Manifestos for History

Sue Morgan, Keith Jenkins, Alun Munslow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134183715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Written by some of the world's leading historians and theorists of history, Manifestos for History draws together a series of manifestos that address the question of what kinds of histories we ought to be considering and making in and for the twenty-first century. With a foreword by Joanna Bourke and an afterword by Hayden White, these manifestos – critical, innovative, reflexive, inspirational – are absolutely essential reading, not just for those embarking on the study of history, but for all those who would think seriously about 'the nature of history' in its present and possible future forms. This collection establishes a benchmark for all future considerations upon the discourse of history.

1 Space for the bird to fly

Robert A. Rosenstone

Spectres are haunting the world of history. Flickering images on screens, large and small, that tell us everything we need to know about the world – including the world of the past. In the post-literate age, there will be no more need for journals and books. Historians will use film, video and the internet to create a new historical imaginary that will show us all, at last, that history is a matter of personal and emotional connection with what has gone before. Historians of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your footnotes.

Manifestos by historians? Come on Jenkins, Morgan and Munslow, you’ve got to be kidding! It’s one thing for you, Sue, to produce a major critical feminist reader, for you, Keith, to write a book called Rethinking History, and for you, Alun, to found a journal with that same title, but asking a bunch of historians, we who march through the world looking backwards, to write manifestos about the future? I once subtitled an essay on postmodern history films ‘the Future of the Past’, a phrase which I have seen used by several other historians now in various contexts, not, I think, as plagiarism, but perhaps as an idea whose time has come, a reflection of a moment (as possible is this collection) when (a few or ever more?) historians have turned from the past to the future, concerned with what will happen to their professional calling in the decades and centuries to come, fearful that in this age of instant communication and gratification, when an era as recent as the sixties can seem to our students as remote as the Wars of the Roses was to us in our college days, that history is going the way of the dodo.

If you are going to write a manifesto, what better model than the original, the first great party manifesto (Marx’s The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848), the one that aimed to turn the world upside down, and pretty much helped to do so. That was the idea that led to my initial proposal, now the epigraph that heads this chapter … er, manifesto. Not that any of us can hope to have the tiniest smidgeon of the influence that the original manifesto writer had. Imagine: 160 years of influence over hundreds of millions of people, labour unions, political parties, belief systems, works of art, revolutions, wars across all the continents of the world save for Antarctica, and maybe if penguins could read … And not just influence, but be the actual cause of major changes in empires and regimes, not to mention deaths by the tens of millions, and gulags named and unnamed in countless countries. There was brilliant writing in that original manifesto, but perhaps too brilliant, too forward looking, too terrifying in its results. Maybe it creates a cautionary note. Maybe we historians should keep our faces turned towards the past and let the future take care of itself? It will anyway, despite what we write.

Nevertheless, after a life of nosing into archives and writing countless footnotes and long bibliographic essays to support one’s narratives, you can’t help but be curious: what will happen to this realm to which we have devoted so (too?) many of our days, this realm or practice we call history, our attempt to tell the past truly and make meaning of it for our peers in the present. Of course, it hardly seems to be the same realm we entered on leaving graduate school four decades ago. Or at least the realm we imagined it to be in those days when our professors wore neckties and herringbone tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and delivered judgements on the past (and on our seminar papers) that had the weight and importance of ideas carved onto stone tablets. Now such certainty seems absurd. We know too much about framing images and stories, too much about narrative, too much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of perception, too much about our own cultural imperatives and biases, too much about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page.

REPORTER: Mr Godard, surely you agree that a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end.

JEAN-LUC GODARD: Yes, of course. But not necessarily in that order.

One reason why it’s difficult to write a new manifesto for historians is that, as far as I am concerned, we already have the one we need, one that says all that has to be said and said it forty years ago. Not that it was framed as a manifesto. Nobody in academia in the sixties would have been bold enough to propose such a thing. Instead, it was a plain, scholarly article, written by Hayden White, the closest thing we historians have to a Karl Marx. Entitled ‘The Burden of History’, this essay (perhaps best remembered for its depiction of historians as shifty folks who, if questioned by scientists, claim that history is an art, but, if questioned by artists, claim it is a science) pointed to the fact that historians in their work fail wholly to identify with the art of their own time (the sixties), with ‘action painters, kinetic sculptors, existentialist novels, imagist poets, or nouvelle vague cinematographers’, but instead follow the forms of the realists of the nineteenth century, primarily novelists such as Sir Walter Scott and William Makepeace Thackeray. By highlighting their absence, the essay becomes in essence a manifesto calling for experiments and innovation, for ‘surrealistic, expressionistic, or existentialist historiography’.

The world has changed a great deal since the nineteenth century, as we historians above all should know. When we attempt to tell stories about the past or present these days – in words on the page, or in photos, or on the motion picture or television screen, or in a museum display, or on a website – we as a culture are no longer so firmly wedded to the notions of literal reality that pervaded the nineteenth century. The impact of the visual media themselves (if we include among them the internet) are certainly the chief carriers of messages in our twenty-first-century world, and this alone assures a major alteration in our sensibilities, the way we see the past. The continual revolutions in artistic visions over the last century – the movements or tendencies we may label cubism, constructivism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction, the New Wave, modernism, postmodernism, hip hop – have helped to alter our ways of seeing, telling and understanding our realities. The quotation by the great Swiss-French avant garde filmmaker which heads this section puts it succinctly by saying, ‘not necessarily in that order’, an idea which would have been incomprehensible to our professors in graduate school as well as to our younger selves.

The point is this: we need to liberate history from its own history and to create forms of historical telling for today and tomorrow, forms of history suited to the sensibility of the times.

In his late Cubist period, Picasso was asked to paint the portrait of a woman. One afternoon, the husband of the woman came by the artist’s studio to take her home. He asked Picasso to see the painting of his wife and Picasso showed it to him. The husband looked at it with a horrified expression and said, ‘It doesn’t look at all like my wife.’ Picasso considered this, then asked, ‘What does your wife look like?’ The husband reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet. From it, he took out a snapshot of his wife and handed it to the painter, who studied it for a while, then turned to the husband and said, ‘I didn’t realise she was so small.’

Not necessarily in that order. Not necessarily of that size. Not necessarily in that frame. Not necessarily in that medium. Not necessarily in the way we have been taught. What we need is history that surprises and startles us. That lets us see things we haven’t seen. Hear things we haven’t heard. Feel things we haven’t felt about some particular period, person, moment or movement in the past. Learn things from the seeing, hearing and feeling we haven’t learned before. What we need are historians brave enough to experiment with the past in the spirit of scientists who investigate the unknown in the micro- and the macrocosmic. What we need are historians who are brave enough to experiment with language, image, sound, colour and any other elements of presentation that will make the past live and vibrate and terrify us once again. What we need are forms of history that make us deeply care about people and moments we never cared about, history that tries to make us understand not only our own past and ourselves but the past and selves of those others whom we never before knew or wished to know.

We are the other people, we are the other people, we are the other people

You’re the other people too!

Found a way to get to you.

Frank Zappa

I am not talking research here. Not talking about extracting new traces of the past in all those brilliant ways historians have devised during what might be called the research revolution of the last half century-plus. I am not talking about the smart and difficult work of investigating parish registries from fifteenth-century Languedoc, finding wills or amassing statistics on longevity, property, literacy and stature from medieval Japan or China, learning the dietary habits of hunters and gatherers in East Africa and of factory workers in Manchester during the early Industrial Revolution, or uncovering the patterns of landownership and inheritance among pre-contact Tahitians. I trust that the sleuths among us will continue to devise new and ingenious ways to extract data from the silence of the past. Those who do so have been hailed for their accomplishments and been given grants and promotions by an academia which would like to turn professors into movie or rock stars if only they (we?) had more hair or shaved skulls.

What I am talking about is presentation, telling the past, creating the story of what happened – only it need not be a story in the usual sense, as Godard suggests. Perhaps it could be a collage, a comic book, a dance, a rap-song cycle, a series of emails sent to everyone online, or a combination of expressive forms we have not yet seen, forms which go beyond White’s notion of ‘surrealistic, expressionistic, or existentialist historiography’ to encompass the shifts in artistic moods, modes, styles and forms that have developed since he wrote his path-breaking essay in the sixties.

Such innovative forms of history have already been produced – but rarely by historians. Art Spiegelman in Maus and Maus II created an intimate history of the Holocaust, the tale of his father’s experiences in concentration and death camps as told to his son who can barely comprehend events, and all this through the medium of a comic book (or graphic novel, to give the form the dignity it now wants to claim); and Marjane Satrapi has done the same in Persepolis, with her own, personal experience of the Iranian Revolution. Filmmakers from many countries have (and continue to) put the history and biography on screens big and small, in popular dramatic forms (e.g., Gandhi, Schindler’s List, The Return of Martin Guerre, Born on the Fourth of July, Capote, Frida), in innovative works of collage and pastiche (32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, Far from Poland, Surname Viet, Given Name Nam), and in unusual (by Hollywood standards) works that deal with Third World situations and mix both traditional and contemporary aesthetics (Quilombo, Sarraounia, Ceddo).

Step out of line

The man come and take you away.

Bob Dylan

For professional historians, those of us who have gone through graduate school and become professors, those of us who want our books to be published, our careers to thrive, our grant and fellowship proposals to be rewarded so that we can have precious time off to research and write, it’s a real problem, a huge problem. For all of us in the culture have been brainwashed (even yours truly, even while writing this, four decades into a career as a historian, now mostly behind me, and a voice somewhere inside, call it the internalised values of the discipline, call it the professional superego, says, ‘You can’t be saying this, it’s too far out, too off the wall, nobody will take such a manifesto seriously’) into thinking we know what is ‘History’, and it’s always something with a capital letter, always something linear and sober, something on the page and stuffed full of facts and footnotes that make us feel virtuous and informed when we finish reading it (and even if we don’t finish). The gatekeepers know, too – the publishers, the editors, and now, by God, the agents – all of them know exactly what history is and it isn’t any of the things I have been calling for here.

Let me cite chapter, book and verse. Almost twenty years ago I produced a manuscript about three American sojourners in nineteenth-century Japan, a work motivated by and framed within my own experiences of teaching on a Fulbright Fellowship at Kyushu University for a year. The men whose tales I chose to recount – a missionary, a scientist and a writer – were, in one sense, emblems of cultural interaction, but they were also individuals whose exposure to Japan had turned them from firm believers in the superiority of Western civilisation into what we might call premature cultural relativists, folks who understood that this Asian nation had its own values that were not inferior to, but in some cases were superior to, those of the world from which they came. To render their lives, to get close to them, to suggest the interactions and moments, the sights, smells, tastes and feelings that underlay the shift in their perceptions and values, I found the traditional third-person narrative I had used in previous works to be too distanced, too lacking in immediacy and intensity. In order to convey the rich and personal encounters and experiences of their lives in this alien world I began to search for a more suitable and more evocative way of writing. What I produced, after much trial and error, was a work of history written in the present tense, recounted in several voices and told from several different perspectives, a work whose words occasionally speak directly to the reader or the historical characters, a work in which the historian is an occasional walk-on character who comments on the problems involved in producing the work being read. What I produced, in short, was a work of history which indulged in some of the techniques of the contemporary novel, a work which some reviewers labelled with the dreaded ‘P’ word: postmodern.

‘This is not the proper way to write history!’ said my editor at Knopf as he turned down the manuscript on which the publisher had an option. He was hardly alone in this opinion. Other editors said the same thing. Agents, too. Agents! I would snap back: ‘But everything is footnoted. It has a huge bibliography. Nothing is invented. It just tells the story a different way.’ No matter. Over and over again I heard: ‘You can’t write history like this!’ But nobody could answer my question: ‘Why not?’ They could, however, refuse to publish the work, as many publishers did, before a brave editor at Harvard University Press named Aida Donald decided to take a chance on something different – and the result was Mirror in the Shrine (1988).

Let me skip over my fictional biography of Russian writer Isaac Babel, King of Odessa (2003), which I would maintain renders the man’s life as more complex and truer than all the prior but more factual accounts, as well as my multi-voiced, mostly true story of three generations in my own family, The Man who Swam into History (2005), which has two of my grandparents talking from the grave – few will consider these history, even though I would be happy to make the case for both of them. For the problem is hardly mine alone. The most stunning piece of combined research scholarship and literary innovation that I have encountered, John Walker’s Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of Gerolamo Vano, Venetian General of Spies, is a work which utilises a dazzling display of contemporary literary and graphic techniques yet has footnotes galore and a bibliography that goes on for ever, both of which show years of work in the archives – yet this book went begging for a publisher for years, to the despair of the author, until finally the University of Melbourne Press took a chance on it. No offence to this Australian university, but to me Walker’s work (in press as I write) should have been published by a major press and featured as a breakthrough in the realm of historical discourse.

I am talking scholarship here. I am talking Ph.D.s and professors. I am talking archives, footnotes, bibliography – none of this matters because we and they, the gatekeepers, claim to know precisely what history is and is not. To them, it is not innovation on the page, as produced by John Walker, and it certainly is not a series of songs, or paintings, or video installations. History is those books we keep producing that not many people want to read. (A thousand books is a very good sale for an academic work in the United States, with a population of 220 million. Doesn’t anyone think there’s something wrong with that, something not just in the public but in us?) Or it’s those bestsellers that lots of people want to own because there has been an accompanying TV series (The West, The Search for Troy, Aristocrats). Or perhaps they are on a topic that makes us feel good about ourselves – works on the Great Generation, which saved the world from the Nazis in the forties, or biographies of presidents who, at this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: on fidelity and diversity
• 1. Space for the bird to fly
• 2. History-writing as critique
• 3. Manifesto for a history of the media
• 4. The closed space of choice: a manifesto on the future of history
• 5. ‘Humani nil alienum’: the quest for ‘human nature’
• 6. History and the politics of recognition
• 7. The gift of the past: towards a critical history
• 8. Performing cross-culturally
• 9. Historical fiction and the future of academic history
• 10. Alternate worlds and invented communities: history and historical consciousness in the age of interactive media
• 11. Being an improper historian
• 12. Resisting apocalypse and rethinking history
• 13. Manifesto for an analytical political history
• 14. Historiographical criticism: a manifesto
• 15. The past of the future: from the foreign to the undiscovered country
• Afterword: manifesto time
• Index