Mary Lanser raises some good questions. I have been trying to grapple
with similar issues while writing a paper about African philosophy and
postcolonialism. My inclination is to think of postmodernism as a
mood, rather than a historical phenomenon. If postmodernism is the
questioning of modernist values of objectivity, progress, efficiency,
structure, and so forth, I think it is possible to see a variety of
writers as modernist and postmodern at the same time. Postmodernism
is an interpretive mood that emphasizes the cracks in a grand
narrative.
I too don't quite know what to do about claims of postmodernism
for African thought. If postmodernism is the questioning or
problematizing of modernism, what is "postmodern" African thought a
questioning or problematizing of? Its own "modernist" past, if it has
one at all? Colonialism? Some (although not all) expressions of
postmodernism amount to little more than cultural relativism -- is
that what postmodernity means here?
Part of my hesitation concerning applying postmodernism to this
situation is that a) it is imposed as a theoretical structure which
does not resonate with African practice, and b) that theoretical
structure, for some theorists, has a kind of necessity about it (the
natural outgrowth of modernism). If African thought was never
modernist, it can't be post-modern, either.
The wild card, of course, is colonialism, which could be seen as
a prime example of modernism (rationalization of resources,
efficiency, the assumption of the universalizability of European
values, rationality, goals, etc.). But this is a modernism that was
imposed, and resisted by many. Does it make sense to talk of a
postmodernism when the modernism was never your own?
My inclination is to look toward hermeneutic philosophy as being
more fruitful, while realizing the possible difficulty of theorizing
what Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. In other words,
African self-understanding cannot be explicated using the European
categories of modern/postmodern (post-colonial has its own problems,
in my opinion, but that's another story), but has to find its own
mode of self-understanding, while at the same time recognizing its
own hidden agendas. African philosophy, at least, is in that process
right now.