Why does the topic of race in the Post-modern era, generate excitement here? Because the so-called Post-modern, Postcolonial, Post-racial era has been so greatly heralded for being devoid of the negative racial connotations associated with the modern era. bell hooks provides context for why the black experience in Post-modern discourse, is kept hidden, not clearly defined, discussed or debated.
Ok, bell hooks provides context:
Context:
Postmodern Blackness, bell hooks
The Issue:
Melissa Harris-Perry's article in the Nation
"Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama.
The Reaction:
Exhibit A Exhibit B Exhibit C Exhibit D Exhibit E Exhibit F
The outcome was mostly a fractured and disjointed discourse around the character, intentions and anti-intelectual nature of Harris-Perry's question. Why? Because Harris-Perry unearthed a family secret among Liberals and conservatives alike. That secret is, that like the Greek god Janus, society is happy to look forward to the future of humanist interaction and values, at the same time, it looks into the past and dredges up colonial narratives for use in the, supposedly, more progressive present.
Again, from hook's thesis,
"4] The failure to recognise a critical black presence in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a subject where those who discuss and write about it seem not to know black women exist or to even consider the possibility that we might be somewhere writing or saying something that should be listened to, or producing art that should be seen, heard, approached with intellectual seriousness. This is especially the case with works that go on and on about the way in which postmodernist discourse has opened up a theoretical terrain where "difference and otherness" can be considered legitimate issues in the academy. Confronting both the lack of recognition of black female presence that much postmodernist theory reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most black folks to hearing about real connections between postmodernism and black experience, I enter a discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain, then, that my voice can or will be heard."
Harris-Perry's article simply put forth an argument interrogating specific cultural aspects of politics and political practice. Using the words, "white, "black" liberal" and "electoral racism" in the same essay, critical of practice and discourse caused an internet row. In the Post-racial, Post-modern era why have the shields of defence been employed in an attempt to deflect and attack the notion that issues surrounding race could effect a collation of groups within politics?
Again, hooks
"It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice"
The cognitive dissidence surrounding this issue centres on the supposed Post-modern values and perspective that encourage critical discourse. Melissa Harris-Perry attempted to interrogate a subject, and she was shunned for her thesis and was treated as if she is not a serious intellectual, framing the issue of Postmodern blackness as hooks does provides insight from a perspective of the Postmodern black experience. Thank you Ms. Harris-Perry for your intellectual curiosity.
Fortunately, the reasonable Negroes on Team Blackness over at @BlackingItUp have done a great job covering this story. Listen to their latest coverage here... or in the podcast section on the right.
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