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Postcolonialism and the Problem of History Commenting on the points of contact between two dominant late twentieth-century “posts,” Linda Hutcheon observes that postmodernism and postcolonialism are alike in undertaking a “dialogue” with history: diverging from modernism’s ahistorical retreat from temporality, the postmodern “questions, rather than concrms, the process of History . . . [and] this is where it overlaps signiccantly with the post-colonial” (“Circling the Downspout,” 152). Euro-American theory of the past few decades has successfully re-visioned history as both narrative and text and problematized its status as a coherent, unmediated, and authoritative form of knowledge about the past. Interestingly, one of the most e,ective instruments of destabilization has been history’s resemblance to contiguous disciplines . Taking archaeology as his contemporary model, Michel Foucault argues for the end of such “vast unities” as periods and centuries (which make possible a “total history”) and decnes fragmentation, rupture, and discontinuity as the conditions of historical writing. His own work, which deals with such subjects as insanity, illness, sexuality, and punishment, radically reorients the celd of historical inquiry (Archaeology, 9). Hayden White, in contrast, approaches history as an archetypal narrative prose discourse ordered through various modes of emplotment, argument, and ideological implication, and suggests that the historian performs an “essentially poetic act” in precguring and explaining historical events (Metahistory , x). The element of interpretation in history subverts its claims to 218 chapter 7 # The Ironic History of the Nation objectivity and scienticc rigor; but, as Hutcheon clarices, this emphasis on textuality does not render history obsolete but reconceives it as a human construct (Poetics, 16). In postcolonial theory, the postmodern critique of textualized history has been reconcgured to account for the epistemological and cultural e,ects of European dominance over non-European societies in the postRenaissance period. Since the appearance of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and the launching of Subaltern Studies as a collective project in 1982, postcolonial studies not only has questioned the idea of history as an “autonomous and self-authenticating mode of thought” (White, Tropics, 29) but has stressed the complicity between historical discourse and colonialist strategies of cultural domination and self-legitimation because the production of “o´cial” histories in the colonial world is almost exclusively the prerogative of the colonizer. Said describes the Western historical enterprise in Egypt and the Middle East as largely a displacement of “history” by “vision,” a type of synchronic essentialism that denies the Orient both historicity and historical agency. Such essentialism, inAnouar Abdel-Malek’s words, “transcxes the being, ‘the object’ of study, within its inalienable and non-evolutive speciccity, instead of decning it as . . . a product, a resultant of the vection of the forces operating in the celd of historical evolution” (108; also qtd. in Said, 97). Said’s redecnition of Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” has also been instrumental in India in dismantling British colonial historiography, which ascribes a similar ahistoricity to Indian civilizations and makes similar claims to a privileged knowledge of the subcontinent. Subaltern historians have extended the anti-Orientalist argument by demonstrating a continuity between the colonialist elitism of British historians and the bourgeois-nationalist elitism of Indian historians, both of which enforce the prejudiced view that the development of national consciousness and the making of the Indian nation were “exclusively or predominantly elite achievements” (Guha, 1). The subaltern position thus relates neocolonialist discourse in Britain to neonationalist discourse in India and implicates post-independence Indian historians in further misrepresentations of their own history. The antiorientalist and subaltern critiques of colonial and neocolonial historiography, however, have elided two relations that are fundamental to Western conceptions of history and equally relevant to Indian practice —the interpenetration of “true” and “cctive” modes of representation in historical writing and the role of historical cctions (narrative, poetic, and theatrical) in the symbolic constitution of the nation. The possible The Ironic History of the Nation 219 overlap between poetry and history as representational forms is a subject as old as Western poetics itself: while poetry’s concern with universal truths makes it more philosophical and more worthy of attention than history,Aristotle allows that the poet may “writ[e] about things that have actually happened . . . for there is nothing to prevent some of the things that have happened from being in accordance with the laws of possibility and probability” (44). In this perspective the truth of historical poetry, like that of poetry in general, also presumably retains its...

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