MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY
MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY

Summary/Abstract: This article looks at identity as a major issue addressed – but ultimately left unsolved –by the discourses of both modernity and postmodernity. On the one hand, modernity,from its totalizing, universalistic perspective, emphasizes a unified, coherent subject anda generic human nature at the expense of the multiple, the heterogeneous, thecontradictory, the individual, the different, the local, the particular, the concrete. On theother hand, the duplicitous postmodern discourse – focusing on difference, plurality,heterogeneity, specificity, and decentredness – both destabilizes the subject, and rendersindeterminate the very concept of difference, which partakes of the same multiplicity andinstability as everything else in the postmodern universe

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