JCRT 15.2 Spring 2016 71 JOSEPH VALENTE SUNY University at Buffalo IS THE AU IN AUTISM THE AU IN AUTONOMY? ome readers, particularly those of a certain vintage, may detect in my title the echo of a well-known article by Kwame Appiah that appeared in the 1991 volume of Critical Inquiry: “Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonialism.” 1 In that piece, Appiah partly discovers and partly constructs a braided aesthetic genealogy whose implicit answer to the question prompting it can only be yes…and no. Both the post in postmodernism and the post in postcolonialism signal what Appiah deems space clearing gestures, strategies of self-assertion and self-distinction, in the guise of temporal or historical demarcations. 2 And the respective caesuras that both of these concepts institute would seem to be aligned and allied in their rejection of the claim that western rationality makes to “an exclusivity of insight” under the seal of modernism/modernity, the presumptive telos of optimal cultural “development.” 3 Owing, however, to the structural dependence of a specifically postcolonial aesthetic movement upon a global marketplace structured according to that same rationality, its largely comprador exponents find their signature difference (from colonialism, indigeneity etc.) via a circuitous rapproachement with modernism, albeit along its left flank. In somewhat displaced terms, I am tracing a like, if obverse, logic with respect to the supreme value attached to the normative development of autonomous subjectivity, on one side, and on the other, a heterogeneous condition, autism, long understood (for roughly the first sixty years of its diagnostic currency), to be the unsocializable Other of subjectivity as such. Autism sprang into intelligible being—first as an orphan pathology, then as a virtual epidemic, now as a minority population—from the same discursive and cultural matrix that had, in the preceding decades, spelled the slow obsolescence of the robust model of liberal subjectivity: i.e. strongly bounded, autonomous, self-interested and self-determining, decidedly masculine, not to say masculinist. 1 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post in Postmodernism, the Post in Postcolonialism.” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (Winter 1991), 336-357. 2 Ibid., 342. 3 Ibid. S