Wesleyan University

Whose (Which) History is it Anyway? Author(s): Ann-Louise Shapiro Source: History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 4, Theme Issue 36: Producing the Past: Making Histories Inside and Outside the Academy (Dec., 1997), pp. 1-3 Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505571 . Accessed: 27/06/2013 13:05
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WHOSE (WHICH) HISTORY IS IT ANYWAY?

ANN-LOUISE SHAPIRO

We seem to be living in a slightly schizophrenic moment when there is both considerable worry about historical illiteracy, cultural amnesia, and intractable presentism-the loss of meaningful history-and an equally powerful sense of history as everywhere present: the high-profile subject of films, museum exhibits, and theme parks; the source of struggle and recrimination in domestic and international politics; the center of controversies over school curricula;the focus of multiplying civic ceremonies and memorials; and the object of intense debate in the print and electronic media. These worries-too little and too much-are, in fact, not two different sets of problems, but aspects of the same larger concern: that the wrong kind of history (wrong-headed, or simply wrong) is producing an unfortunate kind of historical consciousness. The cry is not that people have forgotten the past, but that they misremember it all too well; not that they don't care about history, but that they don't or can't discriminate among the available versions. At stake are questions about whose memories will prevail, which accounts are the most accurate, and how particular meanings are conveyed (and others ignored) by specific kinds of representation. Making matters worse, clear protocols about adequate or appropriate forms for narrating particular pasts are not shared by all, nor are there commonly held notions of responsibility for historical truthtelling among the various producers of history. The essays in this volume take up these issues-the multiple ways of producing the past and their effects on historical consciousness-in order to stimulate reflection on the relationship between academic histories and other genres of historical representation. For some time now, historians have been arguing about the possibilities and possible deformations introduced by "the linguistic turn," focusing on the degree to which the histories that we write can be understood to mirror the pasteven if the mirror produces a fragmented, partial, or distorted image. But it may be that the so-called linguistic turn will be less definitive for historians than what John Toews has recently called a "'broader historical turn' involving not only the academy, its disciplines, and disciplinary discourses, but the problems of cultural or social production of historical consciousness outside the academy."' By taking seriously this "historical turn" in a mass-mediated cul1. John E. Toews, "A New Philosophy of History? Reflections on Postmodern Historicizing," History and Theory 36 (1997), 236.

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ANN-LOUISE SHAPIRO

ture, by looking through this somewhat wider lens, we are able to think simultaneously about different kinds of histories and their meanings in the present. As Vivian Sobchack argues in her essay in this volume, the exchanges of an electronic discussion group called H-Film [history film] demonstrate that "our encounters with a variety of historicized images and narratives from a variety of textual [and non-textual] sources both layer themselves and sit beside each other as the historical field-and none of them can be completely erased." In this broader sense, making history becomes, then, less the autonomous preserve of any one constituency or guild, and the historical narrative less a finished story, than a dynamic project that encompasses both the production and reception of intersecting, overlapping, contradictory, and parallel accounts of the past. To attend to the hybridity of historical consciousness raises questions about the relationships among history, memory, myth, and fantasy-or, put somewhat more provocatively, posits all as different, co-extensive kinds of history-telling. One arena in which these questions are being played out is in academic history. How and when do the less reputable versions of history-memory, myth, and fantasy-inflect academic writing? and to what effect? Is there a place for invention in professional historical narratives? Can academic historical writing incorporate the layering of voices that constitutes the "historical field" in Sobchack's terms? How can historians as both producers and receivers of history take account of this dual perspective? Can guild writers of history both narrate the past and reflect on the coming into being of their narratives? Essays in this volume by James Young, Nancy Partner, and myself address issues in the writing of academic history that focus on the nature of the telling and the historians' choices that produce particular kinds of histories. The same juxtapositions-of more traditional history with memory, myth, and fantasy; of "the real" and the invented; of the actual and the verisimilar; of the conscious and the unconscious-emerge in the essays by Susan Crane, Marita Sturken, Vivian Sobchack, and Jill Godmilow which look at histories produced in museum exhibits, in feature and documentary film, on television, and on the internet. These essays invite us especially to examine the ways in which various representations of history make implicit and sometimes explicit demands on the viewers/readers/audiences to engage the historical narrative so as to evaluate its meaning in the past and in their lives. What happens when viewers confront a mixture of "authentic" and patently invented material? How do audiences interpret visual cues? What is the relation between these mixed historical genres and the historical past? These explorations of the world of non-academic historicizing are interesting in their own right, not least because the "historical turn" is most vividly evident in such arenas. But the essays also illuminate academic history by the light they shed on its presuppositions and on the challenges that it currently confronts. As James Young suggests in this volume, attention to the ways in which people receive historical information "reinvest[s] the narrated past with ... the consequences of its reception for teller and listener . . . [which] might make the

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WHOSE (WHICH) HISTORY IS IT ANYWAY?

listeners' and readers' responses to history a part of that history's record." What implications does this suggestion hold for the discipline of history? In Flaubert's Parrot, his edgy meditation on art, history, and "evidence," novelist Julian Barnes repeatedly asks: "How do we seize the past?" This formulation-with its suggestion of aggressive, determined endeavor and its hint of inevitable frustration-seems to capture the essence of a project that is as apparently urgent as it is elusive, pointing to the disparity between our persistent desire to know and speak about the past on the one hand, and the variability, even unreliability, of our means of knowing and telling on the other. While it cannot exactly be news to historians that there are many kinds of history, emerging from different sorts of producers, within disparate specialized languages, for various ends, it is certainly also the case that the issues linked to this awareness typically inhabit the fringes of our professional consciousness, and come into focus via mostly uncomfortable prods from outside the academy. The essays in this volume collectively offer the opportunity to situate academic histories in relation to other genres that also represent, order, and interpret the past, and to consider their intersections and effects. At a time when we are trying to assess the implications of not only the purported death of the author, but of the potential disappearance of the book-when, in Robert Rosenstone's words, "the visual media have become arguably the chief carrier of historical messages in our culture"2-it seems useful to open a dialogue among diverse producers of history for whom the past is always both real and imagined, and whose intellectual and creative lives exist both within and beyond the academy. Department of History Wesleyan University

2. Robert A. Rosenstone, Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, 1995), 3.

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