I approach Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Fucking A from the perspectives of postmodern drama and show how the discourse of postmodernism enables Parks to make intertextual links with some other literary works in order to reinvent the past and address a number of social ills and historical scars in the present. I also explore a number of key preoccupations of postmodern aesthetics, which contribute to the creation of indeterminacies in the play and argue how the creation of indeterminacies enables the playwright to increase incredulity toward a number of dominant metanarratives—manifesting themselves in the form of ruling economic, social, cultural, and political systems. Furthermore, I show how Parks raises the issue of African American history and imprints it from a fresh perspective to reshape identities for African Americans in her neo-slave narrative.
In his "Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality," Hayden White writes "What we postmodernists are against is a professional historiography." This statement inspired me to reexamine a number of White's oeuvre from the perspective of postmodernism so as to find out in what ways and to what extent White is a postmodernist. In addition, I highlight a number of preoccupations of professional historiography and argue how White deploys the discourse of postmodernism to dismantle them.
Postmodernism has served as a turning point in the human evolution of thought, and thus, it has challenged a number of assumptions central to social, political, historical, cultural, and literary fields. Accordingly, postmodernism has not left the study of democracy untouched, and in this essay, I aim to study the ways that postmodernism has affected the political, social, and literary democracies. To this end, I develop a conceptual comparative study of postmodernism and democracy with a focus on their overlaps and drawbacks. The comparative study of postmodernism and democracy opens up the space for the introduction of "postmodern democracies" as more inclusive, collective, and comprehensive frameworks of democracy.
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