Abstract
The aim of this paper is to locate the novel Shadows of the Pomegranate Treein the postmodern critical discourse on historiography. The novel deals with the Muslim identity through imaginative historical sequence but it also focuses more on the way history is taught and understood. The novel is an example of both counterfactual andmetafictional historiography as it establishes the link between the past and its various so-called truths. The study contends that the novel has two distinct features: ontheone hand,it subverts the ‘us-them’ binary which accounts for the ‘writing-back’it sets to achieve and on the other hand it also challenges the traditional historiography. Therefore, the area of literary study that this research reaches towards is postmodern historiography with its intersection with postcolonial literary theory. The researchbrings out multivocality and varying perspective on the encounter between the confronting ideologies that the text offers. The study, after a review of the postmodern historiography and analysis of the evidence from the text, concludes that with the help of the postmodern historiographic techniques the novel largely reconstructs the cultural past of the Other of the Eurocentric history
Mamuna Ghani, Sohail Ahmad Saeed. (2016) Tariq Ali’s Shadows of the Pomegranate Treeand Alternative Historiography, The ELF Annual Research Journal, Volume 18, Issue 1.
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