While the disappearance of postmodernism from academic discourses may be cause for relief, if not celebration, in many circles, it has left a theoretical vacuum for the analysis of many contemporary literary texts and broader shifts in literary history. In its numerous incarnations, postmodernism was identified as an historical period, a transhistorical phenomenon, an epistemic condition, a phase of late capitalism, an extension or culmination of modernism. The values associated with postmodernism were likewise various, from elitist Western intellectualism to crass popular culture. Despite the inability of academics ever to arrive at a common, coherent definition, the immense popularity of the term in academic and mainstream discourses suggests that it nonetheless conveyed a compelling, if not always consistent, set of concerns and questions. André Brink and, to a lesser extent, J. M. Coetzee both understood their work in terms of an international postmodernism; indeed, the supposedly international character of postmodernism, more than any specific tenet associated with it, was crucial to Brink's hope that literature might effect political transformation in South Africa. Thus, if the movement among Anglo-American academics in the 1980s–90s to apply the term postmodernism to everything from Beowulf to Beloved was a mistake that stalled more complex investigations, the current marginalization of the term and authors associated with it also risks foreclosing significant and unfinished explorations into questions of epistemology, identity, and ethics.