Talking about what kind of forms a postmodern history might take reminded me of a trend I've been seeing lately -- oral history books. Honestly I haven't read any of the books (think World War Z -- it also seems to be a popular trend when writing about musical trends such as punk, metal etc) but a while ago I read an article on the Chicago Tylenol murders. The article obviously uses snippets of the interviews to piece together a narrative but I definitely thought of this when Kathryn mentioned doing interviews for a Uni history in class -- it seems like the only way to really put together a history of something past basics stats and figures, and just showing the raw quotes without a lot of the author writing around it definitely gives more of a showcase to the people involved.
I also think a postmodern history would put contradictory facts more at the core -- often I read essays that detail a whole story then put at the end "so-and-so denies this ever happening," or just straight-up put two conflicting stories side-by-side. This article about a mass shooter was disturbing for a number of reasons (and I would highly recommend reading it), but for one (as I remember from reading it months ago), it basically laid out stories from two different sides, poked some holes in both... then ended. I'm used to something feeding me "this is the way things happened" so ambiguity is both interesting and unsettling.
The idea that history (and "news," which is basically history being written as it happens) should be ambiguous and unsettlingly so fits well with my sense of why the postmodernist insights are so useful. The student of history becomes less of a passive recipient, a popcorn-munching audience observing the pageant of history as it marches past, and more of an active participant in interpreting and making meaning out of events. An oral history is a good example of a "story" being told collaboratively, but with inevitable variations and slight (and major) discrepancies--not to mention the interpretive comments that are always a part of any oral history; interviewees don't just recount facts, they *tell stories*. You remember the ambiguous article about the shooter precisely because it engaged your intelligence on this level--it presents the reader with the raw materials to engage in the same kind of work as the historian. Postmodernist history makes historians out of readers--there's a nice epigram for you!
ReplyDeleteOral History also came to my mind when we were talking about what a post-modern history would look like. I heard this thing somewhere, that history at its best is a lot like crowd sourcing, and oral histories were definitely what that reminded me of.
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