What are the main features of the postmodernist ‘turn’ in historical studies? A Brief Comment

One of the main features that arguably most defines the ‘postmodernist turn’ in historical studies is its engagement with the question of objectivity in historical inquiry.[1] 

The Postmodernist Turn and the Relativity of Truth

While postmodernism’s critics, and indeed some more radical postmodernist thinkers, argue that the theory completely relativises truth claims, others value it as a framework that encourages epistemic humility and self-reflection, and that recognises the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of establishing and representing an authoritative and unified ‘truth’ about the past.[2] 

Characteristic of this approach is Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine, in which a ‘biographer’ articulates many of the historical problems inherent in writing the book.[3] 

‘Don’t leave the impression that this is all, that you now know Griffis in Tokyo,’ the biographer exhorts the writer, ‘Remember everything he sees, hears, smells and feels, but never commits to paper…’[4] 

In this sense, this particular feature of the postmodernist ‘turn’ has influenced historical practice beyond the circles of those who accept its underlying theory—encouraging practitioners to reflect more proactively on their role as writers of history and the power that the position entails.[5] 

‘[The historian] can neither master knowledge of the past,’ write Curthoys and Docker, ‘nor write from complete self-knowledge.’[6] 

Michel Foucault, Power and Knowledge

Postmodernism has drawn heavily on Michel Foucault’s conceptions of power and knowledge, as well as his challenge to the notion of autonomous ‘authorship’.[7] 

Foucault sees power as inherent in social relationships, and power in turn operates through knowledge—forming discourses, which are the ‘form through which power-knowledge operates’.[8] 

While many of Foucault’s approaches to history have been criticised for falling short of his own standards or theories and slipping back into the authoritative, totalising historical mode of times past—indeed, his own theory of the operation of power within societies relies on a totalising reading of history that is arguably self-refuting—his ideas have undoubtedly exerted a significant impact on historical methodology.[9]

According to postmodern theory, drawing on theories of the creative power of language, historical knowledge can be characterised as a method of controlling and domesticating the past—itself a form of power that contributes to various discourses.[10]

While postmodern approaches to history tend to reject the totalising approach of schools like the Annales, they find common ground in seeing history through the lens of the present.[11] The schools of thought diverge significantly, nonetheless, in terms of the effects of the production of historical knowledge.

For postmodernists, historians operate from a position of great power. Histories are creative or ‘verbal fictions,’ to quote Hayden White, which not only shape but ‘create’ the way people see the past and therefore think about the present.[12] However, because, according to Foucault, historians are themselves a part of this discursive process; they are themselves ‘actors’, incapable of escaping their culture—‘even while mouthing a devotion to objective truth’.[13] 

The Postmodernist Critique of Objectivity

One of the most problematic implications of the postmodernist critique of objectivity relates to the exchange of historical knowledge through debate and critique.

The plurality of readings that emerge from the relativity inherent in postmodernism, combined with the fact that the comparative ‘truth’ of any particular interpretation by definition cannot be verified, can plausibly lead to a situation where every attempt at historical inquiry is treated as ‘equally representative of reality and therefore equally fictitious’.[14] 

This appears to be corroborated by Stearns’s observation that postmodernist historians prefer to apply postmodern perspectives to the study of historiography, avoiding direct research about the past.[15] 

While there remain other tools for historical assessment (internal coherence, evidential plausibility), theoretically, no reading of a text, no interpretation of historical data, can be ‘privileged’ in relation to any other interpretation—debate can be subverted, replaced by the sheer will to power between competing discourses.[16] 

Therefore, while its theoretical boundary-pushing has led to some fruitful re-examinations of notions of objectivity in history, the ‘postmodern turn’ has also raised important debates that go to the heart of historical methodology.

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Note: This article was originally written and submitted as an assessment for a historical methodologies unit at the University of New England.

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Endnotes

1. Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? 2nd edn, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2010, p. 5; Green and Troup, Houses of History, pp. 290–291; Patrick Joyce, ‘The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History in Britain,’ Past & Present, no. 158, 1998, pp. 208-211; Peter N. Stearns, ‘Social History Update: Encountering Postmodernism,’ Journal of Social History, vol. 24, 1990, p. 449.

2. Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, pp. 5, 183; Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past, San Francisco, 1996.

3. Robert A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988, https://archive.org/details/mirrorinshrineam00roserich, accessed 17 August 2025; Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, pp. 204–205.

4. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine, p. 202.

5. Joyce, ‘The Return of History,’ p. 209; Laurence Stone, ‘History and Post-Modernism III,’ Past & Present, no. 135, 1992, p. 190; Perez Zagorin, ‘History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now,’ History and Theory, vol. 38, p. 24.

6. Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, p. 183.

7. Adrian Jones, ‘Word and Deed: Why a Post-Poststructural History Is Needed, and How It Might Look,’ The Historical Journal, vol. 43, 2000, p. 518; Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, p. 186; Green and Troup, Houses of History, pp. 293–297; Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Foucault for Historians,’ History Workshop, no. 14, 1982, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4288433, accessed 17 August 2025, p. 107.

8. Weeks, ‘Foucault for History,’ pp. 110–112, 115.

9. Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, pp. 187–191; Green and Troup, Houses of History, pp. 294–295; Jones, ‘Word and Deed,’ pp. 518–519; Weeks, ‘Foucault for History,’ pp. 107–118.

10. Green and Troup, Houses of History, pp. 292, 294.

11. Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, pp. 185–186; Green and Troup, Houses of History, pp. 107–108, 294; Jones, ‘Word and Deed,’ p. 528; Peter Schöttler, ‘Historians and Discourse Analysis,’ History Workshop, no. 27, 1989, p. 38.

12. Green and Troup, Houses of History, p. 294; White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, 1978, https://spot.colorado.edu/~klages/7119/hayden%20white.pdf, accessed 17 August 2025, p. 82; Zagorin, ‘Reflections on Postmodernism Now,’ p. 18.

13. Green and Troup, Houses of History, p. 294; Stearns, ‘Encountering Postmodernism,’ pp. 449, 451.

14. Green and Troup, Houses of History, p. 293; Zagorin, ‘Reflections on Postmodernism Now,’ p. 23.

15. Stearns, ‘Encountering Postmodernism,’ p. 451.

16. Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, p. 5; Green and Troup, Houses of History, p. 293.