Is the Post - in Postsocialism the Post - in Posthumanism ?

DOI 10.1215/016424721468308 © 2012 Duke University Press It has been twenty years since Kwame Anthony Appiah’s sharply critical essay, “Is the Postin Postmodernism the Postin Postcolonial?,” brought to our attention the deep complicities of the postcolonial intellectual with global capitalism’s management of cultural commodities out of Africa via the fetishism of the self as other.1 An unthinking inheritor of the figure of the colonized intellectual that Frantz Fanon had presciently warned against earlier,2 this elite postcolonial intellectual flaunts an aesthetics of postmodernism, regardless of whether the intention is ethical or for the sake of commodification. As an aesthetics without the economic basis of postmodernity, such as the flexible mode of accumulation and the predominance of finance capital, this postmodernism has lost touch with culture as it is practiced on the ground. In postcolonial Africa, late twentiethcentury culture, especially popular culture, is surprisingly or perhaps refreshingly unconcerned with postcolonialism and neocolonialism and does not share either the dark vision or the commodifiable “alteritism” of the postcolonialcumpostmodernist intellectual.3 Hence, the postcolonial as a majority social condition is resoundingly not postmodernist. Similar arguments had been made before: modernism without modernity and postmodernism without postmodernity in the third world. When these arguments were made by nationalist and nativist intellectuals, the claim was that the westernized, thus “compadore,” intellectuals had jettisoned their native tradition in favor of the West and had thus thoroughly emptied their work of usable content in the service of the nation. When they were made by scholars of thirdworld modernism and postmodernIs the Postin Postsocialism the Postin Posthumanism?