Hemingway :: Hemingway Postmodernism Essays

Hemingway1 Postmodernist give-and-takes are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of abstracted concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of divergency and sharpness in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals have talked or written close postmodernism. Recently at a dinner party, I talked intimately trying to grapple with the significance of postmodernism for present-day(a) filthy experience. It was unitary 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 non relate in any way to whats happening with black people. oral presentation 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 discussio n about black experience. Apparently, no one sympathized with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut take experience conceived either as opposing or having no union to abstract mentation and the production of critical theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated. 2 My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good tho I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the subject guardedly 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 in the main by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little argument to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. 3 slender of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am much 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 tinge as an analysis or standpoint that might change the temper and direction of postmodernist theory. Since much of this theory has