Postcoloniality Between The End Of History And Metamodernism

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine two principal issues: postmodernism (and post-postmodernism) within the dual contexts of Fukuyama’s contested ‘end of History,’ as well as developments in postcolonial thought. These will be followed by an attempt to relate these issues with metamodernism as a post-postmodernism. The postmodern condition, defined by Lyotard as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives,’ connotes a scepticism towards all truth claims and metaphysical dogmas: not simply the decentering but the uncentering of all totalizing metanarratives. The modernist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ gives way to a rejection of ‘the nostalgia of the whole and the one,’ liberating a polyphony of subjectivities. Fukuyama’s ‘end of History’ thesis, on the other hand, does not presume the refutation of historicism as much as a purported completion of it: the fundamental principles inherent to history, as a grand Western metanarrative, stand completed. As such, it is not a postmodern undoing of history as a metanarrative, but rather follows in the lineage of teleological thinkers like Hegel and Marx. One may argue, as Habermas does, that postmodernism responded to a distinctly European Enlightenment modernity, which was located within particular historical material contexts, defined by what Schmitt termed jus publicum europaeum. While postmodernism eschews this subject, the presumption of plurality also problematizes postcolonial modernities. This paper attempts to examine these aporias within postcolonial thought against the background of a post-postmodern world, where history is more alive than ever, rife with (metamodernist) grand narratives: nationalist myth-making, millenarian climate crises, religious fundamentalism, refugee crises, culture wars, discourse on economic precarity, etc.