Hemingway :: Hemingway Postmodernism Essays

Hemingway1 Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the hold up of difference and otherness in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals prepare talked or written about postmodernism. Recently at a dinner party, I talked about trying to grapple with the significance of postmodernism for contemporary wispy experience. It was one of those social gatherings where only one other black person was present. The setting quickly became a field of contestation. I was told by the other black person that I was wasting my time, that this stuff does not fix in any way to whats happening with black people. Speaking in the presence of a group of white onlookers, staring at us as though this encounter was staged for their benefit, we engaged in a passionate discussion about black experience. Apparentl y, no one sympathized with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when black is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of deprecative theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture moldiness be continually interrogated. 2 My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good but I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the theater cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much by the sense of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading an d studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. 3 Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the focus on otherness and difference that is often alluded to in these works seems to have little concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature and direction of postmodernist theory. Since much of this theory has