ABSTRACT
But how to write a new history? When, as Césaire observed, the only history is white?1 The critique of the structures of colonialism might seem a marginal activity in relation to the mainstream political issues of literary and cultural theory, catering only for minorities or for those with a specialist interest in colonial history. But although it is concerned with the geographical peripheries of metropolitan European culture, its longterm strategy is to effect a radical restructuring of European thought and, particularly, historiography.
