In America there is a turn of phrase which makes a play on a previous word to indicate mild - sometimes humorous - derision. So someone might say about breaking the speed limit 'Oh speeding, shmeeding'. The 'shm' sound is placed in front to give the sense of the previous word not being important or not being considered worthy of full attention. Pomo is the shorthand word used by some to indicate postmodernism.
Enough of preliminaries! This letter from America wants to say 'pomo - shmomo'. Recently I asked a suitably trendy professor of English at Yale University about postmodernism. He told me in no uncertain terms that postmodernism was passe. This caught me by surprise. Don't you read Derrida any more? I asked askance. Oh yes, he replied, maybe, but that's all out of date now. Hasn't been fashionable since the mid-90s. What's in now? I asked. Ethnicity, he said.
About which I'm still not quite sure what he means, other than that there is an apparent divergence in university syllabuses into lots of different subsets of subjects - like 'African American Literature' or 'Native American Art', etc.
What's really interesting, though, and made me stop in my tracks is the sweeping way he dismissed postmodernism. Having watched academic fashions a little more acutely since that conversation with the professor of English, I wonder whether he's right. Radical hermeneutics, extreme relativism, and the other markers of postmodern intellectual fashion seem now to be often given short shift in the universities.
That isn't to say that there might not be something called 'postmodernity' in popular culture. Perhaps there is. It can be a useful catchall label. But if we're arguing that the academy is influencing us all into being radical relatives, it seems to be not quite true.
It feels a bit like the way evangelicals responded to existentialism. For a while knowing what to do with Sartre was almost de rigeur in university evangelism. And it was so long after anyone other than Christian apologists was reading Sartre. Somehow the church has once again just got fashionable when the fashion has changed - or maybe anyway.
At least here's a starter for thought - pomo shmomo!
