Critical Inquiry · 1997 · 72 citations · 0 references
HumanitiesAfrican American StudiesEthnic StudiesAfrican American HistoryBlack Feminist StudiesBlack Intellectual HistoryBlack Literary CriticismBlack Social TheoryBlack StudiesQueer Of Color CritiqueRacismWhite SupremacyBlack ExistenceBlack Historical ConsciousnessBlack IntellectDu Boisian ThoughtNarratives Of Black SubjectivityW. E. B. Du Bois Debate
A growing chorus of thinkers is in effect writing postmodernism's obituary, inspired by a renewed sense of convergence and commonality among the world's regimes in the wake of recent transitions from communism to emerging market capitalism. One symptom of postmodernism's demise is the reemergence of the cosmopolitan and the universal, ideas stigmatized by the bias of the postmodern toward the particular and local. Indeed, according to the social theorist Jeffrey Alexander, a pluralistic universalism has now become the positive half of a binary whose other (polluted) term is nationalism, a dualism poised to replace the postmodern/modern as the defining binary code of the present.1 Edward Said, Martha Nussbaum, Tzvetan Todorov, Alain Finkielkraut, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Julia Kristeva are among the thinkers who have engaged the possibilities and the limits of the postmodern and rejected its politics of identity and difference.2 Instead, they have (to borrow Kristeva's words),