1486 Gyan Prakash
ing Europe; there are no calls for reversing the Europe / India hierarchy and no attempts to represent India through an " Indian," not Western, perspective. Instead, the recognition that the " third-world historian is condemned to knowing ' Europe ' as the original home of the ' modern,' whereas the ' European ' historian does not share a comparable predicament with regard to the pasts of the majority of humankind," serves as the condition for a deconstructive rethinking of history. 32 Such a strategy seeks to find in the functioning of history as a discipline( in Foucault ' s sense) the source for another history.
This move is a familiar one for postcolonial criticism and should not be confused with approaches that insist simply on the social construction of knowledge and identities. It delves into the history of colonialism not only to document its record of domination but also to identify its failures, silences, and impasses; not only to chronicle the career of dominant discourses but to track those( subaltern) positions that could not be properly recognized and named, only " normalized." The aim of such a strategy is not to unmask dominant discourses but to explore their fault lines in order to provide different accounts, to describe histories revealed in the cracks of the colonial archaeology of knowledge. 33
This perspective draws on critiques of binary oppositions that, as Frederick Cooper notes in his essay in this Forum, historians of former empires look upon with suspicion. It is true, as Cooper points out, that binary oppositions conceal intertwined histories and engagements across dichotomies, but the critique must go further. Oppositions such as East / West and colonizer / colonized are suspect not only because these distort the history of engagements but also because they edit, suppress, and marginalize everything that upsets founding values. It is in this respect that Jacques Derrida ' s strategy to undo the implacable oppositions of Western dominance is of some relevance.
Metaphysics-the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form that he must still wish to call Reason... White mythology-metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest. 34
If the production of white mythology has nevertheless left " an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest," Derrida suggests that the structure of signification, of " differance," can be rearticulated differently than that which produced the West as Reason. Further, the source of the rearticulation of structures that produce foundational myths( History as the march of Man, of Reason, Progress) lies inside, not outside, their ambivalent functioning. From this point of view, critical work seeks its basis not without but within the fissures of dominant
32 Chakrabarty, " Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History," 19.
33 See, in this connection, Homi K. Bhabha, " Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 85-92.
34Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass, trans.( Chicago, 1982), 213.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994