ABSTRACT
The question ‘what comes after postmodernism?’, firstly begs the question that there is consensus about the meaning of ‘postmodernism’. Nicholas Burbules (2009, p. 525) argues that postmodernism is not an ‘ism’ at all, but a condition, a critical attitude and ‘an ambivalent and ambiguous internal relation to modernity, not outgrowing or surpassing it’. This postmodern condition is famously defined by Jean Francois Lyotard (1984, p. xxiv), simplified to the extreme, as an ‘… incredulity toward metanarratives’. Incredulity refers to the inability to put one’s faith in grand or ‘master’ narratives. Instead, a field of contending smaller narratives is proposed by postmodernists who accept the incommensurability of differences, challenge fixed and stable identities, focus on the power producing binaries that characterise human interactions and accept the limits of language and discourses in understanding the world.
