Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past

Anthropological Yearbook of European Cultures

How do people use history to shape their lives, places and 'worlds'? Which kind of history do they use, and in what ways? What are the functions of history in this context? How do people interact with places and spaces by constructing history, and what are the implications of these constructions for a sense of place? These are some of the questions explored in this special issue of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures on history and place-making. In a previous issue of AJEC, Christian Giordano (2012: 20) argued that anthropologists and historians have different conceptions of history: 'While for history time is concrete, objective and exogenous to human beings, for anthropology it is characterised by its being condensed, collectively subjective and endogenous'. Anthropologists and historians are 'coming at' history from different timeframes. The historian delves into history in order to establish the factual past, but the anthropologist is more concerned with the impact of history on present everyday lives. In other words, the anthropologist is 'present-centred', whereas the historian could be said to be 'past-centred'. Anthropologists have rarely considered the relevance of history in the societies they were studying, although Giordano points to exceptions such as Edward Evans-Pritchard, Eric Wolf and Marshall Sahlins. In her contribution to this issue, Cornish refers to the 'historical turn' in anthropology which occurred in the late 1980s, and draws our attention to anthropologists who have explored the impact of history on everyday lives. But the concept of history itself is not necessarily clear. Nic Craith (this issue) mentions the commonly accepted dichotomy between Western 'linear' history which begins in the distant past and culminates in the contemporary. She contrasts this with the sense of time enjoyed by indigenous people who intuit memory in a circular fashion-beginning and ending in the present time. However, Cornish points out that Western history is not as simple as is commonly assumed. While the distinction between myth and history is fairly obvious, Cornish argues that the Western concept of history is far from simple

Science in Context, 1994

The ArgumentAgainst the idea that modern historiography developed in the eighteenth century as a completely new way of looking at the past, this paper argues that modern historical science borrowed its sense of experience from seventeenth-century memoirs. However, seventeenth-century rnemorialists made very different as sumptions than modern historians about the relations between time, memory, and history. One consequence of their introduction of lived subjectivity into the depiction of the past was a debate in early eighteenth-century France about the relations between history and fiction, some arguing that fiction is a better way of grasping the subjective truth of the past. These debates about the relations between history and memory and between history and fiction have resurfaced recently. The historical moods that are one context for paradigm shifts share common motifs, such as a sense of defeat, of distance between the present and the immediate past, and a need for consolation...

Futures, 2002

Postmodernist questioning of historians' claims to historical truth has created a sense of crisis in historical consciousness. The essay argues that the crisis is not a crisis in the writing of history, as most historians still continue with business as usual, but a crisis in the cultural meaning of history. While this crisis has been associated with the so-called "linguistic turn" which was to result in a paradigm shift in historiography in the 1970s, it has other important dimensions; including Third World questionings of EuroAmerican understandings of the past and, perhaps even more importantly, the intrusion into the representations of the past of the new media. The essay argues that new kinds of history that have appeared since the 1970s from women's history to the history of social movements to "microhistory" have themselves contributed to the complication of our understanding of the past, and what might be called postmodernity's histories. It suggests that historians have always assumed the tentativeness and contingency of claims to historical truth, and argues against a premature panic concerning the status of history. Constructivism is here to stay, but that does not necessarily point to the disappearance of history, only to more complicated ways of grasping the past.  2001 (A. Dirlik). 0016-3287/01/$ -see front matter  2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 0 0 1 6 -3 2 8 7 ( 01 )0 0 0 3 6 -2 1 These challenges, their implications for history, and the methodological questions they raise, have been discussed in a number of excellent collections. For prominent examples, see, [2-5]. Novick provides interesting discussions of the impact of the new developments on historians on the US [6]. References 7 and 8 offer important discussions of the relationship between post-structuralism and history. The most extensive, if only partially successful, defense of history against postmodernisms is to be found in [9].

Edebiyat Fakultesi Dergisi, 1999

Writing memoir entails more than researching, recording and constructing a past 'self'. The act of writing forces a set of critical strategies similar to that of writing a fictional work: there is a problem to be solved, narrative choices to be made, a theory to be tested. The idea of how the past is accessed, reconstructed, researched and re-experienced is also problematic. My recent memoir, Soldier Blue (2008) poses the usual autobiographical problem – 'Who am I?' – but further attempts to interrogate and analyse how this 'I' is constructed, and uses narrative strategies such as the conflation of characters and events, a framing device/ use of an outside narrator, and the constant destabilisation of the idea of a retrievable past in order to solve this problem. The protagonist of Soldier Blue has been created by his society (1960s and 1970s Rhodesia) as a colonial 'white male' with a particular propagandised national identity and agenda. In this paper, I explain the narrative methods used to help me deconstruct this 'self' and trace the paths that lead him out of this labyrinth to become Albert Memmi's 'coloniser who refuses' (Memmi 1990:106). Further, I discuss how in making certain narrative choices in writing this memoir, the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction are blurred, and that in order to create a cohesive narrative, fictional techniques are used that apparently sacrifice historical and factual integrity for the achievement of other aims – that of achieving the emotional truth of the memory/event … and that of liberating the 'I' or 'self' from the confines of gender/race/class. Fact and fiction Writers and readers as well as consumers of reality shows and news broadcasts insist on believing that there is a firm line between fiction and non-fiction, and this line is crossed at our peril. Witness for example the furore on Oprah concerning James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces and his forced public recant for the cardinal crime of fictionalising sections of the narrative (Unattributed 2006). We partition our bookstores and our university literature courses into these tight sections: Fiction; Non-Fiction; Creative Non-Fiction; Autobiography; Biography; Memoir; Real Crime. On the 'factual' side of this line, we demand accountability to history and to truth. On the 'fictive' side, we don't.

Canadian journal for the study of adult education, 2016

This article is based on our Memoir Pedagogy Reading Circles research. Using an interpretative sociological case study methodology, we facilitated two groups that read and discussed women’s memoirs as living texts of society, culture, and history; we read the self and the social through the personal narratives of violence, survival, and resistance. e themes that emerged from this collective e ort were a pedagogy for learning and unlearning, a pedagogy for engaging with others, a pedagogy for social justice, and a pedagogy for reclaiming a history. We conclude that, while the contexts, settings, and geographic regions changed in the memoirs, the presence of structural violence was constant. As a pedagogy, the memoir reading circles provided a consistent grounding that helped the participants collectively recognize and negotiate the meaning of the universality and uniqueness of experiences of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, culture, and capitalism as well as the implications of silen...

History and Theory, 1997

It may be just as unfair to judge a book by its title as by its cover, but A New Philosophy of History raises expectations which the editors of this collection of essays cannot, and perhaps never intended to fulfill. The editorial introduction by Hans Kellner ("Describing Redescriptions") modestly redefines the content and purpose of the volume as a taking stock of the "redescriptions" of reflection on history (historical theory) and writing about history (historiography), that have occurred in the past quarter century within the Anglo-American academic world. These redescriptions, he suggests, involved a wideranging shift in focus. Evaluations of historical writings according to scientific models which emphasized the empirical verifiability of specific statements and the logical viability of explanations (arguments of cause and effect), and in which language was perceived "as something to be looked through," were replaced by models drawn from rhetoric and poetics. The latter models emphasized the linguistic/textual density of historical works, in which language was "something to be looked at," and which presented issues of authority or credibility in terms of genre conventions and the subjective "expectations and be-

This essay argues that, in their reflection of theoretical positions, autobiographies by historians may become valid historical writings (that is, both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations) and, as a consequence and simultaneously, privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, following the model established by Carolyn Steedman, historians such as created a new form of academic life-writing that has challenged established literary and historiographical conventions and resisted generic classification. This article aims to examine this new historical-autobiographical genre-including the subgenre of the "autobiographical paper"-and highlights its ability to function as both history (as a retrospective account of the author's own past) and theory (as a speculative approach to historiographical questions). I propose to call these writings interventional in the sense that these historians use their autobiographies, with a more or less deliberate authorial intention, to participate, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of their own intellectual and academic trajectory as the source of historiography. Traditional historians' autobiographies, including ego-historical essays, have provided us with substantial information about the history of historiography; these new performative autobiographies help us to better understand historiography and the development of the historical discipline. Interventional historians seek not only to understand their lives but also to engage in a more complex theoretical project.

Life Writing, 2019

Experimentation and theorising on forms of life writing from the field of history has grown substantially in recent decades, as historians understand how autobiographical narrative may contribute to understanding both the past and our processes of accessing it. The introduction to this special issue on ‘History and Autobiography’ outlines some theoretical debates emerging from the intersection of history with different forms of self-representation, and highlights some of the main points examined by the contributors. Some contributors explore the convergence of history and life writing through an autobiographical voice, while others work theoretically or critically. Beyond these different approaches, all the essays explore to what extent autobiography serves historical writing and comprehension, and examine the theoretical and practical consequences of this convergence.