Critiquing Postmodernism in Congemporary Discourses of Race (review)

In Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race, Sue J. Kim challenges "the epistemology and politics" of "otherness postmodernism," or "the group of critical tendencies based on the privileging of difference and alterity—particularly in regards to race and gender" (1). Characterizing "otherness postmodernism" as a tendency to lapse into binary understandings of difference, heterogeneity, and multiplicity, Kim suggests this binary tendency produces a set of related problems, outlining three in particular: a failure to adequately consider the contexts of political dissent; a valorization of difference that undermines heterogeneity; and a failure to make effective use of the "real" to ground critical evaluation of works. Each of these failures are summarily addressed in three chapters that read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Bessie Head's A Question of Power against their interpretation within postmodernist readings, which Kim finds steeped in an otherness postmodernism "limited by essentialist determinations based on the author's identity and narrow notions of the ideological valences of narrative form." She argues that such postmodernist readings do not account for the novels' "subtler and more complex understandings of ideology, culture, and identity" (2). For Kim, the "hermeneutics of difference ironically ends up flattening differences into sameness, or rendering the diversity of significations and possibilities only in terms of sameness or difference"; or put more simply, "otherness postmodernism fails to live up to the truth of its own tenets" (2).

Kim pursues this commitment to maintaining the difference in difference in the chapter on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha by attending to her aesthetic influences, and by examining the preoccupations of critics who find Cha's work either an example of cultural specificity or of the belief that "narrative disruptions of the novel constitute political disruptions of ideological narratives and formations" (47). Characterizing discussion of Dictee as divided about whether to lay emphasis on Cha's form or content, Kim suggests the former is thought to "avoid the pitfalls of identity politics," but raises the question "why and how is Cha's experimentalism distinguished from universalizing its assumptions and 'colonizing difference itself?'" For Kim, the latter "risks renewing a form of identity politics" whereas a move to "historicize her use of form and relate it dialectically to content and context" can help critics understand "Cha's historical position and concerns […] without reifying the postmodernist aesthetic forms that she uses" (48, 49).

In essence, Kim argues that Cha's work both "clearly intends to disrupt various ideological narratives" and "shares in some of the ideological pitfalls of avant-garde and postmodernist aesthetics" (50). It's a testament to Kim's lucid writing style and theoretical prowess that such a statement may strike readers as more obvious than brave, yet Kim's point is hard-earned. Against what she labels the otherness postmodernism "manifested largely in Asian American studies" in 1990s readings of Dictee, Kim recalls that "we live in a world of multiple contending 'hegemonic' discourses, so while oppositional texts may seem to formally disrupt hegemonic discourses," critics should remember that critiques of hegemony originate from "reactionaries, fundamentalists, and neoconservatives" as well as progressives. Further, such critiques of hegemony concern themselves not only with "whether multiple interpellations exist and clash, but what those interpellations are and how we understand them" (70, 71). Kim is disturbed by an assumption that "exclusion and oppression prompt marginal writers like Cha to produce texts that disrupt hegemonic narratives of history, nation and citizenship, gender roles and sexuality, and so on" because "it seems to discount the agency of that marginal writer." In response to this assumption Kim poses a series of questions: "to what extent or in what ways was Theresa Hak Kyung Cha marginal? Or, more to the point, to what extent does her work have to do with Asian American social movements?" Kim observes that Cha's interests "lay more in film and performance art than the budding ethnic studies movement" at Berkeley in the late...