ABSTRACT
Postmodernism has become one of the most significant areas of theoretical analysis since the early 1980s. Summarizing this genre is no easy matter and can be compared to trying to grab hold of jelly with a clamp-it changes shape and consistency and then fragments. No attempt will be made here to summarize this stream of thought and any reader who wishes to dip into these waters would do well to examine such exemplars as Bauman (1992), Harvey (1989), and Rosenau (1992). Instead, the approach taken here will be the distinctly unpostmodernist approach of treating postmodernism as indicative of certain core themes, some of which will be examined in relation to the Disney theme parks. The status of the parks as emblems of postmodernism is not easy to define, since they variously occupy positions of cause, symptom and consequence in relation to it. That they are implicated in postmodernism is apparent through such disparate pieces of evidence as the praise heaped on them by Robert Venturi, the high priest of postmodern architecture, or the dubbing of the parks as evidence of a creeping ‘hyperreality’, a term strongly associated with postmodern terminology in the works of writers like Baudrillard (1983) and Eco (1986), though in the case of the former care is required in the light of his rejection of the description of himself as a postmodernist (Baudrillard, 1993a:21-3). Thus, Mills refers to the Disney theme park as ‘this most postmodern of experiences’ (1990:76) and Nelson takes the view that the parks exhibit ‘the decidedly postmodernist sensibilities of eclectic style/collage, images of text, and excessive nostalgia’ (1990:61). Fjellman (1992) also associates Disney World with the postmodern world-view, while many of the writers most closely associated with postmodernist ideas often use the Disney theme parks as illustrations of their theoretical ideas (for example, Jameson: see Stephanson, 1987:33).
