Modernism

It is worth noting that, as was true of the term modernism, there was a south-to-north movement for circulating the word postmodernism (or postmodernismo). The latter first emerged in the Hispanophone literary world, in 1934, when it was coined by author Federico de Onis. He did so in Antología de la Poesía Española e Hispanoamericana (1882–1933), where he identified modernism as a worldwide movement in response to the "crisis of Western Civilization." De Onis contrasted a conservative artistic tendency within modernism, which he christened "postmodernism," in contradistinction to an "ultra-modernismo." The latter, linked to writers like Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina, was then reintensifying the most radical features of modernism, in a second wave of the original movement. Revealingly, it was only in the 1950s that the centrist Spanish term postmodernism would resurface in the English-speaking world—after which it then was redefined as a "radical development" and became a generalized cultural phenomenon in the arts "around the world" over the next three decades.

The art critic Hal Foster pointed out in a now-famous anthology entitled The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) that postmodernism emerged not just as a "new set of styles" that chronologically superceded those of modernism. Rather, some tendencies of postmodernism have often been another way of reengaging critically with the competing legacies of international modernism, thus being yet another subaltern or dissenting phase of modernism proper in the form of "resistant post-modernism." Hence, in the period since 1900, there has been a concerted move by advanced critical theorists both to redefine modernism along postcolonial lines and to resituate the historical trajectory of modernism worldwide in response to the "new world order" (without, in either case, denying the ongoing neocolonization now being sanctioned by Western imperialism). Two noteworthy reconsiderations of modernism from "outside the West" encapsulate this hotly contested historiography of modernism and postmodernism: La Modernidad después de la postmodernidad (1990; Modernity after postmodernity) by the Argentine author Nestor García Canclini and "Postmodernity as Modernity's Myth" (2001) by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.