Second, I'm trying to follow your instructions, Dan, but I can't find the damn "torn page" icon on my right of the "compose" box here...I think it's because of my browser. If anyone can fix this for me, that would be awesome. Crap!
And third, I'm kind of following Dan's prompt about the one quote idea. Or maybe not...Here's what I've been thinking about/re-puzzling through lately as I go through my own work on indigenous rhetorical histories (now that the semester is finally over). I've struggled quite a bit choosing one quote that is representative of how I conceptualize history (and my work within that discipline) so some snippets, perhaps?
Let's start with the easiest and maybe I can babystep my way into some sort of answer: Hayden White and Cheryl Glenn
White argues for an awareness [as writers] that each step in the writing of history leads to something else—a series of stair steps relating to emplotment, argument, and ideology. His point is that history has a particular narrative structure—it is a story in all that the word “story” implies (point of view, choice of characters, and even dialect). Thus, the method of emplotment employed shapes the history in terms of what story is told and how that story is read. While “history as story” may appear rather simplistic, the argument that history is neither objective nor truthful has monumental implications for revisionist histories. Perhaps most importantly, reconceptualizing what counts as “History” also requires “a radical shift in attitudes towards who counts and who [is] worth writing about” (White,
This postmodern re-imagining of history and archive is particularly important for feminist historiographers like myself. If the history being written is contingent upon who tells the story, then history no longer can be written as something fixed in time and space but rather as a dynamic process of exchange(s). Extending this idea, in Rhetoric Retold Glenn agrees that rhetoric history has never been neutral. Using the metaphor of the map, she argues that the new maps feminist historiographers trace must have a performative value to them—that is, maps “do” something—they take us new places, introduce us to people, and complicate our understandings of how things are layed out or connected (10). In doing so, the new map being drawn might fulfill the needs at a particular place and time, shaping perceptions. This feminist re-imagining of history connects to White’s assertion that every history is emplotted in some way, thus reemphasizing how histories can never be truthful. While Glenn does not explicitly say this, the description of maps she provides gives them a sort of responsibility to represent a potential rhetoric history. Less than a decade later she continues this train of thought in “Researching in the Spaces Left” by claiming that while historical narratives are motivated to do something and “that something always has to do with contributing to the growth, the vitality, and the strength of a person, a people, or a culture,” this move often occurs “at the expense, erasure, or silencing of another person, anotherpeople, or another culture” (2). Thus, there’s a positive, a negative, and perhaps a neutral reaction to any historiographic move.
For me, the idea of "history as story" really has monumental impact on what I think about before I begin writing. For example, while learning about Albuquerque Indian School institutional history while living in Albuquerque, I was listening to people who had attended the school as teachers, administrators, students, and volunteers. I was also hearing stories from neighbors living near the campus. As you can imagine, their representations of students who attended (as one example) were amazingly disparate. Students were constructed at various times as engaged citizens, artists, builders, mechanics, jewelers, losers, troublemakers, entrenched in the American Indian Movement and the liberation movement, the "worst of the worst", pot smokers, dropouts, struggling, involved, acculturated, proactive, victims of economics and problems at home, and good kids.
Similarly, I was bombarded by competing images of the actual school grounds: historical photographs that showed beautiful trees, large buildings, band demonstrations, and students proudly wearing school baseball uniforms. However, on the way to MY school every morning I drove by the old AIS school grounds that were covered in trash, empty, and could possibly be read as representative of the school's failure. In the basement of the All-Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, I read student poetry that commented on the falling apart buildings and the cracks in the ceilings. And as I was moving away from Albuquerque, the old school grounds were full of lumber, and bulldozers, and workers with hard hats in the beginning stages of constructing a new tribal hotel and, quite possibly, a casino.
At each step of the research process, I had to ask myself what story I wanted the evidence to tell and I wanted to be conscious of this..I can't help but think this is hugely important. A tragedy? A comedy of errors? A romance (the snarky part of me wants to include dramady here as well!). What work would this type of story DO? And, what implications does this particular emplotment have for revisionist histories that not only take a risk by claiming a stake in History but often act as the first, or the only representative of that type of history around (at that moment, at least).
Metahistory 5-38). This attitude shift rejects rhetoric history’s previous exclusivity when it comes to “who counts” and calls for a return to traditional archival practices. However, the call to traditional archival practices does not necessarily mean a return trip to the traditional archives themselves. Instead, this call invites us to step outside of narrowly construed archives and broaden our historical lenses” (Ferreira-Buckley, “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault”).
Let's start with the easiest and maybe I can babystep my way into some sort of answer: Hayden White and Cheryl Glenn
White argues for an awareness [as writers] that each step in the writing of history leads to something else—a series of stair steps relating to emplotment, argument, and ideology. His point is that history has a particular narrative structure—it is a story in all that the word “story” implies (point of view, choice of characters, and even dialect). Thus, the method of emplotment employed shapes the history in terms of what story is told and how that story is read. While “history as story” may appear rather simplistic, the argument that history is neither objective nor truthful has monumental implications for revisionist histories. Perhaps most importantly, reconceptualizing what counts as “History” also requires “a radical shift in attitudes towards who counts and who [is] worth writing about” (White,
This postmodern re-imagining of history and archive is particularly important for feminist historiographers like myself. If the history being written is contingent upon who tells the story, then history no longer can be written as something fixed in time and space but rather as a dynamic process of exchange(s). Extending this idea, in Rhetoric Retold Glenn agrees that rhetoric history has never been neutral. Using the metaphor of the map, she argues that the new maps feminist historiographers trace must have a performative value to them—that is, maps “do” something—they take us new places, introduce us to people, and complicate our understandings of how things are layed out or connected (10). In doing so, the new map being drawn might fulfill the needs at a particular place and time, shaping perceptions. This feminist re-imagining of history connects to White’s assertion that every history is emplotted in some way, thus reemphasizing how histories can never be truthful. While Glenn does not explicitly say this, the description of maps she provides gives them a sort of responsibility to represent a potential rhetoric history. Less than a decade later she continues this train of thought in “Researching in the Spaces Left” by claiming that while historical narratives are motivated to do something and “that something always has to do with contributing to the growth, the vitality, and the strength of a person, a people, or a culture,” this move often occurs “at the expense, erasure, or silencing of another person, anotherpeople, or another culture” (2). Thus, there’s a positive, a negative, and perhaps a neutral reaction to any historiographic move.
For me, the idea of "history as story" really has monumental impact on what I think about before I begin writing. For example, while learning about Albuquerque Indian School institutional history while living in Albuquerque, I was listening to people who had attended the school as teachers, administrators, students, and volunteers. I was also hearing stories from neighbors living near the campus. As you can imagine, their representations of students who attended (as one example) were amazingly disparate. Students were constructed at various times as engaged citizens, artists, builders, mechanics, jewelers, losers, troublemakers, entrenched in the American Indian Movement and the liberation movement, the "worst of the worst", pot smokers, dropouts, struggling, involved, acculturated, proactive, victims of economics and problems at home, and good kids.
Similarly, I was bombarded by competing images of the actual school grounds: historical photographs that showed beautiful trees, large buildings, band demonstrations, and students proudly wearing school baseball uniforms. However, on the way to MY school every morning I drove by the old AIS school grounds that were covered in trash, empty, and could possibly be read as representative of the school's failure. In the basement of the All-Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, I read student poetry that commented on the falling apart buildings and the cracks in the ceilings. And as I was moving away from Albuquerque, the old school grounds were full of lumber, and bulldozers, and workers with hard hats in the beginning stages of constructing a new tribal hotel and, quite possibly, a casino.
At each step of the research process, I had to ask myself what story I wanted the evidence to tell and I wanted to be conscious of this..I can't help but think this is hugely important. A tragedy? A comedy of errors? A romance (the snarky part of me wants to include dramady here as well!). What work would this type of story DO? And, what implications does this particular emplotment have for revisionist histories that not only take a risk by claiming a stake in History but often act as the first, or the only representative of that type of history around (at that moment, at least).
Metahistory 5-38). This attitude shift rejects rhetoric history’s previous exclusivity when it comes to “who counts” and calls for a return to traditional archival practices. However, the call to traditional archival practices does not necessarily mean a return trip to the traditional archives themselves. Instead, this call invites us to step outside of narrowly construed archives and broaden our historical lenses” (Ferreira-Buckley, “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault”).
Hi Whitney (and all)
ReplyDeleteIf you go to settings, then scroll down to global settings, you'll see a series of buttons that say like 'updated editor' or 'original editor'--if you select updated editor it will change the box you post in so you'll have the torn page icon.
Thanks for the thoughtful post--much to reply to after the holiday!
Hi Whitney,
ReplyDeleteJust coming back to this blog after a little hiatus and starting with your post, which I find especially compelling in the way you describe the actual disparity and variety of voices you hear in doing your work--which is an interesting place to be I think in comparison to my own work on Elizabeth I, where there's already a narrative in place that dictates what voices are even available to me to hear, and where the narratives that existed in that historical moments likewise dictate this in the present i.e., perhaps too obviously, a narrative about the construction of society that was dominated by the book of Genesis dictated the access women had to leaving behind textual traces of themselves insofar as their opportunities for authorship in st least one very real sense were limited. Oversimplistically, Eve sinned, so women in general could only write to express their religious devotion--or else they would lead us all astray again and again.
But these (historical) voices are not all lost to you, although the best efforts of culture mean that you have to work very hard to find them. Does that make the work you are doing in your archives different than my work and, at least in Rhetoric Retold, the work that Glenn does? For instance, does it mean that even though you and I might approach our materials with similar concerns about what we want to happen in the present (and I suspect we do, but let's just say we definitely do for the sake of the question) the materials themselves might force us into narratives that end up doing different, perhaps conflicting, things? and does that at all temper White's concept of history as narrative, as tropology?