Rethinking Historical Epistemology

Abstract

IN AN INTERVIEW ON MAGICAL REALISM, Salman Rushdie acknowledges, quite astonished, his novels are regarded as works of magical realism in the West, whereas in India they are treated as historical texts.1 This dichotomy between history and literature is central to the analysis of the relationship between Diasporic Marvellous Realism and the representation of historical events in literature. It was during the 1950s and 1960s the assumption of historical as a master-narrative began to be questioned, together with any other product of human knowledge such as philosophy or literary criticism. This sceptical movement, mainly in the arts, challenged absolute truths, had inflections anticipated postmodernism and deeply influenced other disciplines. Generally speaking, postmodernism is characterized by decentering reality, which is considered to be a mental construct subject to individual interpretations and, thus, cannot be objective. This response to the assumption science can explain any fact will be the point of departure for this chapter and the perspective adopted when approaching the reinterpretation of historical master-narratives in contemporary literature. This assumption is intimately connected to Diasporic Marvellous Realism, which juxtaposes and contrasts different points of view while suggesting reality depends on the perspective adopted by characters and reader.Since the standpoint adopted here is devoted to challenging historical masternarratives, it is necessary to explore the very nature of discourse-formation. Stuart Hall, writing on the concepts of 'discourse' and 'power', follows Foucault's precepts when bringing together postmodernist thought and Caribbean cultural criticism. Hall takes the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in the late-fifteenth century as an example of the way historical is shaped. According to Foucault, are formed by statements organize knowledge through language, but this organized set of ideas is influenced by other elements such as culture, social relations, and politics. These are obviously used by hegemonic powers for their own benefit in order to manipulate and control a particular group; as Hall puts it, discourse is one of the systems through which power circulates.2 This was obvious during the early colonization of the Americas. The encounter between Europeans and pre-Columbian civilizations was not unbiased; the expeditions sent across the Atlantic were seeking new trading routes and, thus, hoping to expand the rule of European powers. Since early colonization was not ideologically neutral, were created around the newly colonized territories in order to subdue them and mould 'others' accordingly. With this aim in mind, Europeans imposed their own cultural codes, languages, and ideas to shape the Americas within existing frameworks and to define new civilizations by using a specific discourse. This eurocentric imaginary of the Americas is a good example of how discourses do not reflect a pre-given reality: they constitute and produce our sense of reality.3 Discourses are thus human constructs may be used to effect exclusion or submission in a hierarchy of power. By extension, historical are subjective and open to different interpretations; they may be naive, but they are not neutral or innocent.For scholars like Patricia Waugh,4 the relationship between facts and fiction is achieved through the use of a specific metalanguage, which assists readers in achieving a balance between the various narrative levels of a text. In this regard, Linda Hutcheon observes:the term Postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past.5After the postmodernist collapse of traditional historicism as a discipline with direct access to 'true facts', historical events have frequently been questioned in literature by bridging the gap between real and fictional in terms of metafiction, which suggests that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design. …