“A GUESSER IN THIS VALE OF TEARS”: ON THE POLITICS OF HISTORY WRITING

Abstract

The essay makes three points about historians’ responsibilities in the current moment. The first has to do with making sense of the present by bringing the past to bear on it—that is, offering to the current eruptions of politics a history that can help explain what has brought them to this point in the form of narratives that counter the dominant ones. The second is what Foucault called a “history of the present.” That is a critical interrogation of the terms we use to represent the past, a dismantling of the naturalized understanding of history that has long served to legitimize modernity as the inevitable outcome of a singular chronology. The third calls for the avowal of our ethical investments in the history we write.