Third-World Writers in the Era of Postmodernism

In the post-cold war Third World, transnational capital (also called Western civilization, balance of power, and so forth) has assumed a triumphalist posture. Some people call this post-cold war period the era of “recolonizing” former colonies or dependencies, or the underdeveloped South versus the industrialized North. All the events that have occurred in the world, such as those in the former Soviet Union, South Africa, the Middle East, and Bosnia, lend an ironic twist to what Marshall McLuhan in the early sixties called “the concretization of human fraternity” through the use of information-media technology. McLuhan then intoned, “with the extension of the central nervous system by electric technology, even weaponry makes more vivid the fact of the unity of the human family.” ¹ McLuhan celebrated the advent of the global village and one harmonious world, which no doubt was a celebration of postmodernity in terms of appearance. But in his essay “The Precession of Simulacra” (1984), Jean Baudrillard believes this is only the “simulacra” pervading hyperreality.

Based on David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, we may say that postmodernism is a historical response to the recent crisis of overaccumulation, the symptoms of which include the disintegration of the centered subject, the loss of the referent, the collapse of the link between moral and scientific judgments, the predominance of images over narratives, aesthetics over ethics: “ephemerality and fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics.” ² The names of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud encapsulate these epochal transitions. Harvey points to the voodoo economics and image-making of Ronald Reagan as the epitome of the postmodernist outlook, in which homelessness, unemployment, increasing poverty, and disempowerment are justified by appeals to traditional values of self-reliance, entrepreneurial individualism, the sacred family, religion, and so forth. Street scenes of graffiti, urban decay, and misery become quaint and swirling backdrops to media spectacles; poverty, homelessness, and despair become sources of aesthetic pleasure, or signs of Otherness and Difference.

Jean-François Lyotard celebrates the postmodern condition as the fulfillment of the genuine spirit of the modernist project. Arguing against Jürgen Habermas’s condemnation of postmodernism as a betrayal of Enlightenment ideals, such as objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art, Lyotard rejects the Hegelian-inspired totalizing worldview, believing that it leads to a transcendental illusion of organic wholeness imposed by state violence. It seems to him that modernity equals terrorism over the individual. Therefore, Lyotard insists that it is necessary to do away with the notion of a self-identical subject or a unitary end of history, and uphold instead a Nietzschean nihilism or perspectivism—or, better yet, a neo-Kantian aesthetic of the sublime that would present the unpresentable, allude “to the conceivable that cannot be presented.” Refusing nostalgia for “the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible,” Lyotard issues a battle-cry: “Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.” ³ However, to whom is this call addressed?

For Third-World writers and artists, culture is still a main part of the identity of their own people. In order to resist the representations enforced on them by the West, their oppressor/colonizer, Edward Said in his Orientalism declares that they have to wrestle with their means of expression, to invent them or construct them from their specific circumstances, wield and control them. A nation’s culture is to be born in struggle. Frantz Fanon believes that there are three stages in this formation: first, the slavish copying of the conqueror’s paradigm; second, a revulsion from everything foreign, leading to nativism, worshipping the indigenous and embracing a nostalgia for origins; third, the emergence of a “fighting phase” associated with revolution, a new self-aware culture rooted in but not coinciding with the indigenous tradition, in which the writer and artist become the mouthpiece of a new reality in action.

So in the postmodern era, Third-World writers look askance at the benefits supposedly granted by Western civilization...