p xxii, ‘Were I not suspicious of obvious genealogies, I could claim this mixture of intimacy and distance, and the class, race, and gender positions that made it possible, as the central part of my intellectual heritage. But I have learned on my own that the point about such claims may be less what they assert than the fact of their assertion. Growing up who I was, I could not escape historicity, but I also learned that anyone anywhere with the right dosage of suspicion can formulate questions to history with no pretense that these questions themselves stand outside of history’
‘Long before I read Nietzche’s Untimely Meditations, I knew intuitively that people can suffer from historical overdose, complaisant hostages of the pasts they create, We learned that much in many Haitian households at the peak of the Duvaliers’ terror, if only we dared to look outside. Yet being who I am and looking at the world from there, the mere proposition that one could—or should—escape history seems to me either foolish or deceitful. I find it hard to harness respect for those who genuinely believe that postmodernity, whatever it may be, allows us to claim no roots. I wonder why they have convictions, if indeed they have any. Similarly, allegations that we have reached the end of history or that we are somewhat closer to a future when all pasts will be made equal make me wonder about the motives of those who make such claims. I am aware that there is an inherent tension in suggesting that we should acknowledge our position while taking a distance from it, but I find that tension both healthy and pleasant. I guess that, after all, I am perhaps claiming that legacy of intimacy and estrangement…Naiveté is often an excuse for those who excercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake’.
to consider:
Past – Present
Memory – Forgetting
Genealogy – Break
‘History’ – Freedom
‘History’ – Suspicion
History – Historicity
History – histories
History – Storytelling
what happened – what is said to have happened
actors – narrators
activities – stories
activities – records/archives
Written – Unwritten
Voicing – Silencing
Universal – particular
Intimacy – Estrangement
positionality – distance from it
Freedom – Unfreedom
Experience – Naiveté
Concepts – words and their vernacular meanings
clarity – ambiguity
p. 4 ‘it is not surprising that the vernacular use of the word history has caught the attention of many thinkers since at least antiquity. What is surprising is the reluctance with which theories of history have dealt with this fundamental ambiguity… Some, influenced by positivism, have emphasised the distinction between the historical world and what we say or write about it. Others, who adopt a “constructivist” viewpoint, have stressed the overlap between the historical process and the narratives about that process. Most have treated the combination itself, the core of the ambiguity as mere accident of vernacular parlance to be corrected by theory. What I hope to do is to show how much room there is to look at the production of history outside of the dichotomies that these positions suggest and reproduce’