By undermining the fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment and modernist approaches to history, the postmodern philosophy offered a new outlook at defining history as a discipline in humanities by foregrounding its ontology. One such postmodern approach is that of the American philosopher of history Hayden White. White challenged the rudimentary presuppositions of Enlightenment/modernist philosophies of history to render them insufficient and incomplete. At the same time, parallel to the development of the poststructuralist philosophy of history, historiographic metafiction burgeoned to criticize the positivistic attitudes to history by, for instance, intermingling the historical and the fictional. Instances of such historiographic metafiction are the Ishmael Reed's novels Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada. In the preset study, while providing a comparative study of the major approaches to history, it is attempted to analyze Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada to investigate the strategies and novelistic techniques by the help of which he embraced such postmodernist tenets. By reading these novels based on White's critical key terms on history, it was observed that in deconstructing the fundamental conventions of historiography and of the classical historical novel, Reed constructs apocryphal histories of Western civilization and American history respectively. Such counterhistories provide a new narration of history by the help of which Reed foregrounds the history of the black people as a racial minority and makes their silenced voices be heard and acknowledged. This new narration of history in turn leads to a new narration of identity in which Reed distances his narrative from the traditional essentialist accounts of identity and welcomes the poststructuralist tenets
