A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Modern and the Postmodern

This is an enquiry into the terms of the theoretical discourse surrounding the definition of modernity, and its counterpart - both apposite and opposite-post-modernity. I should like to pose the question whether the mere consideration of modernity is not, indeed, a Western modes, based on Western developmental chronology, embodying Western modes of analysis. I want to examine the paradigmatic elements in the (Western) theory of modernity and postmodernity and to challenge the independence of these phenomena in the Third World. For the most part, I will focus on the reception of postmodernism in China. It would be, of course, altogether too ironic if these terms turned out to be "hegemonic" in the same way that postmodernists have accused traditional and colonial movements of being.