Much modern historical writing outside Europe and North America is naturally published in non-European languages, and many more works in European languages are translated into these languages than from them. There are, however, a growing number of informative works in English. Examples are Youssef M. Choueiri, Modern Arab Historiography: Historical Discourse and the Nation-State, rev. ed. (2003); Michael Gottlob, Historical Thinking in South Asia: A Handbook of Sources from Colonial Times to the Present (also published as Sources of Historical Thinking in Modern South Asia, 2003); Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1997); Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd rev. ed. (2001); and Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (1998). Postmodern historiography
Historiography has not been untouched by the difficult concepts often lumped under the names “postmodernism” or “poststructuralism.” Insofar as these are not mere terms of abuse, they might most appropriately apply in Keith Jenkins, Why History?: Ethics and Postmodernity (1999); and to the essays collected in Keith Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (1997). Jenkins is a radical skeptic about the referentiality of language, which of course calls all historical statements into question. Those who do not go this far have nevertheless become interested in “modernist events,” those which defy the powers of historiography (at least as conventionally practiced) to represent them. The Holocaust is of course the prime example, but far from the only one. The best treatments are to be found in some of the essays in Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999); and in Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (2005).