Postmodern Blackness
In her essay Postmodern Blacknessi, bell hooksii challenges the exclusiveness of postmodern
discourses and conversations which are habitually obsessed with conceptual notions such as
‘’difference’’iii and ‘’otherness’iv’. The essay discusses the importance of postmodernism to the
black experience, while raising questions of identity, race and gender. It is an interdisciplinary
essay where postmodern theory, cultural criticism, African-American studies and the politics of
race and gender intersect. This transgression of disciplinary boundaries allows bell hooks to
stress the importance of postmodern insights to blackness, and in the same time to warn against
the exclusionary language of the postmodernist movement which echoes only of white male
intellectuals’ voices.
bell hooks starts her essay by pointing out the exclusionary discourses of postmodernist
intellectuals who fashionably abuse concepts of difference and otherness. Notwithstanding the
infinite significance of abstract thinking and postmodern visions to African-American
experience, these notions, even if they belong with the discourse of postmodernism, have little
to do with the African-American Civil Rights Movement. This ‘’ stuff’’ is detached from the
real struggle that must be waged against racism and gender inequalities. hooks hastens to
explain that she is disturbed not by postmodernism, but by the conventional and coded
language with which white male intellectuals tend to converse familiarly. Being mainly
directed to and against grand narratives of modernism and high modernism, Postmodern
writings are barely inclusive of black experience or black people writings; more seriously,
black women voices are absent from postmodern writings as if they had no role in the
emergence and the shaping of the African American identity. Although she is an academic
scholar herself, bell hooks positions herself outside white academia, that is, she lacks
conviction and she is even suspicious of how relevant postmodernism is to black folks. This
feeling of marginalisation, of being outside postmodern discourse, is abetted by the preservers
and reproducers of a hierarchical discourse, peculiar to the now postmodern movement.
Conceiving of themselves outside the ‘’fellowships of discoursev’’, black female readers are to
question their interest in a body of scholarship that eliminates their presence in and contribution
to postmodern discourse. While black female writers’ presence is wiped out from mainstream
literature on postmodernism, recurrent writings on ‘’ difference and otherness’’ manufacture
consent and legitimacy in the academia, by propagating, indoctrinating, reinscribing and
reproducing the same discourse. bell hooks, then, suggests that it necessary for postmodernist
practice to include the voices of the displaced, marginalized, exploited and oppressed black
In her essay Postmodern Blacknessi, bell hooksii challenges the exclusiveness of postmodern
discourses and conversations which are habitually obsessed with conceptual notions such as
‘’difference’’iii and ‘’otherness’iv’. The essay discusses the importance of postmodernism to the
black experience, while raising questions of identity, race and gender. It is an interdisciplinary
essay where postmodern theory, cultural criticism, African-American studies and the politics of
race and gender intersect. This transgression of disciplinary boundaries allows bell hooks to
stress the importance of postmodern insights to blackness, and in the same time to warn against
the exclusionary language of the postmodernist movement which echoes only of white male
intellectuals’ voices.
bell hooks starts her essay by pointing out the exclusionary discourses of postmodernist
intellectuals who fashionably abuse concepts of difference and otherness. Notwithstanding the
infinite significance of abstract thinking and postmodern visions to African-American
experience, these notions, even if they belong with the discourse of postmodernism, have little
to do with the African-American Civil Rights Movement. This ‘’ stuff’’ is detached from the
real struggle that must be waged against racism and gender inequalities. hooks hastens to
explain that she is disturbed not by postmodernism, but by the conventional and coded
language with which white male intellectuals tend to converse familiarly. Being mainly
directed to and against grand narratives of modernism and high modernism, Postmodern
writings are barely inclusive of black experience or black people writings; more seriously,
black women voices are absent from postmodern writings as if they had no role in the
emergence and the shaping of the African American identity. Although she is an academic
scholar herself, bell hooks positions herself outside white academia, that is, she lacks
conviction and she is even suspicious of how relevant postmodernism is to black folks. This
feeling of marginalisation, of being outside postmodern discourse, is abetted by the preservers
and reproducers of a hierarchical discourse, peculiar to the now postmodern movement.
Conceiving of themselves outside the ‘’fellowships of discoursev’’, black female readers are to
question their interest in a body of scholarship that eliminates their presence in and contribution
to postmodern discourse. While black female writers’ presence is wiped out from mainstream
literature on postmodernism, recurrent writings on ‘’ difference and otherness’’ manufacture
consent and legitimacy in the academia, by propagating, indoctrinating, reinscribing and
reproducing the same discourse. bell hooks, then, suggests that it necessary for postmodernist
practice to include the voices of the displaced, marginalized, exploited and oppressed black
