When did the twenty-first century begin?

At a recent conference - the first I'd ever seen on twenty-first century literature - I found myself surprised by how many speakers referenced 9/11 as one of the markers for the beginning of the century.

Hmmm....

I was frankly a bit surprised by it and so much so that I feel the need to blog about it by wondering at the markers that signal literary periods. Aside from the gloominess of defining a century by its disasters, what really surprised me the most is that almost every person who mentioned 9/11 in the context of a marker of the twenty-first century was not American.

That surprised me because I guess I hadn't thought of the disaster as being indicative of the century. This is of course partly because I work in representations of science and technology (and by extension, science fiction), so I tend to think in timelines that involve technological change or scientific paradigm shifts and such. But falling so soon after the beginning of the century, the 9/11 event does seem an ideal marker.

But at the same time that it makes it easy to mark off centuries of literature according to the calendar, there are exceptions.

Of course there's the long eighteenth century... Although I'm not a specialist in this area, I realize that there are long discussions (often at the curricular level) about what constitutes eighteenth century literature.

And the nineteenth century often gets chopped into two separate sections because a "long" nineteenth century is really, really long, so that we have the Romantics and the Victorians (at least on the English side of the house).

Even the twentieth century has been divided fairly consistently between the early part of the century, sometimes defined as pre-WWII, but more often associated with the modernist style that developed shortly after the century began, and the post-WWII or "postmodern" period. (There are problems with the label postmodern, but I don't want to take that detour right now)

So then, where does this post-WWII period or postmodern period end (i.e. where does the twentieth century end) and where does the twenty-first one begin?

Standing so close to that line, wherever it might be drawn, makes it difficult to see it, and certainly most of the lines we've drawn through the literature of the past have been assigned to those periods long after they were over. The benefits of hindsight operate healthily in this respect.

But where does the twenty-first century begin?

Y2K?

1989?

9/11?

Now you might be wondering, 1989? What's up with that?

Well, there were several events in 1989/1990 that might make it valid to include the last decade of the twentieth century in the twenty-first, depending on how things unfold as we continue into this century, of course. 1989 was the year of Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both events that changed the political landscapes of the East and the West

On the literary front, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, although not the first case of attempted censorship through violence, was certainly widely reported and the upsurge of anti-Western sentiment that has built since then certainly attests to the critical effect of such beliefs in the world.

On the scientific front, the Human Genome Project was conceived in the late eighties, with an official start date of 1990. Although it seems somewhat anti-climactic now, at the time, the promises of genomics seemed endless and the project was hailed as a marvel that would allow us to cure all kinds of diseases. (Even though the promise of the project seemed to offer more than it delivered, it was that promise and the envisioned new future that seems to me to be a marked break with the more mundane visions of science in the post WWII period. But I can be wrong.)

So, when did the twenty-first century begin?

It's a question whose answer I'm hoping to watch unfold over my career. And that's exciting to me.