ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how postwar historians have approached unresolved issues about the uncertain status of historical knowledge. The new order, it was argued by theoretically driven historians, could not be interpreted by the conventional methods of history. 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. Postcolonialism as a body of work explores the crucial relationship between the Enlightenment project and the West. Postcolonialism exposes ways in which Europe's colonial past was underpinned by the uncritical acceptance of ideas of natural superiority and modernity that masked the brutality and exploitation of its rise to imperial pre-eminence. By abandoning familiar historical narratives, the field of postmodernism has thus opened up the possibility of multiple narratives of seeming equal validity and worth.
