Deconstructing Master-Narrative: the Postmodern View of History in Volkswagen Blues and Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals Monica Zhou College

History is written by the victorious, the dominating nation, the ruling class, and subaltern voices are overpowered and unheard. Jean-Francois Lyotard, in his The Postmodern Condition, critiques the historical master-narrative, the vision of history as a totalizing narrative schema that reflects a singular perspective: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives… The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.”[1] The all-encompassing, goal-oriented master-narrative is only a means to legitimize a subjective vision as truth. In its place, postmodernists argue, marginalized, localized, subaltern histories must be heard.[2] Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues reflects the postmodern condition in its unraveling of the traditional, colonial, white supremacist portrayal of American history, opening with, “We are no longer the heroes of history” (Poulin). In their experience of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural, Jack and La Grande Sauterelle find themselves in the role of both creator and victim of a grand master-narrative to reveal the inadequacy of a totalizing, determinate vision of history.

The vehement opposition to Rivera’s representation of...