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Research in African Literatures 31.3 (2000) 172-173



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Book Review

Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics


Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics, by Satya P. Mohanty. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. xiii + 260 pp. ISBN 0-8014-8135-x paper.

Although Satya Mohanty is sometimes dogmatic when attacking postmodern epistemology in Literary Theory and the Claims of History, eventually he rejects both dogmatism and relativism in favor of moral and cultural pluralism. He is not afraid to borrow particular insights from postmodern thinkers, but he counters the skepticism (and its corollary, relativism) that he perceives at the core of postmodern thought by proposing an alternative epistemology, "postpositivist realism." This "softened" positivism deploys the concepts of "objectivity," "universalism," "reason," and empirically verifiable "truth," but it also recognizes the dependence of knowledge on social institutions and conventions and thus presents itself as antifoundationalist, nonessentialist, not concerned with transcendence.

One need not be entirely sympathetic to the argument for postpositivist realism in order to benefit from Mohanty's readings of other theorists. The first two chapters move from a critique of de Man's view of "reference" to discussions of Bakhtin and Peirce that outline the need for a social and historical account of language. Two chapters are then devoted to Althusser and Jameson, who, although striving to foreground the historical dimension of literary production, are nevertheless hampered, in Mohanty's view, by their poststructuralist skepticism about historical knowledge. In the final three chapters, Mohanty touches on anthropology, pragmatism, the history of science, and deconstruction--Gellner, Rorty, Quine, Kuhn, and Derrida--on the way to his most comprehensive presentation of his own position.

Postpositivist realism is a plea to inject Enlightenment rationality into multiculturalism. Mohanty invokes Kant in order to speak of "a (universalist) belief that humans, across cultures and societies, are creatures capable of rational agency" (248). He ties this "moral universalism" to a defense of "cultural pluralism" by contending that "(1) 'Cultures' need to be seen as fields of moral inquiry; and (2) Multiculturalism should be defined as a form of epistemic cooperation" (240). The anticipated result of such inquiry and cooperation is not consensus and homogeneity, for "prolonged disagreement or cross-cultural conflict will in many instances point to genuinely open-ended questions, for which we may indeed possess no answers at the moment" (246-47). Despite his attempted resistance to teleology, the final qualifier here--"at the moment"--betrays his own Enlightenment optimism about the "growth of objective moral knowledge" (248).

Mohanty's theory is provocative, and even when the thought is complex, the prose remains mercifully clear. The book deserves and rewards attention even from readers who may, like myself, begin it with skepticism [End Page 172] and finish it unconverted. It demonstrates the limitations as well as the advantages of choosing epistemology as one's primary discipline when formulating a theory of culture. For all the potential weightiness of the title's reference to the "Claims of History," there is little sense of "the burden of the past" to be found here--little sense of loss needing redemption or of wounds needing to heal, not even in the readings of theorists like James or Derrida, where traces of such pathos can be found. In this study the claims of history are above all epistemological; as one characteristic sentence puts it: "The realist's postpositivist notion of scientific methodology as epistemically reliable is [. . .] itself open to the claims of history, that is, to change and revision" (193). Such statements indicate that Mohanty's epistemology remains immune to some of the deeper motivations for attending to historical discontinuity and fragmentation.

David Adams

David Adams is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University, Lima.Moradewun Adejunmobi is on the faculty of African-American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis.

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