ABSTRACT
About the time of postmodernism’s eclipse (or exhaustion) at the turn of the century, many of us who were deeply influenced by that great raft of critical theory, writ large, found ourselves at a turning point. The intervening years between then and now have not been a time of posttheory so much as a time trying to find a way forward lit by theory. Which is to say that the work that we have subsequently undertaken is being driven by what postmodernism and poststructuralism exposed as the pretense of an overweening center, a totalizing grand narrative of Western progress amid lapse and shortfall. Certainly, some sustain the critique of the West’s particular, but by no means exclusive, legacy of racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, colonialism, and capitalism, while others have turned to new educational forms in hip-hop pedagogy, culturally responsive curricula, the maker movement, and more. And still others have tried to pursue what Fredric Jameson imagined as a postmodern politics: ‘The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale’ (Jameson, 1991, p. 54). Insofar as I fall within this political group, the vocation in question for me is academic work, as a number of us seek to re-invent a means of fully projecting the global cognitive mapping of our colleagues, who are working in every corner of the world, onto the new public space of this digital era.
