Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

post what?! (not) an abbreviated introduction 11
meanings cannot explain new concepts. For example, how could someone
in the medieval era, steeped in the language of God’s will, a cosmology like
the Great Chain of Being, and monarchism understand a modern political
theorist’s views of democracy, individual liberty, and equal rights before a
natural law? Similarly, how could a postmodern theorist explain the social
construction of reality and the deconstructed individual with modernist
concepts of objective truth and individuality? Oftentimes, only a different
vocabulary can explain something new.
Thinking Big: Postmodernism versus
Cultural Studies
Cultural theory, cultural studies, and postmodernism—they are not quite
synonymous, even though they are often used interchangeably, as we have
done to this point. It is difficult to confi ne postmodern to a single defi nition,
but for the sake of argument we are going to begin by associating it
with a historical era, roughly the mid-1960s to the present. The beginning
of postmodernity is often traced to the 1940s, or even to the turn of the
twentieth century. In any event, the postmodern era represents a deep and
fundamental change in human existence.
When Western civilization entered the modern era, roughly in the late
fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, human existence changed simultaneously
in almost every arena: economics, politics, society, art, philosophy,
and more. People in Western society began to see themselves and the world
around them in quite different ways than did their premodern ancestors of
the Middle Ages. Postmodernists contend that this same degree of change
was taking place in the late twentieth and now in the early twenty-fi rst
century. They do not consider themselves proselytizers of a new idea or
some New Age religion. Instead, they contend that postmodernity is upon
us whether we like it or not, just as modernity confronted its premodern
predecessors fi ve hundred years ago whether they liked it or not. One of
the debates among postmodernists is whether this transition is a global
phenomenon or something peculiar to Western civilization. Some Latin
American scholars are suspicious of postmodernism as yet another form of
intellectual imperialism by Europe and North America. Indeed, this is an
issue we will address in greater depth.
Modernists, or those people who think the modern era is still alive and
well, naturally reject the postmodernist claim as a silly but threatening
idea that has the potential to erode the core values of civilization, Western
or otherwise. In turn, postmodernists see their modernist opponents as
holdouts, unwilling or unable to see the changes taking place all around