History after the end: post-socialist difference in a (post)modern world

Author: HöRschelmann, Kathrin¹

Source: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 27, Number 1, March 2002 , pp. 52-66(15)

Publisher: Blackwell Publishing

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Abstract:

This paper makes an intervention in the debates on postmodernism as dominant social and cultural order of the present from the perspective of post-socialist transformation. Grounded in an analysis of theoretical discourses and of qualitative interviews, it highlights the hierarchical time/space constructions and universalizing tendencies inherent in many proclamations of the postmodern epoch and contests the uncritical acceptance of the `end of history' metanarrative. Post-socialist transformation is shown to be a complex process that fits uneasily into pre-given categories and disrupts an ordering logic that divides between a western, postmodern `us' and `the rest' of the world. My argument is formulated on the basis of research on the transformative processes in former east Germany.

Keywords: Germany; post-socialism; transformation; postmodernism

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1111/1475-5661.00041

Affiliations: 1: Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Plymouth khorschelmann@plymouth.ac.uk

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