Publisher's Synopsis
Robert Young's investigation of the "history of history", from Hegel and Marx to Althusser and Foucault, calls into question the Eurocentrism of traditional Marxist accounts of a single world history, in which, as he shows, the Third World appears as an unassimilable excess, surplus to the narrative of the West.;Young goes on to consider recent questionings of the limits of Western knowledge. He argues that the efforts of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha to formulate non-historicist ways of thinking and writing history are part of a larger project of a decolonization of history and a deconstruction of the West.