Victorian and postmodern collisions

For the central currents of post-colonial and new-historicist criticism, ‘history’, as it is usually thought of, is in every sense the History of the West. As Robert Young puts it, ‘History, with a capital H …cannot tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion. The appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalising system can thus be set alongside the history (if not the project) of European imperialism’. Young argues that History's linear narrative of logical cause and effect, teleologically tending towards totality, rhetorically occludes other ‘histories’, and rhetorically legitimates the subjugation of other peoples in the cause of ascendant western man's supposedly preordained mission to unite the globe under his rule of enlightenment.