Gayatri Spivak, in Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, posits that although essentialism is highly problematic for the knowledge it creates about the “other”, there is sometimes a political and social need for what she calls “strategic essentialism.” Spivak uses this term… Read More ›
In the last two decades of the 20th century, Subaltern Studies, postcolonial theory and criticism gained momentum, especially, as a corollary to globalisation in the Third World countries. If postcolonial criticism is taken as an offshoot of postmodernism, subaltern studies… Read More ›
One of the most widely employed and most disputed terms in postcolonial theory, hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding… Read More ›
One of the prominent books of the Postmodern era, on par with Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species, Marx‘ Das Capital and Freud‘s Interpretation of Dreams, Edward Said‘s Orientalism (1978) inaugurated postcolonial theory. Appearing at the same time as the… Read More ›
A pioneering postcolonial theorist and activist, who wrote in the 1960s in the context of the French occupation of Algeria, Frantz Fanon through his seminal works, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1967), analysed the… Read More ›
A critical analysis of the history, culture, literature and modes of discourse on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean Islands and South America, postcolonialism concerns itself with the study of the colonization (which began as early as… Read More ›
Postmodern literature’s celebratory mode of experimentation found new impetus with the usage of parody and pastiche. While a parody imitates the manner, style or characteristics of a particular literary work/ genre/ author, and deflates the original by applying the imitation… Read More ›
A term originally coined by Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, historiographic metafiction includes those postmodern works, usually popular novels, which are “both intensely self-reflexive and paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages”. This is categorically a postmodern… Read More ›
The postmodern idea of history repudiates the humanist notion that it corresponds faithfully to reality and asserts that it is textual and mediated in order to validate power centres. Thus, while “history” deals with the past, “historiography” deals with the… Read More ›
Although active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language,… Read More ›
Although the interrogation of power on a wider scale is implicit in Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism- the belief that language provides access to truth — the interest in power and its workings that dominates the poststructuraiist criticism of the 1980s… Read More ›
Michel Foucault, best known for his critical studies of social institutions, such as psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison systems as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality, has been tremendously influential on postmodern… Read More ›
From top left to right: Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Leopold Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, cultural critics and social scientists, the leading figures of which included Max Horkheimer,… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson, best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, called postmodern culture as one of “depthlessness” and as the cultural logic of late capitalism. “Late capitalism” implies that society has moved past the industrial age.and into the information… Read More ›
Baudrillard‘s concept of hyperreality is closely linked to his idea of Simulacrum, which he defines as something which replaces reality with its representations. Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has… Read More ›
Postmodernism is a term applied to a variety of artistic, cultural and philosophical movements that arose as a result of modernism. While modernism frames itself as tahnedculmination of in response to Enlightenment‘s quest for authoritatively rational aesthetics, ethics and knowledge,… Read More ›
Jean Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition famously described Postmodernism as the “incredulity towards metanarratives”. Postmodernism attacks specific notions of monolithic universals and encourages fractured, fluid and multiple perspectives. Lyotard observes that modernism relies on metanarratives or grand recits —… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.