On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary

Abstract

1989, the year of American Literary History's founding, held out a tantalizing moment for periodizers of whatever comes after modernism. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War seemed to tell us that we had arrived at a moment of genuine historical transformation. Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history shortly after, in 1992, and it would seem to follow naturally that the post-45 era was coming to a close. But if this was true in the realm of global politics, it was less apparent in literature and the arts more generally. Political watersheds are one thing, but cultural or aesthetic ones quite another, and it was not immediately clear—nor is it clear now—that, to borrow a turn of phrase from Virginia Woolf, literature changed, even if the world did, on or about 9 November 1989. One could argue that 1989 launched us into the age of multiculturalism, or, more negatively, sectarianism. The culture wars were already warming up in the US: Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know were published in 1987; Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, one of the more lasting documents to come out of the culture wars, was published in 1992. 1992 also saw the start of the Bosnian War, the most dramatic example of resurgent sectarian strife in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. On the American literary scene, pluralism defined the moment; in the international scene, sectarianism; in both cases, identities seemed to be at stake. But if, in Bosnia, your identity could get you killed, in America, it seemed, your identity could get you published.