Histories

This is part of the ‘key terms’ series. Short pieces to explain how I am using certain terms. As my understanding changes, I may revisit and re-write these pieces.

Given that ‘at the root’ is all about histories, it feels important to try to document how I am using this term.

Histories are the stories we tell about the past, to try to understand the past, in order to shape the future, through the lens of the present - whatever lens we are looking through.

These stories both seek to tell what happened but also to try to explain why. Analysis and interpretation are all a part of histories. This means the positionality of the person telling the stories matters.

Ideally, history is in some way connected to what actually happened. But there are many questions that we can ask about this statement! How do we know what happened? What are we basing our knowledge on? Often there are sources - letters, artefacts, official documents, traditions and stories that are passed down through the generations through oral tradition, newspapers, books, photographs, paintings - all sorts.

We have to consider who is creating these sources in the first place? What is their relationship to what was happening? What was their interest in telling the story in a certain way? What was missed by their record of what happened? Being critical of sources is a core part of the historians training.

“Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.” - Saidiya Hartman

In the piecing together of sources, historians themselves also choose what topics to look at, which sources to study, what questions to ask of those sources. So when we are looking at the work of historians we also need to ask what their agenda might be and what their telling might obscure.

And then there is the notion of ‘history’ itself and what counts especially from the perspective of the British academy in which history is a discipline often with dominant vantage points, norms and approaches. Over time attempts to subvert how history is done and how histories are understood have taken place. From Marxist historians to feminist historians to decolonial historians there has been much untangling / reweaving of what history is.

Many from these traditions have argued that dominant ways of doing history obscure, perhaps intentionally, the lives of people who are not the ruling class, who are not male, who are not speaking from the perspective of the Global North/empire. Nor were the systemic forces across centuries acknowledged or studied in the dusty tombs on the lives of ‘great white men’. Grappling with racial capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism have become more mainstream pursuits.

With all this said, history is a political act - a way to look at and talk about the past. By telling the histories from a range of vantage points, drawing on a range of voices and experiences of the world, with multiple systemic analyses a patchwork of understanding can start to be threaded together. And in so doing, it becomes more possible to make sense of the present and gesture towards different futures.