This chapter explores how the postcolonial predicament bequeathed by the British Empire challenges us to rethink conceptions of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘Britishness’. The specifically Anglo-American sense of the close connection between postmodernism and postcolonial studies is established via the identification of ‘grand narrative’ with the ‘civilising mission’, but this equation is problematised through a reading of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and a review of the changing history of British imperial ideology. A different approach to the interplay of fictive and historical narrative is identified in Ngugi we Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), a novel that locates characteristic postmodern concerns within the late colonial violence of the Kenyan Emergency. The novel is shown to anticipate a contemporary cultural moment in which postmodernism’s choreography of certainty and uncertainty proves increasingly ill-suited.

The postmodern moment was both important and turbulent in both anthropology and gender studies. This chapter focuses on how postmodern thought, which is described as being ant-foundational, engaged with thinking about gender and sexuality in gender studies and in anthropology, both in conjunction with each other as disciplines and in conjunction with feminist (and gay and lesbian) movements, which were influential during the same period. As an intellectual trend, the postmodern moment never attracted sufficient advocates to become a majority approach, and its time in the limelight was quickly over; nevertheless, the authors argue that the moment had lasting effects, particularly in terms of thinking about gender and sexuality. More specifically, they suggest that the introduction of postmodern thought affected the politicization of thought about gender and sexuality in the academy. In gender studies, it coincided with the founding of the discipline; in anthropology, it initially most notably came through the route of feminist-inspired kinship studies, and later through the influence of queer on studies of sexuality and embodiment.