The article demonstrates how the methodologies of cultural-exchange studies may be combined with postcolonial studies to analyse the representation of history in postcolonial literature. It reviews major developments in both fields as well as recent issues in historiography in order to establish common ground between the fields. From there it moves on to the analysis of two novels, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American, and The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda from South Africa. Both authors envision processes of cultural exchange that project history as connected. This representation of history as something shared mediates between the two oppositional models of history that see it as disorderly and irrational or as patterned and rational.