White Mythologies - Softcover

Robert J.C. Young

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415053722 ISBN 13: 9780415053723

Publisher: Routledge, 1990

Synopsis

We must, many now argue, `get back' to history. but which one? History has always been a problematical concept in Western theory, particularly for Marxism. In the wake of postmodernism, its status has become ever less certain. Is it possible to write history that avoids the trap of Eurocentrism? Robert Young's investigation of 'the history of History', from Hegel and Marx to Althusser and Foucault, calls into question the Eurocentrism of traditional Marxist accounts of a single 'World History', in which, as he shows, the `Third World' appears as an unassimilable excess, surplus to the narrative of the West. Young goes on to consider recent questionings of the limits of Western knowledge. He argues that the efforts of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha to formulate non-historicist ways of thinking and writing history are part of a larger project of a decolonisation of History and a deconstruction of 'the West'.

About this title

Synopsis

We are still living under the Empire of the Selfsame. The same masters domimate history from the beginning ...history, as a story of phallocentrism hasn't moved except to repeat itself.' Helene Cixous's indictment of history' as a story of phallocentrism' provides the starting point for Robert Young's exploration of the operations of history' in Western theory. History', Young argues, has always been a problematical concept. In the wake of Postmodernism, with its celebration of dislocation and disunity, the status of history has become ever less certain. White Mythologies traces various attempts to produce a coherent theory of history, from Hegel and Marx to Lukacs and Sartre, and to the more recent work of Althusser and Foucault who tried without success to produce a non-historicist history. Young suggests that all efforts to subsume history into a single narrative are doomed to failure: there remains always an unassimilable surplus. In Marxist accounts, in which history' is the struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the Third World appears as this excess, surplus to the narrative of the West.

Young goes on to consider strategies for a hon-historicist history which avoids the trap of Eurocentricism. While Edward Said's influential critique of Orientalism ends by repeating the very structures it attacks, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have successfully exploited the ambivalence of history to deconstruct its totalising authority. At the same time, they suggest a way forward by means of a shift in the locational specifity of historical argument.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415053722
• ISBN 13: 9780415053723
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240