Customer Reviews

The Vietnam War and Postmodernity

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More and more it seems as if the 1970s were not the decade in which nothing happened, but rather was the decade that laid the base and superstructure for the postmodern world we currently inhabit. The essays in this book make a convincing series of arguments that the Vietnam War, rarely mentioned in most accounts of the rise of the postmodern, is the genesis or at least concomitant with rise of the postmodern era. In many ways it signaled the end of the modern project, the end of old-time colonialism, the beginning of "technowar" which saw its greatest expression in pyrotechnics of the Gulf War, the end of the American people's belief in the modern project as expressed by its government leaders. It was in the 70s that the war actually ended, 1975, and in the 70s that the symbolic language and apologetics of the war proliferated. Much of the book looks at the postwar texts that became shorthand descriptors for the Vietnam experience and show not only how reductive these texts were, but also how they came to be manipulated during the hypermasculine Reagan era, which sought to demonstrate that America was not weak, not beaten, and certainly not demoralized by the Vietnam War.

A number of the essays take issue with Frederic Jameson's observation that Vietnam was the "first postmodern war." This works pretty well most of the time as a kind of "Rashomon" device where different authors' interests and optics prismatize this statement. I happen to agree with the editor, Bibby, who suggests that seeing Vietnam as the "first postmodern war" puts the cart before the horse. That it not a war which by its intrinsic nature was "postmodern," but rather it was out of this war that the postmodern experience was given context and impetus. After all it was during and after Vietnam that those damned (and I mean that fondly) French intellecutuals began picking apart our modernist assumptions...and referring to rhizomes, which, as one essayist points out are metaphorical dead ringers to the tunnel systems dug by the Vietcong...