What We Talk about When We Talk about the Eighties

What We Talk about When We Talk about the Eighties

What do we talk about when we talk about the 1980s? A standard history textbook in the West would probably define the decade as the Reagan and/or Thatcher Era in political and economic terms. In the Eastern Bloc, as it still existed then, the 1980s were likely experienced as an exhilarating period that commenced with the founding of Solidarity in Poland (August 1980) and culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989). If you were living in East Asia back then, you might recall the gloomy decade stretching from Gwangju (May 1980) to Tiananmen ( June 1989), and of course the gilded age of bubble economy in Japan. So much depends upon where and how we experienced each of these historical moments when we talk about the 80s. What about our experience with Theory and Criticism? One might talk about the theoretical sophistication he finds with Stuart Hall's “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” (1980) and Homi Bhabha's “DissemiNation” (1990), while another might have in mind the critical advance she comes across in the work of Adrienne Rich (“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 1980), Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990), and Eve Sedgwick (Epistemology of the Closet, 1990). Yet another, with a decidedly Continental orientation, might speak of the pathbreaking envisioning of the human collectives in Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux (1980) and Giorgio Agamben's La comunità che viene (1990). There should no doubt be thirteen different ways of looking at Theory in the 1980s, if there were thirteen theorists seated at a dining table.