ABSTRACT
The experience of the Second World War and the immediate postwar period in Europe transformed an order based on the possession of colonies by Western powers. The horrors of the experience of colonial rule and the Second World War threw into crisis any belief that the West – and Enlightenment thought upon which it was built – could claim superiority over the non-Western world. These events forced a fundamental re-examination of the historiographical approaches which had sprung from the Enlightenment to create two new fields of intellectual inquiry – postmodernism and postcolonialism. The Enlightenment hastened an underlying cluster of assumptions and expectations about the nature of the modern world. By abandoning familiar historical narratives, the field of postmodernism has thus opened up the possibility of multiple narratives of seemingly equal validity and worth. Postcolonialism as a body of work explored the crucial relationship between the Enlightenment project and the West.
