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The Politics of Postmodernism

01 Jan 1989-
TL;DR: In this article, the postmodernist representation is de-naturalized the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history, Re-presenting the past: 'total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text.
Abstract: General editor's preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Representing the postmodern: What is postmodernism? Representation and its politics, Whose postmodernism? Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modernism. 2. Postmodernist representation: De-naturalizing the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history. 3. Re-presenting the past: 'Total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text. 4. The politics of parody: Parodic postmodern representation, Double-coded politics, Postmodern film? 5. Text/image border tensions: The paradoxes of photography, The ideological arena of photo-graphy, The politics of address 6. Postmodernism and feminisms: Politicizing desire, Feminist postmodernist parody, The private and the public. Concluding note: some directed reading. Bibliography. Index.
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) are telling instances of his hybridization of Eastern and Western narrative and aesthetic traditions as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) are telling instances of his hybridization of Eastern and Western narrative and aesthetic traditions. Howe...

9 citations


Cites background from "The Politics of Postmodernism"

  • ...Email: anjali@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in cosmopolitan, Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) “de-doxification”, and Deleuzian (1977; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) “nomadology” has rightly been sensitive to his ability to articulate both the postcolonial, the postmodern, and now, the globalizing moments of displacement, decentring, and rootlessness....

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  • ...Is there an intention of “parody”, as Linda Hutcheon (1989) uses the term?...

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a critical assessment of postmodernism as an empirical phenomenon is presented, with reference to examples from architecture, cinema, advertising, television and popular music, and an outline of some of the reasons that have been proposed to account for the emergence of post-modernism.
Abstract: This paper is concerned with a critical assessment of postmodernism as an empirical phenomenon. It strives to examine the claims of postmodern theory by investigating whether it is possible to claim that postmodernism is emerging in contemporary industrial, capitalist societies and, in particular, whether it can be found in the sphere of popular media culture. To do so, it will first be apposite to give an outline of the basic features which define postmodernism, illustrate them with reference to examples from architecture, cinema, advertising, television and popular music, and give an outline of some of the reasons that have been proposed to account for the emergence of postmodernism. Some trends towards postmodernism are claimed to be apparent in the examples of popular media culture that have been selected for discussion. However, the paper should finally demonstrate why—if a specific example, i.e. cinema, is assessed more critically and studied in depth—the arguments of postmodern theory appe...

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
02 Oct 2018
TL;DR: The authors argue that many recent British historical fictions historicise the "inevitability" and hegemony of neoliberal freedoms by figuring them as the product of sustained political/ideological conflict in the 1980s.
Abstract: To imagine alternative futures it is essential to historicise and denaturalise neoliberal iterations of freedom. This paper builds on Wendy Brown’s injunction to ‘undo the inevitability or givenness of the present’ and Jameson’s analysis of historicity as ‘a perception of the present as history […] which somehow defamiliarises it’ produced by representations of past or future. I argue that many recent British historical fictions historicise the ‘inevitability’ and hegemony of neoliberal freedoms by figuring them as the product of sustained political/ideological conflict in the 1980s. This article’s case study is David Peace’s GB84 (2004), which presents the 1984-85 miners’ strike as a civil war in which the battle to define and embody ‘freedom’ is central. However, I argue that the text also produces a highly suggestive contradictory sense of historicity without futurity. It denaturalises the neoliberal present as the product of struggle and structural forces but also tacitly presents the neoliberal triumph of the 1980s as the ‘End of History’, after which political alternatives seem impossible to imagine and subjects remain inescapably determined by neoliberal ‘common sense’. This article argues that the novel is political only in profoundly ambivalent ways but that its aesthetic strategies offer a significant critical intervention which teases out what Jameson terms the ‘limits beyond which [contemporary subjects] cannot think.’

9 citations


Cites background from "The Politics of Postmodernism"

  • ...…senses of historicity usefully supplements the dominant scholarly approaches to the historical novel—the focus on epistemology/historiography (Hutcheon, 1988, 1989) and memory studies (Middleton & Woods, 2000)—to include the ways in which texts present culturally specific understandings of…...

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The surprising thing about Tom Stoppard is that, for all his reputation as a “cutting edge” dramatist, dealing with highly contemporary issues, tackling immediately relevant themes, there are only four full-length stage plays actually set in the present as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The surprising thing about Tom Stoppard is that – for all his reputation as a “cutting edge” dramatist, dealing with highly contemporary issues, tackling immediately relevant themes – i n his whole d ramatic output there a re on ly four full-length stage plays actually set in the present. These are Night and Day and Jumpers and Hapgood, along with his ironically titled, semi-autobiographical The Real Thing and his very first play, Enter a Free Man – although Stoppard has dismissed this as an amalgam of other people’s plays. Eighteen of his remaining nineteen full-length plays are set wholly or at least partially in the past, qualifying him for the title “historical playwright,” a fact that makes him quite unusual among major twentieth-century British playwrights. There are, of course, others who have turned to historical subjects, among them Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill. Yet neither of these has set more than one in three of their dramas in the past, and Churchill, for example, moves away from the hist...

8 citations