ABSTRACT
Although published in 1994, Keith Windschuttle is shadow boxing intellectual phantoms of an earlier decade. Many of his criticisms about Cultural Studies and history are found in the writings of the mid-1980s. Epistemological discussions that detail the nature of history have existed since the discipline had a name. The impact of women's history and social history has certainly changed the way historical methods are constituted. History is inserted within a discursive space that is structured by the binary opposition of fact and fiction. This temporal confusion subverts any claims for an historical origin or endpoint. Instead, possibilities arise that produce contingent, intertextual histories. Lipstick traces from the past provide a tantalizing taste of another way of living and another way of thinking. The nexus through which academics engage with/in history and Cultural Studies has been tortured and conflictual. Cultural Studies, being built on and through interdisciplinarity, has been more open to alternative methodologies than the historical discipline.
