Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (review)

Sue J. Kim's Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race exposes and critiques what Kim calls "otherness postmodernism" in academic discussions of work by minority writers. According to Kim, otherness postmodernism celebrates alterity and heterogeneity as challenges to homogenizing discourses of power, but flattens that difference into uniform otherness. This perpetuates dualisms that stifle rather than promote resistance to dominant power structures.

One of Kim's important interventions is to suggest that an uncritical celebration of difference for its own sake leaves no way to judge between varied expressions of difference. By removing any ethics other than a privileging of heterogeneity, we become unable to discern which forms of resistance are more ethical or sustainable. Kim notes further that indiscriminate valorization of difference opens up the discourse of multiculturalism and pluralism to its appropriation by hegemonic groups. With discussions of the Washington Consensus and "intelligent design," Kim demonstrates that arguments that support neoimperialist and reactionary political goals can take advantage of postmodernism rhetoric. When this happens, discourses meant to promote tolerance for multiple views are appropriated by oppressors to assert their right to participate in public dialogue. Thus it remains important to be able to discern the merits of the many views that make up a resistant heterogeneity.

In her first chapter, "The Ideological Fantasy of Otherness Postmodernism," Kim invokes Slavoj Žižk to critique the simplistic notion that identifying ideology prevents us from reifying it. Since we are taught to view ideology as a false belief, we readily imagine that knowledge will provide its antidote. For Kim, it is imperative that we not merely see through ideology, but counteract its negative real-world consequences. Kim also reminds us that imagining that disbelieving ideology is sufficient resistance to that ideology actually harms society by inhibiting active resistance. By lulling critics into a false sense of having undermined power's homogenizing force once they have identified its contingency, otherness postmodernism ultimately limits opportunities for real political action.

Kim works with only a few authors to elucidate the practice of otherness postmodernism, but her investigation of those authors' works is wide-ranging. While Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Thomas Pynchon, and Bessie Head have been studied extensively, Kim brings fresh insights by focusing on their lesser-known and earlier writings and on how these texts shed light on their authors' later novels. Kim's analysis of Cha's work, for instance, begins with the political activists and film theorists of Groupe Dziga Vertov, with whom Cha was associated early in her career. Understanding the Groupe's poststructuralist aesthetics of form contributes to a discussion of Cha's Dictee (1982). Kim notes that Dictee, more than Cha's earlier film theory, is grounded in the historical realities of the Korean resistance to Japanese imperialism, as well as discourses considered more "complicit." Dictee, then, has a complex relationship to identity politics and political discourses; readings that flatten the novel's relationship to dominant discourse by ascribing to it an aesthetics of wholesale resistance because of Cha's Korean American identity do a disservice to the text.

Next, Kim reads Gravity's Rainbow (1973) in relation to Pynchon's earlier work, which, she argues, essentialized race as it drew on the influence of the Beat Movement. Gravity's Rainbow, in contrast, particularizes experience, even as it dramatizes a postmodern sensibility. The reading of Gravity's Rainbow demonstrates important tendencies in Pynchon's later work: casting the other as like ourselves, construing the system that constrains identity as unstable, and undermining the self/other binary as not-quite-totalizing. The novel resists homogenizing discourses, but, Kim argues, Pynchon's status as white male leads some critics to treat his work as universal.

In the fourth chapter, Kim examines Head's A Question of Power (1973), bringing together both the realist and hallucinatory sections of the novel to understand how the two work together in creating the novel's unique vision. This is necessary, because criticism of the hallucinatory sections of A...