Global postmodernism celebrates a commodified ethnic difference that high modernism could not acknowledge

Evidence

Quite in opposition to the blindness and hostility that European high culture evidenced on the whole toward ethnic difference—its inability even to speak ethnicity when it was so manifestly registering its effects—there is nothing that global postmodernism loves better than a certain kind of difference: a touch of ethnicity, a taste of the exotic, and, as we say in England, “a bit of the other” (which in the United Kingdom has a sexual as well as an ethnic connotation). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 273

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The ‘difference that doesn’t make a difference’ is a key mechanism for Islamophobia readings: how the West consumes/otherizes difference without political recognition — connects to Orientalism’s exoticism and the ‘diversity without difference’ critique.
• QUESTION: Hall attaches Wallace’s question about whether this proliferation of difference repeats modernism’s ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ game with primitivism — worth tracing how this licensing/disavowal gaze operates.

Related

• Global postmodern culture remains radically uneven, centered in Manhattan and London not Calcutta (similarity 0.82)
• Multiculturalism reduces difference to exotic spectacle while evading racism (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural difference has replaced race as the basis for new racisms (similarity 0.79)
• Multicultural politics must think beyond liberal-communitarian binaries to combine difference with equality (similarity 0.79)
• Multiculturalism is unfinished, contested, and predates modernity (similarity 0.78)