Oscillation Between The Modern and the Postmodern: A Metamodernist Analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s “The Last White Man”

Abstract

This paper explores Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (2022) by applying the lens of metamodernism, analyzing how the novel oscillates between postmodernism and modernism. In The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid builds a layer of the narrative that oscillates in a post-modern anti-identity deconstruction, as well as modernist existential motives. Such oscillation creates a metamodern foundation on the text neither fully giving in to the relativism and irony of postmodernism nor fully ascribing to the utopian values of modernism. Rather, the novel dwells in an in-between world which signals the presence of the two paradigms in the narrative consciousness. Based upon Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s (2010) theory of metamodernism and Allan McKee’s (2003) model of textual analysis, this research examines how the novel oscillates between modernism and postmodernism. This study demonstrates that The Last White Man reveals that strategies of metamodernism such as oscillation, ambivalence, relationality, and sincerity tempered by irony offer prolific ways of re-engaging with reality and meaning beyond the gridlocks of modernist certainty and postmodernist nihilism. The research also demonstrates how The Last White Man repossesses storytelling as a tool of both epistemological integrity and emotional truth, thereby proclaiming a metamodernist philosophy of sincerity after irony. This paper also aims to develop and chart understandings about societal transformation and changes. Furthermore, the research is very significant because it provides a breakaway from postmodernism. It is a great change that shows how society is moving forward and can be further developed and understood. It is a great progress in the field of social understanding and philosophy.