Postmodernism Is Not What You Think : Second Edition » (2nd Edition)

Charles Lemert is Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University. He is author most recently of Sociology after the Crisis, Second Edition (Paradigm, 2004), and Dark Thoughts: Race and the Eclipse of Society (Routledge, 2002).

In the view of Lemert (sociology, Wesleyan U.), modernism is a culture that justifies the world-system of capitalism and its "extraction of surplus value on the basis of stolen resources and impoverished cheap labor." Postmodernism, then, can be seen as the conditions where modernism fails to cover up the dirty secrets of capitalist modernity. Seen in this positive light, postmodernism is driven by processes of globalization, and is the cultural corollary to a global political economy. This understanding of postmodernism and globalization underpins his wide-ranging discussion in which he addresses questions of the media and popular culture, identity politics, the science wars, politics and cultural studies, and structuralism and postculturalism. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR