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What is New about Culture in the Postnational World?

Are historical epochs any more ‘real’ or any less ‘constructed’ than ethnic identities or cultural boundaries? One would think that social constructionists would answer such a question in the negative. Yet, it is a peculiarity of the current state of play in social theory that social constructionist accounts of cultural identity can be used in building a case for the reality of a world-historical shift, from a modern to a postmodern, from a national to a transnational, epoch. At least, that is what Arjun Appadurai seems to have done in this thought-provoking work. Appadurai does not use the term ‘postmodern’. Indeed, the notion of ‘modernity at large’ would seem to have been formulated precisely to avoid that term, perhaps even to suggest historical continuity between earlier and current modernities. Appadurai speaks rather of the postnational, the postcolonial, even the ‘postelectronic’ world (p. 5), and of diaspora, globalisation, deterritorialisation, and transnationalism. In any case, these terms, to which we can add ‘postmodern,’ have been cropping up repeatedly in a two-decades-old debate about the de ning political and cultural characteristics of the contemporary world order. Some argue that there is a decisive break between the postmodern, transnational global order and the world system that took shape during the ‘modern’ period (de ned expansively to begin with ‘the waning of the Middle Ages,’ Western European overseas expansion, leading on to the industrial, urban, and democratic revolutions). Others see the current [postmodern, transnational] moment as more of the [modern, national] same. (I leave aside the questions of whether there was ever a decisive break between the Middle Ages and modernity, and whether such Eurocentric temporal categories make sense for a truly global or world history.) In any case, Appadurai states his argument clearly enough: ‘the globe has begun to spin in new ways’ (p. 58). More particularly, Appadurai advances ‘a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major ... diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity’ (p. 3, italics in original). But he waf es a bit on the dating of this rupture. At times he writes as if the present moment is merely the next step in a long process that has stretched over ‘the past few centuries’, when ‘large and aggressive social formations’, not merely in Western Europe but throughout the world, arose and clashed: ‘an