Introduction

Abstract

In Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race, I critique the epistemology and politics of what I refer to as “otherness postmodernism,” or the group of critical tendencies based on the privileging of difference and alterity—particularly in regards to race and gender—in contemporary literary criticism and theory. This tendency is manifested variously in poststructuralist, postmodernist, and even antitheoretical positions; although it takes different guises, otherness postmodernism, I argue, is ubiquitous in academic and public conversations about race in particular and alterity and marginality in general. I contend that otherness postmodernism constitutes what Slavoj Žižek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), terms an ideological fantasy, or the notion that ideology functions primarily through belief rather than practice. The ideological fantasy of otherness postmodernism includes the belief, for example, that the postmodernist believes that he/she resists racism and other kinds of exploitation by “seeing through” the ideologies that the credulous essentialist presumably believes. On the contrary, I argue that despite the insights of postmodernism, literary criticism and theory continue to perpetuate essentialisms, obscuring the institutional, political, and economic structures that shape issues of race and marginality.