Modernism/modernity

As a cultural historian who has spent her adult life writing about three different decades of American culture, I have inevitably thought a good deal about periodization. Fredric Jameson has reminded us that, if repressed, the hunger for such temporal demarcation will always return; it seems integral to the modern temper. ¹ The periods my first two books covered were relatively easy to name. The Feminization of American Culture was set in the Victorian era (the last historical period in which the United States let another western nation dominate the naming game); my second, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, in the modern era. ² Now that I am working full-time in the last half of the twentieth century, things have become far more problematic.

I find myself beset by a host of prefixes, all clamoring for my attention: the collaborating and competing “post’s”—as in “postmodern,” “postcolonial,” “post-Marxist,” and “post-Freudian”—as well as a lesser crowd of “neo’s,” some grouping edgily with the “post’s,” as in “neo-Marxist,” “neo-Freudian,” and “neocolonial,” and others, like “neoconservative” and “neoliberal,” striking out on their own. I mention only in passing the fashionable prefixes “meta”—as in “metanarrative” and “metahistory”—and “hyper”—as in “hyperreality” and “hypertext”—because these terms make less strenuous claims for themselves as temporal signifiers. All these prefixes seem to me self-evasions, however. What precedes us is named, but we are not—prime instances of the widespread language disorder that [End Page 71] characterizes the contemporary scene. When it comes to naming ourselves, we seem like planes circling and circling our target, unable to land. Jameson, Stuart Hall, Andreas Huyssen, and other critics have suggested that we can’t not use terms like postmodern and postcolonial, and they must be right, since I find myself using these terms here, and elsewhere. ³ We nonetheless might wish to situate our prefix addiction historically.

Managing time or history by naming it has been largely a western and white obsession, a function, in other words, of power elites stamping their image on the world at large. Even among the white elites of the West, time-naming as a mainstream and highly interpretative activity is of fairly recent origin. The American 1920s, the time in which the full-fledged media-consumer culture was born, invented the decade as a marketing device and a fashion statement—a time unit, in other words, not as the product of historians’ hindsight, but as an advertisement for the present. Earlier eras in the West, as outside it, had tended to name themselves and their predecessors by quasipolitical or philosophical labels, often honoring a monarch or a movement along the way: the various dynasties in Chinese history, the Restoration in Great Britain, the Enlightenment era in Europe, or the Victorian age in Great Britain and the United States. However, the commercially and cosmetically minded American 1920s called itself the Jazz Age, the lost decade, and the lost generation, and spoke of the Gay [18]90s and the Feminine [18]50s. History was commodified into colorful sound bites, a habit the American media continued in following decades with the Beat Generation, baby boomers, and the Woodstock Generation. ⁴

None of these terms, of course, had much to do with people of color living in the United States at the designated times. The 1890s were not “gay” for Southern blacks who saw Reconstruction reforms replaced by Jim Crow laws and Ku Klux Klan lynchings, or for Asian immigrants struggling to preserve a precarious economic and legal foothold on the West Coast. The members of the Harlem Renaissance (a name bestowed on it by the white press in the mid-1920s) hardly thought of themselves as “lost,” and it is questionable if the term “baby boomers” had much resonance for the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans immigrating to New York City in the decades just after World War II. ⁵

Today’s media have saddled us with the term “Generation X” for the young, and, recognizing a kindred enterprise, they have adopted wholesale the term...