ABSTRACT
The effort to historicize postmodernism will likely raise eyebrows. Historicism and postmodernism might seem to be an odd couple. After the people introduce historicism, they will return to the question of how it might contribute to their understanding of postmodernism. In tracing histories of postmodernism from precursors such as Nietzsche, through French thinkers such as Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and on to contemporary Americans such as Drucilla Cornell and Rorty, the people find that certain themes emerge. In this chapter, the authors examine how local contexts-specific traditions and dilemmas-give different meanings and implications to the themes. Historicism emphasizes particularity and contingency in a way that draws our attention to the local contexts in which people have inherited and transformed themes associated with postmodernism. Some postmodernists certainly adopted a version of anti-historicism that treated each moment as its own instance, decontextualized and devoid of any shared meaning.
