Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

5 CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND INTERSECTIONALITY

6 FEMINISMS AND GENDER STUDIES

3 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Deconstructing the West to Save the Other

2 POSTMODERNISM’S APPLIED TURN

The postmodern knowledge principle: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.

We also see the postmodern idea that knowledge is not found but made in the introduction to Orientalism, in which Said writes, My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that “our” East, “our

Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, puts it more strongly: “We are in the midst of a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with a change not so much in what we believe but how we believe…. People all over the world are making such shifts in belief—to be more precise, shifts in belief about

In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted.

Equal access to rubble is not a worthy goal.

Jacques Derrida, who, in 1967, published three texts—Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena—in which he introduced a concept that would become very influential in postmodernism: deconstruction. In these works, Derrida rejects the commonsense idea that words refer straightforwardly to things in the real world.34 Instead, h