Postmodern Challenge on History

Postmodernism offers a fundamental critique of the conventional mode of history-writing. Sometimes the critique becomes so radical that it almost becomes anti-history. The main ingredient of history-writing, such as facts, sources, documents, archival records, etc., all come under severe scrutiny under the microscope of postmodernist vision.

Postmodernism rejects the ‘objectivist’ tradition of history writing starting with Ranke who strove to recover the past ‘as it actually was’. It has attacked history both in its grander versions as well as in its relatively modest versions. It challenges the proclaimed objectivity and neutrality of historians and claims that the process of interpretation transforms the past in radically different ways.

Postmodernism questions the very basis of conventional historiography by locating its origins in modern Europe’s encounter with the other. It began with the European Renaissance which prompted the Europeans to ‘discover’ other lands and people. In this quest, the ‘history’ served as a tool for posing the modern western self in opposition to the other whose history was supposed to be just beginning as a result of its encounter with Europe. Thus the practice of history was employed not just to study the past but to fashion it in terms of the criteria set by modern Europe. History, therefore, evolved into a western quest for power over the colonized territories and its desire to appropriate their pasts.

Postmodernism rejects the grand narrative of history which visualises that the human society is moving in a certain direction, toward an ultimate goal. According to postmodernism, there is no historical truth but what the historians make it out to be, no facts except what the historians interpret, and no representable past except what the historians construct. In the postmodernist view, history can be accepted as genuine knowledge only if it sheds its claims to truth and hence to power and accepts its fragmentary character. The only history possible is micro history.

The postmodern theorists question the very basis on which the discipline of history has been based. They do not believe in the disciplinary boundaries in academics, such as those between history and literature, or between economics and anthropology, and so on. They also question the existence of facts and events apart from what the historians make them out to be. In their view, linguistic representation becomes the essence of the past and the core of history.

End of the autonomous subject, of history and of absolute truth: This is a well-known “slogan” associated with postmodernism. The meaning is this: By “end of history,” postmoderns mean three things: They question the assumption that human beings are progressing to an even better state of being or society. A later stage of history can be worse than the previous one. Secondly, they look at historiography (the writing of history) critically. What we have is not raw history, but historiography done by particular nations or persons or cultures. We do not have anyone objective of knowing or writing history. Thus, the history of the British Period in India would look different when written by an English historian— especially one who believed in the superiority of British culture or in the right of conquest—or by an Indian who saw colonization as immoral. Thirdly, postmoderns do not believe that history has a direction or unity. They think rather that the events that make up history are of too many different kinds to fit into anyone's coherent whole.

Postmodernists treated all documents and facts are nothing but texts and ideologically constructed. There are even more extreme views within postmodernism with regard to historiography. Keith Jenkins, therefore, declares that ‘we are now at a postmodern moment when we can forget history completely.’ This extreme position questions the very existence of any kind of professional history writing.

Critique of Postmodernism

The postmodernist critique of modernity ranges from total rejection to partial acceptance.

• The critiques have pointed out that in some extreme forms of postmodern relativism, the implication may be that ‘anything goes’.
• Moreover, the postmodern analysis of society and culture is lop-sided because it emphasises the tendencies towards fragmentation while completely ignoring the equally important movements towards synthesisation and the broader organisation.
• It also tends to ignore the roles of state and capital as much more potent tools of domination and repression.
• Some critics also charge postmodernism with being historicist as it accepts the inevitability of the present and its supposedly postmodernist character. If the world is now postmodern, it is our fate to be living in it. But such postmodernity that the western world has created now is no more positive than the earlier social formation it is supposed to have superseded.
• Moreover, it is not very sure whether modernity has actually come to an end. In fact, large parts of the world in the erstwhile colonial and semi-colonial societies and East European countries are now busy modernizing themselves. The concept of postmodernity, therefore, remains mostly at an academic and intellectual level.
• Critics also argue that many postmodernists, deriving from poststructuralism, deny the possibility of knowing facts and reality. As a result, no event can be given any weightage over another. All happenings in the past are of the same value.