Dialogues with the Dead: History and the ‘Sense of an Ending’, 1990–2000

Abstract

The 1990s were, as Patricia Waugh put it, an ‘era of belatedness, of a generalised “post”-condition’ (1995, 33). Theorists talked about ‘postmodernism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postcolonialism’, ‘post-industrialism’, ‘post-feminism’, ‘post-nationalism’, the ‘post-human’, ‘late capitalism’ and ‘the end of history’. For Frederic Jameson, it was precisely this ‘inverted millenarianism’ with its ‘senses of the end of this or that’ which constituted postmodernism, defined as a radical break with ‘the 100-year-old modern movement’ (1991, 1). For women the 1990s were most obviously ‘post-feminist’, not in the sense that the battle for equality had been won, but because they found themselves facing an anti-feminist backlash.¹ The language of revolutionary feminism might be everywhere, co-opted by the global market in order to sell consumer goods, but the actual economic and political gains made by women often seemed illusory.