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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