America in the 20 th Century and Beyond, A Pluralistic Society
After the Civil War, major changes with race relations occurred in the South, but they
ended almost as quickly as they began. Many governmental posts during Reconstruction were
held by African Americans, but as soon as Reconstruction ended, a backlash against those
changes occurred.
The most significant attempts to reverse the advances made during Reconstruction were
the Jim Crow laws that segregated public space. To reinforce the pre-Civil War racial hierarchy,
elected officials began to pass local and state laws that specified certain places “For Whites
Only” and others for “Colored.” Blacks had separate schools, transportation, restaurants, and
parks, many of which were poorly funded and inferior to those of whites. Over the next 75 years,
Jim Crow signs went up to separate the races in every possible place.
The system of segregation also included the denial of voting rights, known as
disfranchisement. Between 1890 and 1910 all Southern states passed laws imposing
requirements for voting that were used to prevent blacks from voting, in spite of the 15th
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which had been designed to protect black
voting rights. As a final insult, the few blacks who made it over all these hurdles could not vote
in the Democratic primaries that chose the candidates because they were open only to whites in
most Southern states.
In the late 1800s blacks sued in court to stop separate seating in railroad cars, states'
disfranchisement of voters, and denial of access to schools and restaurants. One of the cases
against segregated rail travel was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Supreme Court of the
United States ruled that “separate but equal” accommodations were constitutional. In fact,
separate was almost never equal, but the Plessy doctrine provided constitutional protection for
segregation for the next 50 years.
When World War II began in Europe in 1939, blacks demanded better treatment than they
had experienced in World War I. Black newspaper editors insisted during 1939 and 1940 that
black support for this war effort would depend on fair treatment. They demanded that black
soldiers be trained in all military roles and that black civilians have equal opportunities to work in
war industries at home; desegregation of military in 1948. During the war, black newspapers
campaigned for a Double V, victories over both fascism in Europe and racism at home. The war
experience gave about one million blacks the opportunity to fight racism in Europe and Asia, a fact
that black veterans would remember during the struggle against racism at home after the war.
Perhaps just as important, almost ten times that many white Americans witnessed the patriotic
service of black Americans. Many of them would object to the continued denial of civil rights to the
men and women beside whom they had fought.
After World War II the momentum for racial change continued. Black soldiers returned
home with determination to have full civil rights. President Harry Truman ordered the final
desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. He also committed to a domestic civil rights policy
favoring voting rights and equal employment, but the U.S. Congress rejected his proposals.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on five cases that challenged elementary- and
secondary-school segregation, and in May 1954 issued its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of
Education that stated that racially segregated education was unconstitutional.
During this era of sweeping change, many organizations were set up to create an
organized resistance to racial injustice: Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of
Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These groups led many
formal and informal protests against segregation and publically sanctioned mistreatment of
African Americans including Montgomery Bus Boycott, Student Sit-In Movement, Freedom
Rides, March on Washington, and Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. These actions were
driven by Martin Luther King Junior’s non-violent direction action philosophy, which he
describes as follows: "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a
tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the
issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." King’s speech at the
March on Washington exemplifies the spirit of the Civil Rights movement of the early part of the
sixties. In it, he draws on all the promise that is America and seeks justice for the wrongs
inflicted:
The later phase of the Civil Rights movement, however, departed from the tone of the
first phase. At this point, there was much frustration felt toward perceived failures of the earlier
work done. The request for justice turned to a demand for power. People like Stokely
Carmichael and Malcolm X were no longer content to wait for the wheels of justice to turn,
seeking instead to resolve issues themselves, and often called for violence as a means to do so.
Out of this movement came many other movements seeking to give voice to those
previously voiceless: women, Native Americans, people with disabilities. More avenues were
open to those previously disenfranchised and throughout the remainder of the twentieth-century
and continuing today, America has had many more people taking part in public discourse.
Postmodernism and American Literature
Many changes occurred in American literature as a result of World War Ii. Having
witnessed the atrocities committed against innocent people and having found little help to cope
with those atrocities or answers to the questions raised by the modernist writers, American
authors after World War II began to turn modernism on its head, to no longer expect resolution or
seek salvation. They were simply content to just explore the questions of existence and to enjoy
the creativity of the process, all the while laughing at the meaninglessness surrounding them.
Add to this resignation to absurdity the technological capabilities of the television and
later the personal computer, and literary creativity took off. As well, boundaries between the elite
and the middle class were obliterated by mass entertainment and mass production, which further
altered cultural production. The cultural conditions of post World War II America opened a new
world of postmodernism for writers to explore. Postmodernism is a notoriously difficult term to
define, but we’ll look here at five definitions put forth:
Ihab Hassan’s “Toward a Concept of the Postmodern,” Michael Bérubé’s Public Access,
Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism and Consumer
Society, and Umberto Eco’s Postscript to The Name of the Rose
Hassan’s definition of postmodernism centers on his coined term, “indetermanence,”
which refers to “two central constitutive tendencies in postmodernism: one of indeterminacy, the
other of immanence.” Indeterminacy, he explains, is “a complex referent that these diverse
concepts help to delineate: ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism, randomness, revolt,
perversion, deformation,” while immanence is “a term that I employ without religious echo to
designate the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervene more and more into
nature, act upon itself through its own abstractions and so become increasingly, im-mediately, its
own environment.” Basically, Hassan’s definition attempts to account for what he sees as the
postmodern struggle of definitions.
Bérubé, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with cultural reproduction – how
images, information, forms are taken from their origination point. He argues that at the root of
this constant transformation of images, information, and forms is “postmodernism’s politics [that
are] a struggle for control—not over the means of production, but over the means of replication.”
He explains that two tendencies are at the heart of this struggle for control: 1. Influence of
feminism: he acknowledges that many feminist (or otherwise politically interested
theorists/critics) are at odds with underlying principles of postmodernism, “that pomo will
dissolve all possibility for political resistance into a bubbling vat of texuality and ironic self-
parody” (598) and 2. “facticity”: “It’s not that there are no ‘facts’ in pomo, or that anything goes
so long as everybody’s happy; rather, it’s that pomo has paid acute attention to how various
human communities go about deciding what will count as ‘facts’” (599).
Baudrillard’s essay explores the contemporary relationship between reality—that which
exists outside of language or signifiers; symbols—what human beings or specific communities
use to communicate their relationship to reality, and society. In this consideration, he is very
much concerned with contemporary conditions—the impact of technological innovation on
language and social relationships.
Baudrillard suggests, however, that the relationship between language and reality has
changed as a result of the changing cultural conditions; this pre-modern explanation of the
relationship between language and reality was first impacted by the Industrial Revolution’s
ability to mass-produce copies of signs and symbols—lead to a “second order simulacra” in
which the image (language, signs, and symbols) “masks and denatures a profound reality” and
ultimately threatens to displace the original version. He is most concerned with how this
overloading of the public sphere with signs, symbols, language obfuscates the true reality behind
the image – he calls this a “strategy of deterrence” – actually, ultimately Baudrillard is concerned
with how the generators and distributors of these signs, symbols, language use them to
manipulate the public (or the receivers of these messages) with this use of language (one passage
in which he is particularly impassioned in this decrying the displacement of reality through
images is his examination of uses of the image of the Divine – bottom of 633-top of 634: “Thus
this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs” (634).
Jameson states his purpose as follows: “I want here to sketch a few of the ways in which
the new postmodernism expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late
capitalism, but will have to limit the description to only two of its significant features, which I
will call pastiche and schizophrenia: they will give us a chance to sense the specificity of the
postmodernist experience of space and time respectively” (656). Jameson’s definition concerns
the differences between parody (a modernist concern) and pastiche (a postmodern technique).
This difference depends on tone, with pastiche being connected “to nostalgia saying that these
forms “satisf[y] a deep [. . .] longing to experience them again.” And this transformation of the
past into images of the past is Jameson’s primary concern—that in so doing contemporary
society has lost its historical awareness and now live in a state of, what he calls, “historical
amnesia.”
Eco, too, is concerned with the postmodern’s dealings with the past. His definition
emphasizes the ways in which the “postmodern” can deal with its awareness of the past (the
burden of the past perhaps?): “The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognising that
the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be
revisited; but with irony, not innocently" (622). This use of irony in dealing with the weight of
the past, Eco argues, is “not the negation of the already said, but its ironic rethinking” (623).
And, ultimately, for Eco, this irony allows for a renewed enjoyment of literature and the acts of
writing and reading.
In the readings of American literature after World War II, we will see manifestations of
all of these definitions, some more obviously and more pervasively than others, but all
nonetheless. As we will see, in the postmodern landscape, these questions of reality are often at
the heart of these writers’ concerns.
