INTRODUCTION

• Postmodernism is a sharp reaction against the predominance of modernism.

• Modernism emerged during the industrial era, replacing traditional methods of explanation and expression with reason and science.

• Modernism’s fundamental attributes include formulating grand narratives and theories.

• Postmodernism emerged as a radical alternative to modernity, arguing that modernism is too centralized and monolithic, suppressing minor identities and voices.

• It rejects the notion of a single meaning of truth and challenges established assumptions regarding society, culture, and the nature of knowledge.

• Postmodernism corroded the foundations of epistemology and the practices of social sciences.

• It advocates for a multiplicity of narratives and rejects the possibility of meta-narratives.

• While postmodernism is a major trend in the theory of knowledge, there is little consensus on its origin.

• The term “postmodernism” was first used in 1914 in an article by J. M. Thompson in The Hibbert Journal, describing a transformation in beliefs within Christian society.

• The concept gained currency in Post-Modern architecture and literary criticism, focusing on dissatisfaction with modern architecture and deconstructing literary texts to reveal the hidden power-knowledge relationship.

• Since the 19th century, postmodernism has been embraced across various disciplines such as architecture, literature, art, philosophy, ethics, political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, and penology, each with different emphases.

• Postmodernism is considered a bucket of ambiguity, distrusting everything and lacking clear directions.

• Its fundamental nature makes it difficult to provide a single, all-encompassing definition as it seeks to understand what escapes simple definitions and celebrates what resists or disrupts them.

• There is disagreement among postmodernists on whether postmodernity is continuous with modernity or represents a radical break with it.

• Some postmodernists believe they engage in a long-running relationship with modernity, continually pointing out its limitations.

• Thinkers like Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault reacted against the project of enlightenment, but their works share some uniformity, leading to categorization by critical thinkers like Terry Eagleton.

• Postmodernism is a style of thought suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity, objectivity, and ideas of universal progress or emancipation.

• It opposes single frameworks, grand narratives, and ultimate grounds of explanation.

• Postmodernism views the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, and indeterminate.

• It sees a set of disunited cultures or interpretations, breeding skepticism about the objectivity of truth, history, norms, and the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities.

• To understand postmodernism, it is necessary to study the original writings of key postmodern thinkers like Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Laclou, and Mouffe.