Framing the margins: the social logic of postmodern culture

Abstract

Phillip Brian Harper, Framing Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Black women had to deal with problems nineteenth century and earlier. These things had to be addressed by black people long time ago. Certain kinds of dissolution, loss of and need to reconstruct certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad order, as one of characters says book, in order not to lose your mind. --Toni Morrison (qtd. Gilroy Small Acts 178). 1 In this review essay I want to suggest particular relationship between kinds of literature discussed organization and journal MELUS, and understood Jamesonian terms as particular cultural dominant into which I necessarily write, rather than as an ethics or an aesthetics which given writer may choose. The relationship is suggested by two books under review, Phillip Brian Harper's Framing Margins: On Social Logic of Postmodernism (1994), and Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), important recent works which attempt to bridge gap between and by arguing different ways that ethnicity and marginality studies must figure centrally all considerations of period terms like modernism and postmodernism. Indeed, these books demonstrate that what is presently defined as by certain well-known theorists was anticipated by peoples of African diaspora, among others, period generally referred to as modern. Being ahead of curve on this has, of course, not been necessarily to benefit of black people. In course of reviewing these books, I will find it useful to introduce separate argument: that, among theories of Fredric Jameson's Marxist account of term provides framework most consistent with claims Harper and Gilroy make for studies of ethnicity and marginality. This is because studies of ethnicity and other forms of marginality require an epistemological framework which can account for production of subjectivity on basis of what Satya Mohanty refers to as objective social location (54). One version of such framework is available through feminist epistemology, which itself has developed part through particular reading of Marxism.(1) I will suggest that while certain criticisms that have been made of Fredric Jameson's Marxist account of from ethnic studies point of view are accurate, nevertheless Jameson's work provides framework for most consistent with most complex of standpoint theories, lending Harper's and Gilroy's accounts greater coherence than is available through theories of of Jean-Francois Lyotard or his lineal descendants, which have tended to be preferred accounts of ethnic studies scholars.(2) 2 Harper begins his account of the social logic of postmodern culture by recounting well-known triad of positions on definition of postmodern through which most debates can be read: Habermas, Lyotard, Jameson. Between 1979 and 1984 each of these canonical theorists published work evaluating meaning and usefulness of term postmodernism from strikingly different positions, which can be described as against postmodernism, for postmodernism, and amid postmodernism, respectively. Habermas's main concern was never quite postmodernity, but rather modernity, which he sees as an uncompleted which should have led to the rational organization of everyday life (Harper 5). Through promotion of theory of rational communication, he wants to complete modernist project, and it is this light that he views as an essentially conservative project (Habermas 1314). Lyotard, contrast, is enthusiastic about which he imagines to be fulfillment of modernist avant garde--an ongoing disruptive discourse that prevents us from falling into a collective nostalgia for an unattainable unity (Harper 5). …