Revaluating the Postmodern Challenge in South African Historical Studies: A Reception Study

Abstract

This article reads the postmodern challenge in South African historiography from the perspective of African historiography through the study of the reception of three major works produced by white South African historians in the 1990s. I argue that the theoretical unsettling raised by postmodernism in South African historiography served to further discredit alternative historiographies endogenous to South Africa, which speaks to the enduring legacies of intellectual imperialism in the South African settler-colonial context.