A History that does not yet exist. Historiography and the Postcolonial Question at the Crossroads of Postmodernity

Abstract

This historiographical essay explores the relationship between postmodern criticism and postcolonial studies within the context of the challenges of historiography today. Starting with a reconstruction of the role of the historical discipline and historiography in the modern colonial expansion, we situate the postmodern crisis as one that centrally crosses historiographical discourses and has produced a series of bifurcations and isolations concerning postcolonial debates in the rest of the social sciences and humanities. We analyze the bifurcation produced between the field of postmodern criticism and postcolonial studies, on the one hand, and the estrangement between historiographical production and postcolonial criticism, on the other. The present article aims to offer new hypotheses that will explain the divergence between historiographical production and postcolonial studies.