Postmodernism and the Rest of the World

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Postmodernism is the expression of a profound contradiction: deterritorialization and a borderless world on the one hand, and, on the other, the return of nationalism and the exacerbation of the gap between the `developed' and the `underdeveloped' worlds. The freedom that is associated with postmodernism is, in fact, an abject surrender to the dominance of capitalism. This essay argues that the significance of postmodernism has to be determined globally and world-historically and not merely within the confines of the metropolitan West. Secure in its dominance, postmodernism travels the world over in the name of knowledge, theory and epistemology. The pervasive epistemics of the `post-' sanctions the domination of other knowledges by the knowledge of the West. In a world polarized into the West and the Rest, the rest of the world has the ethico-political responsibility as well as authority to ensure that postmodernism does not mandate itself as the universal human condition.