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I also just finished reading the beautiful piece on Saidiya Hartman.
I'm like 94% sure I disagree with Nell Painter here.
History can be, should be, more than fidelity to "the archive," given that their violent constructions make them... untrue.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/26/how-saidiya-hartman-retells-the-history-of-black-life
I'm like 94% sure I disagree with Nell Painter here.
History can be, should be, more than fidelity to "the archive," given that their violent constructions make them... untrue.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/26/how-saidiya-hartman-retells-the-history-of-black-life
I'll try. They aren't fully formed yet.
I should clarify that I completely agree with Painter that there's plenty more evidence to find about Black life. My probable disagreement is with the line she's drawn between history and literature.
I should clarify that I completely agree with Painter that there's plenty more evidence to find about Black life. My probable disagreement is with the line she's drawn between history and literature.
I think historians do "make up" archives all the time; necessarily, we curate, which is a creative and necessarily incomplete process. And plenty historiographical debates concern the same archival materials bc we find what we want to find, where "want" isn't necessarily intent.
More fundamentally, I think history is narrative art, always telling some truth (if not within the narrative, then about the author and their anxieties) and some misrepresentation--fiction (if only because it rests on curated evidence).
The archive--the curated stuff of the past--is itself narrative, perhaps not written (and not always written at all) linearly, accessibly, or even coherently, but its creation, its preservation, its form are all parts of its narrative.
We're writing stories based on stories.
We're writing stories based on stories.
So, for me, the difference between what we call history versus literature is about how each claims authority over truth and what they claim to tell us given that authority.
Hartman dispenses with that claim to authority, exposing history as disciplinary--an apparatus that norms numerous but still limited ways of asking questions, reading "evidence," and defining the "truth" about both the past and about what counts as truthful anyway.
By interrogating how we construct knowledge about the past, Hartman is both writing stories based on stories--documented in ways accepted by the discipline and in ways that are not--but...
More pointedly, she is telling us a truthful story about history itself. She demonstrates how to exercise the methods that give the discipline its claim to authority, exposing that claim to critique by telling stories that illustrate how we tell stories based on stories.
(This is her frustration with the archive--with Venus, with losing our mothers; with wayward experiments--all incomplete stories, but stories we know existed, if only in fact but not detailed, because how else did we get here? How else would they still have so much purchase?)
She exposes at least 2 things for me: 1) that history--the narratives we write--reflect the claims the past makes on the present but also the claims the discipline makes to authority, and
2) all art forms have methodologies, methods that norm what counts as authoritative knowledge construction, but when we question the claim to authority, the disciplinary lines come into focus as narratives themselves.
In short, I'd be curious what Painter sees as the fundamental difference between these two art forms--history and literature--if not how they claim authority and over what they truths claim jurisdiction.
If that is the fundamental difference, I'd have to buy those claims to see them as distinct.
/Fin (I think. This is the 94% of me that's sure. I don't really know what that other 6% is thinking or holding onto.)
/Fin (I think. This is the 94% of me that's sure. I don't really know what that other 6% is thinking or holding onto.)
The discipline of History has a "traditional identification as a branch of literature." History is constituted by "the epistemological dualism of historiography that arises in the attempt to work from the presentness of past meanings to the pastness of past meanings."
It is quite striking that historians will, OTOH, acknowledge empiricism as a colonialist thought structure and, OTOH, refuse to imagine good History as anything less than an empirical science. What are historians afraid of?
