Metamorphosis (English): a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one. 

 

Modernism’s radical potential eventually solidified into the very institutional orthodoxy it once fought. By the mid-20th century, particularly through the formalist lens of critics like Clement Greenberg, the avant-garde became the new academy, privileging abstract purity and autonomy while aggressively policing the boundaries of "high art”. Postmodernism emerged as a decisive and ironic rejection of this self-correction, condemning Modernism for its historical amnesia, its perceived aesthetic fascism, and its failure to acknowledge its own market-driven and institutional biases—the rigidities the nineteenth-century innovators had set out to destroy.

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This postmodern critique extended beyond art history to target the foundational "grand narratives" that structured Western society. Employing strategies of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, Postmodernism systematically interrogated the perceived objectivity of reason, history, and scientific progress. Key social and political institutions—including social hierarchies, monolithic political ideologies, and the stability of cultural norms—were systematically displaced and deconstructed. These structures were revealed not as timeless truths, but as historically contingent, power-laden constructions that served to maintain existing hierarchies.

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Consequently, the notion of the individual identity, once conceptualised as a stable, unified self guaranteed by these grand narratives, dissolved into a fluid and performative construct. Postmodern thought viewed identity not as a fixed essence, but as a site of multiple, shifting subjectivities—a continuous mediation shaped by language, media, and social context. This focus on fragmentation and plurality directly informs my own engagement with hybridity, framing the postcolonial subject not just as a product of two separate traditions, but as a perpetually evolving, and inherently revolutionary, nexus of cultural codes.