The Metamodern Bend: Theorizations for Religious Studies and a Review of Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism (original) (raw)

Very few full-length texts have been written on the burgeoning concept-theory of metamodernism. Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism by van den Akker, Gibbons and Vermeulen is, to date, the only scholarly, multi-authored, ed- ited volume on the topic. Their volume develops the conception of metamodernism introduced in a 2010 exploratory essay (by Vermeulen and van den Akker) titled “Notes on Metamodernism.” In the mid-2000s, at a time of general, cross-disciplinary agree- ment that “postmodern vernacular has increasingly proven inapt and inept in coming to terms with our changed social sit- uation” (van den Akker et al. 2017, 2), these scholars joined a spirited discussion adjacent to others floating new terms such as digimodernism (Alan Kirby 2006), altermodernism (Nicholas Bourriaud 2009), cosmodernism (Christian Moraru 2011) and performatism (Raoul Eshelman 2000) as to what ought to be the term and form/concept to follow postmodernism. In a sense, all of these alternatives echo Fredric Jameson’s call from 1988 ad- dressing the need for a new discourse to reflect the postmod- ern historical moment, this time by refreshing it for today’s post-postmodern moment: if history did not, in fact, “end” with Fukuyama’s famous pronouncement, then what did it do? If it has instead “bent”—a term Vermeulen and van den Akker bor- row from John Arquilla—what is the tone of this bend, and in what ways has it, as they write, “come to define contemporary cultural production and political discourse”? (2). Of these bids to theorize a post-postmodern, it is van den Akker and Vermeulen, later joined by Gibbons, whose writings most decisively introduce a paradigm for the humanities writ large, one that has been taken as a scaffold by scholars in nu- merous fields who have contributed to developing metamodern theory since. What follows is an evaluation of its usefulness as such, including a brief review of their volume to highlight its applicability for the humanities and especially for the study of religion. Shareable link: C. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/Q6TETNCMUIWNFVSH7XEF?target=10.1111/rsr.16195