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Age of Fracture. By Daniel T. Rodgers. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 360pp, Pounds 22.95. ISBN 9780674057449. Published 27 January 2011
In the early 1990s, the hottest (or coolest) of the new African-American intellectuals, Cornel West, was asked to compare his reading of race with that of the architect of Afrocentrism, Molefi Kete Asante.
They were agreed on their critique of white supremacy and their emphasis on the importance of self-respect among people of African descent, West replied, but then they parted company. "For him, notions of a solid and centred identity are positive," he continued. "I revel in fluidity, in improvisation, in the highly complicated and paradoxical ... I begin with radical cultural hybridity, an improvisational New World sensibility ... I'm not for solid anything."
For Daniel Rodgers, this jive surfs the zeitgeist. "Choice, provisionality, and impermanence; a sense of the diffuse and penetrating yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history - these were the emergent intellectual themes of the age." Rodgers calls it the "age of fracture". The epithet is designed to capture the multiple transformations he identifies in ways of thinking, imagining and metaphoring in the US in the final quarter of the 20th century. This means an anatomy of the "culture wars"...