a response to the plethora of information available to us now in all sorts of different mediums, the horrors of WWI and II, the pessimism of Modernism. It is a shaping force behind the artistic movements of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, in particular, but it hasn’t lost its momentum in more contemporary times.

Postmodernism indeterminacy (the growth of relativism, the notion that the truth is subject to time, place and context) fragmentation (inability to understand or appreciate any process, idea, system, or institution as a unified or coherent whole) decanonization (loss of faith in cultural and political authority) selflessness (loss of faith in the idea that an individual exists in a way that is knowable and stable; what one thinks about one’s self is an illusion or misunderstanding that one believes in order to avoid fears of nothingness or chaos)

Postmodernism the unrepresentable (extends the modernist notion that the mysteries of life cannot be described or named but only suggested) hybridization (tendency of postmodern writings to violate the notion of discrete genres, they reject the notion of boundaries between high and low culture) carnivalization (suggests postmodern tendency to revel in absurdity, travesty, grotesquerie and parody) and participation (because of the indeterminacy of the text, the reader must create meaning, perform meaning, thereby revising the text into reflections of one’s own needs or concerns)

Postmodernism/Postcolonialism So, what’s the connection between the two? Postcolonialism, as you know, seeks the story of the subaltern, tries to revise history, questions the colonizer’s representation of truth, depends upon postmodern notions of subject formation, produces texts which challenge genres and cultural divisions, celebrates carnival, etc. And what’s the problem with this?

“Comprador Intelligentsia” We’ve asked this question all semester long: How can the first world intellectual represent the third world? How can a person become a member of the intelligentsia w/o being inculcated in the third world system of thought? Is “Postcoloniality the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism?” Are we merely the product of our environment? Or are we a factor in the resistance?

Relativism Is the notion of the decentered subject the latest strategy of Western colonialism? If the theory of postmodern relativism – all stories carry equal weight – just another way for 1 st world intellectuals to undermine 3 rd world story tellers? Instead of foregrounding the stories of the 3 rd world, it puts them on a par with the stories of the 1 st world. If all stories are meaningless, or only meaningful in combination with other stories, doesn’t postcolonial relativism disarm the force of 3 rd world stories?

Loomba suggests that... We need to think past these sort of divisive strategies and learn to use 3 rd world stories to revise global narratives. Instead of seeing colonialism as the story of Western Imperialism or as a stage in the evolution toward socialism via Marx, we need to recognize that it can no longer “be told as a story scripted entirely in European centres, or as one of peaceful evolution. Instead, we see it as a violent narrative in which far flung ‘peripheries’ played a crucial role.”

What must postcolonial theorists do? They must plant themselves in the present, instead of focusing on the past. How does colonialism/global capitalism play itself out in the present moment? Redefine the term “postmodern.” It doesn’t have to mean “the end” of the global or grand narrative, of making sense of a big picture. Perhaps it can mean “a mutual reorganization of the local and the global.” Maybe local and global are not mutually exclusive perspectives, but “aspects of the same reality which help reposition each other in more nuanced ways.”

Gramsci/Foucault Do people have the ability to develop agency? Should we work at acknowledging that agency, at fostering it? Or, are people positioned by oppressive structures, and therefore, helpless to escape from their influences? Perhaps, suggests Loomba, there is some middle ground. “If postcolonial studies demands both a revision of the past, and an analysis of our past changing present, then we cannot work with closed paradigms.”