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<clowe@bu.edu> I don't think I missed Jim Blaut's main point, which was quite clear and seemed to need no reiteration. Possibly I should have acknowledged it more overtly prior to addressing the different issue he raised by denying being a postmodernist in a way that appeared gratuitous to me. I did miss the point of the disavowal and continue to do so, I fear. The lack of a commonly agreed definition of postmodernism and the power of straw-man stereotypes of the term make me think that an H-Africa discussion organized around the role of postmodernism in doing African history is likely to prove a dialogue of the deaf. I fear Jim Blaut and I have already illustrated the first round. For such a thing to be fruitful we would need to organize the discussion in ways that bring out actual propositions that actual scholars who see themselves as postmodernist advance about African history, rather than discussion of alleged and often caricatured generic propositions that scholars who see themselves as anti-postmodernist attribute to postmodernism. We could see if we can identify the issues at stake, such as: the relative roles of material and ideational/cultural dimensions of power; how much stress to put on internal vs. external agency in African history (& what counts as internal and external over time); how important are or should be questions of identity; is resistance itself victory; and is cultural appropriation by Africans really cultural deracination -- does the invention of tradition argument implicitly cut off perception of legitimate forms of agency, inventiveness, cultural and social creativity and dynamism -- why is invention considered inauthentic. Are all those questions really beside the point of the political-economic transformations of the expansion of global capitalism -- or are they where the latter finds its meaning -- or only part of it? What are the other parts that get left out with a too-culturalist focus? These are only a few of the questions that interest me in the area that I associate with debates over postmodernism, from my own point of view which I would see as historical materialist and social historical. I would suggest that we'll get further with such questions, or probably with even more specific instances, than with a generic debate over the term itself.
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