The Trans-Modern Author: Five Contemporary Writers

Like the fabled hare and tortoise, post-modernism and post-colonialism are running the same race, and if we take modernism to be the starting point, it looks very much like the road to nowhere. The hare and the tortoise are running against themselves, seldom against each other, and every step they take away from their modernist starting point is paradoxically a step back towards it. Along this 'tautologous and self-justifying circuit', they race, encouraged by the 'binary oppositions' with which they are conceived.1