Actually, when I answered the question on videos for "modern history"
on colonialism, I included a line from the message I was replying to,
so the query "how modern is 'modern'" really meant, "how modern is
modern history?" It was a simple query, implying that I wanted to
know if "decolonization" would be included among the films under
discussion.
However, the question on post-modernism DOES concern me, as I am
about to present a paper to the Britain-Zimbabwe Society Research
Dayschool at St. Anthony's College in Oxford, entitled "Trying to
Think About Politics in Zimbabwe Without Being A Post-Modernist."
After reading and assigning to students Jean-Francois Bayart's *The
State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly*, and Achille Mbembe's
article in *Public Culture* (1992) on "The Banality of Power," I have
been thinking about post-modernism and Africa quite a bit.
Colin Ley's review of Bayart, "Confronting the African Tragedy," in
the *New Left Review* (March-April 1994) captures some of those
feelings: Bayart is to be admired in many ways, but his cynicism and
nihilism (or is it just pleasure at watching the theatre?) are
worrisome. Some of my students are mystified over why I would even
consider him worthy of assigning: they read pomposity and empty
verbiage. I do like his efforts to get past the "dependency" debate,
and some of his attempts to use Gramsci. I think there is a lot of
pleasure there too: a much better way of looking at "political
culture" than the modernization school!
Jane Parpart's writings on post-modernism and gender are less
nihilistic: she finds the methodology good for deconstructing
gendered discourse in Africa, and for bridging historical and
"development" discourse in the disciplines, and, I think, does not
find it to be a disempowering methodology.
All in all, post-modernism (or hyper-modernism? David Harvey's work
still seems the best general introduction to me, as his linkage to
the new global politics of "flexible production" remains a
materialist one and his thoughts on modernism make the two look very
similar) may be a good way to look at the varying historical times
that are and have been ever-present in Africa, and a good way to think
about the beguiling nature of the meta-narratives some of us have
been working under. But when it gets to the POLITICS of
post-modernism, that is when I begin to worry.