PA

"Postmodernism emerged as a cultural dominant in unprecedently rich capitalist societies with very high average levels of consumption. [Fredric] Jameson's first reconnaissance linked it directly to these, and he has since insisted further on its specifically American origins. Would it not therefore be reasonable to think that where levels of consumption were far lower, and the stage of industrial development much less advanced, a configuration closer to modernism - as it once flourished in the West - would be more likely to prevail? This was a hypothesis to which I, at any rate, was drawn. In these conditions, might one not expect to find a pronounced dualism of high and low forms, comparable to the European divide between avant-garde and mass culture, possibly with a still wider gulf between the two? The Indian cinema would appear to offer a case in point: the contrast between Satyajit Ray's films and the avalanche of song-and-dance genres from the Bombay studios looking as stark as any in the developed world. But this, of course, is an example from a highly protected market in the sixties. Today, global communications systems insure an incomparably greater degree of cultural penetration of the former Second and Third Worlds by the First. In these conditions, the influence of postmodern forms becomes inescapable - in the architecture of cities like Shanghai or Kuala Lampur, the art shows of Caracas or Beijing, novels and films from Moscow to Buenos Aires." (121)

{ Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso, 1998 }