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Conclusion MURRAY G. PHILLIPS Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide . . . If we have survived the “death of God” and the “death of man,” we will surely survive the “death of history”—and of truth, reason, morality, society, reality, and all other verities we used to take for granted and that have been now problematised and deconstructed. We will even survive the death of postmodernism. —Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Postmodernist History” Some readers of this book will share Himmelfarb’s skepticism and disdain for all things postmodern. At the heart of her concerns are the challenges made by postmodernism to the fundamental way we produce knowledge, and, as pointed out in the introduction, there are certainly well articulated concerns about postmodernism and postmodern history. Himmelfarb’s position is an extreme reading of the postmodern view of history that portrays it in a revolutionary way leading to the demolition of history. Ironically there are some historians from the other end of the epistemological spectrum, the antifoundationalist end, like Keith Jenkins, who agree with Himmelfarb. After exploring postmodern history in three books and advocating these approaches as the best way to represent the past, Jenkins in Why History? contended that history may have little to offer contemporary culture.1 He concluded more recently: “in a really tangible sense postmodernism thus seemed to me to signal the end of at least these sorts of conceptualizations of history and, maybe, even the end of thinking historically at all.”2 There are, of course, less demonic readings of postmodern history as articulated by Himmelfarb , and less cataclysmic readings as expressed by Jenkins, that promote 245 critical reflection and analysis as well as significant change, but not total destruction of the discipline. I hold the latter view. As a supporter of engagement with postmodern approaches to history there are, nevertheless, at least two concerns worth briefly addressing. One common issue is that postmodern historians are very good on critique, of making traditional history look lame and inept, and poor on producing a body of historical works that portray its goals. A valid point, until the 1990s. An early example of postmodern history is Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine (1988).3 Rosenstone experiments with narration in the first person through the author’s subjects, in the second person addressing the reader and even the historical characters. His narrative also includes “a biographer” who comments on the challenges of creating the book.4 Authorial self reflexivity is a dominant feature of his book. Another landmark book utilizing postmodern historical practices is Richard Price’s history of eighteenthcentury Surinam.5 Alabi’s World is a compelling story of slavery constructed from the perspectives of Dutch colonial authorities, Morovian missionaries, slaves, and the historian. The contributions of these voices are represented in the text in different typefaces and are intended to “decenter the narrative, to fragment the power of the author’s inevitable authority, and to draw the reader more directly into the process of interpretation.”6 It is history through multiple, complex, and competing voices. Published shortly after Alabi’s World is Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language.7 Dening’s award winning book about the South Seas gives equal voice to Tahitians and Europeans while showing how stories about the Bounty have been represented differently over time. Among many things, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language illustrates how histories are imbued with the presuppositions, attitudes, and values of the people who create them. These examples, along with a few others, hardly form an expansive corpus of work.8 The launch of Rethinking History in 1997, however, provided a critical and receptive professional space for historians wanting to experiment more radically than was acceptable in established historical journals. As the editors explain: “Rethinking History challenges the accepted ways of doing history and rethinks the traditional paradigms, providing a unique forum in which practitioners and theorists can debate and expand the boundaries of the discipline.”9 A selection of articles from this journal has been subsequently published in a collection entitled Experiments in Rethinking History.10 Not only does this collection provide a wide range of creative, confronting and, in Jenkins’ parlance, “disobedient” histories to illustrate postmodern historical practices but each author has added an informative, personal, and theoretical reflection some years after the original articles.11 While it is true that postmodern historical literature is not abundant, there 246 Murray G. Phillips [3...

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