What Era Are We Living In?

We are far from Modernism now. Post or otherwise.

The practice of labelling the trends of society and culture is a relatively new one. Though we refer to periods like the Classical era, the Early Modern, the Enlightenment or the Renaissance these are often posthumous labels that allow historians and critics to compartmentalise the all encompassing whirlwind of change particular spaces of time provided, and are largely in reference to Europe and their colonies. Though, where once these ‘eras’ lasted centuries, millennia even, there has been a more accelerationist view of these periods in the last hundred or so years. Modernism and Post-Modernism were relatively swift with Modernism mainly thought to encompass the late 19th to early 20th century, while Postmodernism is seen to have lasted from the second world war until today. Modernism was a dominant philosophical and artistic movement in the majority-white Nations that desired the creation of new, distinctly non-Romantic, art that better reflected the changing state of the world with the Industrial Revolution taking over, growing urbanisation and new technology. This attempt to “make it new”, as leading figure of the movement and sometime fascist Ezra Pound put it, was repudiated by Postmodernism that argued that there was nothing new to be made, nothing is certain and everything has been done, society is simply an…