Postmodernism

In Orientalism, postmodernism appears as one of two influential intellectual currents that came to prominence in the 1980s, alongside postcolonialism. The book treats their shared critical interests as consequential but insists that their different relations to history, power, and emancipation matter: postmodernism can foreground local contingency while leaving history comparatively weightless, whereas postcolonial work keeps colonial continuities and deferred liberation in view.

Emergence and Historical Context

The book situates postmodernism within debates that had gathered force by the 1980s. The prefix post, as discussed through Ella Shohat’s account of postcolonialism, need not mean that colonial practices have been left behind; it can mark both continuities and discontinuities, including new forms of older practices. Postmodernism and postcolonialism developed as related fields of engagement, and both could take earlier work such as Orientalism as an antecedent. Their overlap, however, does not make them interchangeable.

The account places these intellectual currents against larger changes in global power. Globalization is described as a system in which a small financial elite expands its power across the globe, raising commodity and service prices and redistributing wealth from lower-income sectors, usually outside the West, toward higher-income ones. Masao Miyoshi and Arif Dirlik also identify a transnational order in which states lose the force of borders, labor and income come under global management, and colonial subordination reappears as the dependence of the South on the North. Their analysis warns that academic interest in multiculturalism and postcoloniality can retreat from these material realities rather than confront them.

Distinction from Postcolonialism

The book identifies a substantial difference in orientation between the two currents. Postmodernism is described as more Eurocentrically biased, with a theoretical and aesthetic emphasis on the local and contingent, and with history, pastiche, and consumerism sometimes given an almost weightless, decorative role. This is not presented as a complete account of every postmodern work, but as a contrast that helps explain why postmodern and postcolonial approaches may produce different results despite some shared techniques.

Postcolonial inquiry, by contrast, is traced to earlier work by Anwar Abdel Malek, Samir Amin, and C. L. R. James, whose studies addressed domination and control from the standpoint of political independence already achieved or liberation still incomplete. The contrast becomes especially clear in the treatment of grand narratives. Jean-François Lyotard’s influential postmodern formulation emphasizes their disappearance, including narratives of emancipation and enlightenment. The first generation of postcolonial artists and scholars often makes the opposite claim: those narratives remain consequential, even when their realization is suspended, deferred, or circumvented. The difference is not simply stylistic; it reflects postcolonialism’s urgent historical and political imperatives and postmodernism’s relative detachment from them.

Shared Methods and Limits

The distinction does not mean that postcolonial work ignores local conditions. The book acknowledges its strong attention to the local, regional, and contingent, but finds that attention most compelling when connected to broader concerns: emancipation, revisionist readings of history and culture, and recurring theoretical models and styles. Magical realism is offered as one point of overlap between postmodern and postcolonial practice, without erasing the different purposes those approaches can serve.

The discussion also cautions against treating either academic field as automatically resistant to global power. Miyoshi’s call for rigorous political and economic scrutiny challenges what he sees as liberal self-deception in cultural studies and multiculturalism, which can become gestures of pedagogical expediency. The warning sharpens the book’s account of postmodernism: attention to cultural forms or local difference does not, by itself, ensure engagement with the economic and political structures that shape them.

Relation to Orientalism and Historical Critique

The book connects its account of these currents to Orientalism’s challenge to the supposed unbridgeable divide between East and West. Its aim is not to dissolve cultural or national differences, but to reject the inference that difference must entail hostility or fixed opposing essences. That distinction matters to the comparison: a focus on contingency can unsettle rigid identities, yet the book asks whether such analysis also confronts the historical conflicts, imperial control, and unequal power that gave those identities force.

Postcolonial scholarship’s critique of Eurocentrism and patriarchy offers one answer to that demand. In the 1980s, students and faculty in the United States and Europe worked to broaden core curricula to include women’s writing, non-European artists and thinkers, and subaltern voices. The resulting critique affected area studies and disciplines including anthropology, political science, literature, sociology, and history through renewed scrutiny of sources, the introduction of theory, and the displacement of Eurocentric perspectives. The book’s contrast ultimately makes historical accountability the test: postmodernism’s attention to contingency is significant, but it must be distinguished from postcolonial work’s sustained engagement with domination, historical revision, and unfinished emancipation.