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By Paul Copan
In one of his dialogues, Plato cited the thinker Protagoras as saying that any given thing “is to me such as it appears to me, and is to you such as it appears to you.”1 This sounds rather contemporary. We hear slogans declaring “that’s true for you but not for me” or “that’s just your perspective.” These statements reflect the postmodern mood that continues to affect and shape Western culture.
Postmodern Blackness Bell Hooks Being mainly directed to and against grand narratives of modernism and high modernism, Postmodern writings are barely inclusive of black experience or black people writings; more seriously, black women voices are so egregiously absent from postmodern writings as if they had no role in the emergence and the shaping of the African American identity. Postmodern epoch, that is, instituted a destruction of the universal ground of truth, justice, reason and all the other modernist ideas and values. Oct 28, 2015 Bell Hooks, “Postmodern Blackness” Article Summary. October 28, 2015 Gavin Rear. Since the coming of the late 20th century the postmodern movement in art has brought numerous artists to the surface in the mainstream art world. Postmodernism has allowed works of art from Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and most recently, Banksy to be placed.
POSTMODERN BLACKNESS. Truth History Canon Progress Science Objectivity Identity Essence COLLAPSE OF MODERN GRAND NARRATIVES. IN-CLASS WRITING SAMPLE! Identity is a grand narrative destabilized in postmodernism! Identity is contingent, socially constructed, dynamic. Even if an aspect of black culture is the subject of postmodern critical writing the works cited will usually be those of black men. A work that comes immediately to mind is Andrew Ross' chapter 'Hip, and the Long Front of Color' in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture; though an interesting reading, it constructs black culture as.
Postmodern Blackness Pdf
How did postmodernism descend upon our civilization? What is postmodernism? What are its defining characteristics? We will look very briefly at these questions.
1. How did postmodernism emerge? Obviously, the term postmodernism presupposes an era that preceded it--modernism. But we must also understand what modernism was reacting to—namely, premodernism.
Premodernism: Before the 1600s, people in the West generally believed that God (or the transcendent/supernatural realm) furnished the basis for moral absolutes, rationality, human dignity, and truth. This is expressed by the noted Christian theologian Anselm (b. AD 1033), who said, “I believe that I may understand” (credo ut intelligam) he spoke of a “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). That is, the starting point for knowledge and wisdom was God, who provided the lens through which one could properly interpret reality and human experience. By having faith in God, the world could be rightly understood.
Modernism: Then came philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). As a Roman Catholic, he was troubled by the philosophical skepticism and (due to the Protestant Reformation) the theological uncertainty of his day. So he embarked on a “skeptical voyage” in the pursuit of absolutely certain knowledge. As part of his project, he determined to doubt everything: Maybe an evil genius was tinkering with his mind – or maybe everything is an illusion. But he concluded that at least he knew he was doubting, which is a form of thinking. He concluded: I think; therefore I am (or, in Latin, cogito, ergo sum). So without realizing it, Descartes’ project removed God from center stage, replacing it with the human knower as the starting point. The effect would be momentous. The rationalism of the European Enlightenment (c. 1650-1800) reflected this shift. This period was both optimistic about human potential and reason, but was also skeptical about church authority/state churches and Christian doctrine (“dogma”).
This was just one of many modernist projects that assumed that human dignity, truth, and reason could be preserved without God. Besides rationalism (with its emphasis on reason), there were Romanticism (with the emphasis on feeling), Marxism, Nazism, and other utopian schemes that sought to displace God as the starting point for understanding and living. The Jewish-Christian worldview that had deeply influenced the West was now being challenged.
Postmodernism: Then, in the wake of two World Wars, a postmodern climate started to permeate the West. Confidence in human progress and autonomy was shattered on the rocks of Auschwitz and the Soviet gulags. The systems or “grand stories” (“metanarratives”) of Nazism, Marxism, scientism, or rationalism ended up oppressing “the other”—that is, those marginalized by these systems such as Jews, capitalists, etc. These systems proved to be total failures. So with postmodernism, not only was God excluded as a foundation for making sense of reality and human experience; we cannot speak of any universal truth, reason, or morality. We just have fragmented perspectives.
If the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille in Paris (1789) stands as a picture of the shift to modernism, the fall of the Berlin Wall exactly 200 years later (1989) symbolizes the failure of modernism and rise of postmodernism.
Premodernism (up to 1650) | Modernism (1650-1950s) | Postmodernism (1960s – present) |
God/the supernatural realm furnishes the basis for morality, human dignity, truth, and reason. | Morality, human dignity, truth, and reason rest on foundations other than God (reason, science, race, etc.). | All metanarratives (systems or grand stories) are suspect-whether religious or not. No universal foundation for truth, morality, human dignity exists. |
French Revolution (1789) | Word multilevel list problems. Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) |
2. What is postmodernism? French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard famously claimed modernism’s end symbolized by Auschwitz, asking, “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” What is postmodernism then? “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”2 That is, postmodernism is deeply skeptical about (or suspicious of) big explanatory systems or stories. It is also critical of any view that claims to be neutral, unbiased, or rational. Christian philosopher Merold Westphal observes that modernism was characterized by the quest for (a) absolute certainty (think of Descartes) and (b) totalism – that all-embracing system (“metanarrative”).3 Modernists attempted to create “grand stories”-without reference to God-to ground human dignity, freedom, morality, and progress.
While modernism sought totalizing systems and absolute certainty, postmodernism now calls them into question in a two-fold manner. To counter totalism, postmodernism asserts that our interests and desires often use “reason” to promote their fulfillment; “truth” is simply whatever promotes my (or my group’s) will or interests. There is a “political agenda” in whatever we claim to be true. Knowledge is not neutral. (This observation utilizes the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”) In response to the unbiased certainty, postmodernism emphasizes that our ideas and judgments are embedded within a historical-cultural context; so we can never fully remove ourselves from it by pure reflection. (This has been called the “hermeneutic of finitude.”)4
3. What are some characteristics of postmodernism? We can only take a glance at some of the chief characteristics of postmodern thought.
Anti-dualistic: Postmoderns assert that Western philosophy created dualisms (true/false, right/wrong) and thus excluded certain perspectives from consideration. On the other hand, postmodernism values and promotes pluralism and diversity (rather than black vs. white, West vs. East, male vs. female). It claims to seek the interests of “the other” – those marginalized and oppressed by modernist ideologies and the political/social structures that support them.
Questioning texts: Postmoderns also maintain that texts—historical, literary, or otherwise—have no inherent authority or objectivity in revealing the author’s intent, nor can they tell us “what really happened.” Rather, these texts reflect the peculiarities of the writer’s particular bias, culture, and era. Australian historian Keith Windschuttle has noted that for the past 2400 years, critics assumed that truth was still within the historian’s grasp, but “the newly dominant theorists within the humanities and social sciences assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all.”5
The linguistic turn: Postmodernism argues that language shapes our thinking and that there can be no thought without language. So language literally creates truth. As Richard Rorty argues, “Where there are no sentences there is no truth.”6 So truth is created rather than discovered. Thus, as Friedrich Nietzsche argued, “There are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths.”7
Truth as perspectival: Furthermore, truth is a matter of perspective or context rather than being something universal. We do not have access to reality —to the way things are—but only to what appears to us. Since we cannot remove ourselves from our context to have a “God’s-eye view” of things, we must acknowledge that our thinking is shaped by forces beyond our control. We are like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show. He is the unknowing star of a production in a sheltered environment (“Seahaven”), where 5,000 cameras monitor his every move; everyone but Truman is acting. Likewise, we simply find ourselves thrown into a context with no way of getting outside it.
Of course, we can be grateful for the postmodern critique of modernism in many ways. Much within postmodernism raises important questions regarding genuine human limitations or bias and the problematic position that one should only believe what is absolutely certain. But much within postmodernism raises many troubling questions and deep contradictions: How can someone deny universal truth without affirming it in some way (“It’s universally true that there is no truth”)? Would it not be a universal fact that there are not any universal facts? Is it not the claim that “it’s all a matter of perspective” asserting more than someone’s perspective? Do not those who question whether we can know an author’s intentions write to express their own particular intentions? And is it not the rejection of metanarratives/grand stories a kind of metanarrative itself?
In another essay, we will look at some of these issues-pro and con. There we will assess “What’s Wrong (and Right) With Postmodernism?”
1 Plato, Theaetetus, p. 152a.
2 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxv, xxiv.
3 Merold Westphal, “Postmodernism and Religious Reflection,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 (1995), p. 137.
4 Merold Westphal, Interview with Gary J. Percesepe, “Appropriating the Atheists,” Books & Culture (May/June 1997), p. 24.
5 Keith Windshuttle, The Killing of History (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 1, 2.
6 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 5.
7 Friedrich, Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 13.
Paul Copan is on faculty at Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach, Florida.
Published March 30, 2016
BELL HOOKS POSTMODERN BLACKNESS PDF
This transgression of disciplinary boundaries allows bell hooks to stress the importance of postmodern insights to blackness, and in the same time to warn. Download Citation on ResearchGate | Postmodern Blackness | Critical of most Article in Postmodern Culture 1(1) · January with Reads Bell Hooks. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” page numbers from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. When was this essay written?.
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The essay discusses the importance of postmodernism to the black experience, while raising questions of identity, race and gender.
It means that critics, writers, and academics have to give the same critical attention to nurturing and cultivating our ties to black community that we give to writing articles, teaching, and bladkness. This tells us that bell hooks locates herself outside the realm of white academic scholars. She expresses that by using words like cautiously, suspicion, conscious and perhaps. You are commenting using your Facebook account.
bell hooks “Postmodern Blackness” Quotes | feministtheory
It is an exclusionary discourse that gains supremacy through the appropriation of notions like difference and otherness. She equally explains the real plight of black people and the hopelessness ensued from segregation and disintegration by quoting Cornel West. Skip to main content.
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Postmodern Blackness [Bell Hooks]
Notify me of new comments via email. She, therefore, suggests that postmodernism should be reflected in actual attitudes and in forms of writing.
Bell hooks points up the futility of discussions and writings on difference and otherness to the black experience as bell are detached from the real struggle black people should face. Crossing disciplinary boundaries posttmodern race, gender, sexism, postmodern theory, and cultural imperialism is for bell hooks a way to regain or yearn for a critical voice.
She criticizes not postmodernism but directions, deviations and practices in postmodernism. This feeling of marginalisation, of being outside postmodern discourse, is abetted by the preservers and reproducers of a hierarchical discourse, peculiar to the now postmodern movement.
Postmodern Blackness [Bell Hooks]
Postmodern Blackness Pdf Files
Email required Address never made public. Even if the critique of identity is at the heart of any postmodern discourse, hooks warns that it could be unfavourable for the black people, that is, with the presence of a subversive white supremacy that precludes the formation of radical black subjectivity, it is necessary to check the implications of any critique of identity on oppressed groups.
It is clear while reading the essay that hooks has faced several challenges in her writing career but there hooka not a sense of anger postmoderm her writing.
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Some of the quotes I really like are: But just because there is not a sense of anger there is a sense that black writers are struggling to get their words heard.
Help Center Find new research papers in: Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: In her book, Talking Back, Gloria Watkins explains how she adopted her pen name, bell hooks, from her maternal grandmother, as a gesture of her bold decision to speak and talk back. I find it odd that people would go up to someone and tell them to stop writing about something, but I am glad that those people at that party did not stop hooks from writing.
And in order for a critical black voice to emerge, postmodern insights, visions and revolutionary ways of embracing otherness should be implemented. A Review of bell hook’s Postmodern Blackness. Blacknesz personal stories that hooks shares bring to life the points that she makes, the stories show that hooks has personally faced these challenges and not just read about them. Notwithstanding the postmoderb significance of abstract thinking and postmodern visions to African-American postmoeern, these notions, even if they belong with the discourse of postmodernism, postmoden little to do with the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
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She, even if she is convinced of the instrumentality of postmodern visions to the black people, is hesitating and almost unsure about the relevancy of such an inward-looking discourse posrmodern their cause. There were so many quotes in this essay that I loved.
Click here to sign up. As part of shaping a critical voice, popular culture should be included within the struggle as it speaks for the underrepresented and the marginalized. Log In Sign Up. In this way, bell hooks extols postmodernism by suggesting that the adoption of a critique of essentialism would help shape an awareness of multiple black identities, multiple black experiences, an idea that challenges readymade stereotypes of black people as belonging to one unchanging, or incapable of changing, homogenous entity.
Postmodern Blackness Pdf Book
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