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Postmodern Melancholia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Patricia Ewick
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Extract

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In his presidential address to the Law and Society Association, Joel Handler describes recent changes in the character of social protest and the scholarship that seeks to understand these resistant practices. In his description, Handler depicts a world in which all that was once collective and effectual is now fragmented and futile. Not that long ago, he suggests, we had real (ideological/class-based) social movements and vital communities that were documented by scholars in optimistic stories of resistance and protest. But time passed and we became postmodernized: destabilized and uncertain, ironic and listless. Where once we challenged oppression and power en masse to the flourish of trumpets, now we are just so many flatulent individuals.

Type
Comments on Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , 1992 , pp. 755 - 763
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I would like to thank Joel Handler, Susan Silbey, and Marc Steinberg for their comments on this essay.

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