ABSTRACT
In White Mythologies, Robert Young argues that the injunction that one should always historicize does not sufficiently take into account the historicity of history itself. In his view the accusation that poststructuralism neglects history and prefers textuality to politics is largely based on the misguided belief that there is something called history out there which is not subject to the law of textuality. Rather than provide a poststructuralist theory of history, Young attends with admirable rigour to the troubled history of the term history itself and demonstrates that the idea of history as totality has always been difficult to sustain.
