Postmodernism and the Other (Paperback)

The book ranges across areas like architecture, film, television, pop music and philosophy to faddish new age religions and includes specific analysis of everything from Disney's Pocahontas to Rushdie's Satanic Verses; Mira Nair's The Perez Family; the Body Shop and Microsoft Bookshelf to tourism and terrorism.

In every instanace Sardar brings compelling evidence (and his own exceptional intelligence) to support his argument that while postmodernism appears to embrace plurality it in fact functions to legitimate the acceleration of Western imperialism.

This is book is more than just an effective antidote to Baudrillard and Rorty. It's a very serious, convincing, compelling and overdue attack on the way the world is. It's also a very necessary antidote to the selfrighteous smugness of most Western 'critics' and particularly those who are so blinded by luxury that they really do believe that we are entering a postpolitical age.

Postmodernism and the Other can be read with the work of people like Noam Chomsky, Christopher Norris, Lesego Rampolokeng, John Pilger, Jeremy Cronin, Anthony Richmond, Breyten Breytenbach, Vandana Shiva and Pierre Bourdieu. The Post-Development Reader is excellent too. And of course Frantz Fanon's classic, The Wretched of the Earth, still speaks as urgently as ever.

Academic but readable, Sardar is sometimes very amusing, but always serious regarding the central issues. The essence of Sardar's analysis of postmodernism is this: the West and its culture has come, has conquered and is here to stay, to keep on dominating and, as Sardar puts it, will eventually consume all Others.

This may well be true in the minds of the current controlling `elites', whose concern for their own affluence far outstrips any empathy for the poverty and suffering their actions cause to others. Yet there is a counterforce, and the worse the controlling elites become the more support goes to the opposition. We should not be disillusioned nor dissuaded from the search for global justice and equity, but must realise, as Sardar describes so vividly in this book, the strength and determination of the opposition. Or, as Sardar puts it: `We are left only with a worldview that cannot differentiate between good and evil and hence cannot cultivate virtue. It can thus have no long term future.'

But there is another side to every dominant regime, American led globalisation is the current paradigm (putting economic policies driven by `consumerism' above human values), but all the evidence points to its implosion: not if, but when. What is required is an alternative or rather alternatives based on true moral principles which (as Sardar describes) are to be found within every culture (or tradition), and which could provide the foundations to lead the way forward. But contrary to the suggestion in most of Sardar's potent discourse, both `Westerners' and `Others' possess humanity, and unity of purpose is possible......ultimately. Sardar penetrates the superficial level of Western postmodern authors, film and attitudes, but perhaps may also have considered deeper Western `traditions' where the potential to redevelop our systems to `revitalise' justice and equity, raising them above the level of economic considerations (the mainstay of postmodernism), still exists.

Sadly (well, he does have a point!), Coleridge is singled out along with Wordsworth by Sardar as a poet of western romanticism, which he describes as `pathetic fallacy', yet in the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge describes the guilt, penance and final redemption of the old mariner, for the wonton killing of the Albatross, the lesson being:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Rather as the ancient mariner holds the Wedding-Guest spellbound, Sardar holds us with his own `glittering eye' (being the depth of his insight), forcing us to understand the cruel nature of Western supremacy; for as we read his work we become for a while as the Wedding-Guest, who having been stayed to hear, is finally released thus:

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.

This is made all the more poignant since many of us are the proponents (albeit unwittingly perhaps) of the `crimes' of Western domination of all `Others'. But, as Sardar says in the final lines of this book `The invincible, life-denying forces of postmodernism are about to encounter the immovable object of life-enhancing tradition.' Or, as Martin Luther King put it: `I have a dream that one day this nation [USA] will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal'. Capitalist postmodernism is in fact already dead and the alternatives are springing up everywhere, but what kind of futures will materialise is yet to be discovered.