IN Maba’d Jadidiat: Falsifa-wa-Tarikh kay Tanazur Mein Dr Iqbal Afaqi deliberates on the origin and evolution of postmodernism and its effect on life and disciplines in the contemporary world as seen against the background of historical and philosophical developments.

Postmodernism has been talked about elaborately, bringing its proponents and opponents in literary conformation or contradiction. Generally, postmodernism has been defined as “a philosophical movement, largely a reaction against the philosophical assumptions, values, and intellectual worldview of Western (especially European) history i.e., the period from about the beginning of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries to the mid-20th century.”

Science helps evolve technology to assist the human race in solving its problems, enhance production and offer time for rest and recreation. After the industrial revolution it was generally believed that the human race would ultimately attain the objective set by scientific growth. Two centuries later, the rise in quality of life was termed as magnificent but at the same time posed many problems. It is generally believed that while technology resolves some problems, it creates others for which another technology has to be developed. This was quite apparent in the case of life-saving methods and medicines. Since the mid-20th century sociologists and philosophers have been questioning development and its effects.

Postmodernists refuse to accept the Enlightenment faith in science and technology as instruments of human progress. No doubt, newer knowledge resolved many problems of the human race and improved the quality of life, yet it is also the knowledge and application of these instruments which brought death and misery to millions in the two world wars during the 20th century and the disputes following them.

Going back, the debate surfaced in the 1870s when John Watkins Chapman first used the term. Since then a number of sociologists, thinkers and philosophers have expressed their viewpoints, especially in the 20th century.

Afaqi, a critic and thinker, has contributed towards the research and added to the existing scant writings on the subject in Urdu. Maba’d Jadidiat has been divided in three chapters: pre-modernism, dealing with the years prior to modernism; beginning of modernism, its status during its evolutionary period; and lastly, the effects of postmodernism on various disciplines and areas of human life. An additional chapter containing the author’s observations is also included.

Afaqi, seeking intellectual support from Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Sartre, draws an outline of the effects of modernism and clearly conveys his views on the subject about it in the chapter ‘Jadidiat’. He deliberates over Enlightenment, when the thinkers replaced religious dogmas with freedom and told people that for attaining prosperity they needed organised economic systems and scientific disciplines, not the support of supernatural forces. They tended to replace religion with science and reason and enhanced the personal integrity of the individual. People were told that man was master of his own destiny.

Moving bit by bit, Afaqi next takes up modernism and interprets the way the human being was freed from epistemic darkness. He discusses various philosophical movements and in drawing his analysis of postmodernism, he brings forth a detailed discussion over the term and its meaning, of various theories, and philosophic approaches.

An appreciable part of the book has been dedicated to the central idea of the work and explains postmodernism through social and philosophical connotations. The author brings forth the ideologies of eminent postmodernists such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty and Jean Baudrillard with ample interpretations of their philosophies.

Maba’d Jadidiat: Falisifa-wa-Tarikh Kay Tanazur Mien

(Literary Criticism)

By Dr Iqbal Afaqi

Missal Publishers, Faisalabad

ISBN 9789695811542

292pp.