Postmodernism Archives - Public Seminar

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The Invention of “Gritty” New York

Where did nostalgia for gritty New York come from and what makes it so potent?

August 2, 2018 • by Zed Adams

Nostalgia for “gritty” New York is so strong, it’s surprising that someone hasn’t started selling cans of “authentic NYC grit” in Times Square. Evidence of this nostalgia is everywhere, from Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York to David Simon’s The Deuce. But where did this nostalgia come from, and what makes ...

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Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

An excerpt from the new book

September 29, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Eight years after the end my Fulbright, at the beginning of April 1983, I return to Japan for ten weeks in an effort to connect to the world of the nineteenth century, return in an attempt to share experiences and feelings buried in the past -- theirs and my own. How ...

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Why Does a Historian Write a Memoir?

The adventures of a postmodern historian

September 27, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Aurell shows that professional historians have produced some 450 works of autobiography or memoir, the bulk of them in the last few decades. "It is possible," he suggests, "that no other academic discipline can boast of such a high number of autobiographies written by its professionals." Perhaps, then, my work ...

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A Pre-History of Post-truth

East and West

September 1, 2017 • by Marci Shore

The end of “The End of History” arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter ...

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Otaku Philosophy

On Hiroki Azuma

September 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Tokyo was a real metropolis centuries before any European city got much beyond the small town stage. By the 80s it had a heavy overlay of pervasive media culture, of a kind that would not happen anywhere else for decades. The contemporary media-urban landscape was born here. Not speaking the ...

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Can Anyone Even Remember Postmodernism?

October 31, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

If one teaches the ‘postmodern’ moment to today’s students, it is worth remembering that when pomo was a big deal, they had probably not even been born. If ‘retro’ was one of the characteristic style moves of pomo, then there is now even retro-pomo, a kind of meta-retro, or meta-pomo, ...