Producing the Past

Catalog description

History is central to recent claims for reparation and repair for past and continuing injustices. Yet at the same time, elements central to the disciplinary authority of history itself - archives, facticity and narrative genres - have been the focus of much critical scrutiny. This course explores how the work of anthropologists, critical historians and theorists has broadened our understanding of what history means by revealing how history itself is one among a number of ways of knowing, experiencing and reckoning with the past. We will start by examining how an increasing self-awareness about the historical density of their typical objects of study prompted anthropologists to question the forms of difference and alterity their discipline had traditionally assumed. In particular, we will explore how anthropologists have approached colonialism, as a form of power implicated in the production of distinctive historical, postcolonial modernities, but also the concepts, knowledges and disciplines which represent them. The course then turns to explorations of how the past shadows, mediates and interrupts life in the present. Here, we ask how archives enable and foreclose knowledge of certain pasts, and ask what it means to produce "counter archives." We will investigate regimes of historicity and conceptions of historical time; the tension between memory and history; and the politics of witnessing and humanitarian testimony. Finally, we will focus on the contemporary emergence of the truth commission as the hegemonic form for reconciling the present with the past. We will likely draw on the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ann Stoler, Katherine Verdery, Talal Asad, Michel Foucault, Caroline Elkins, and Mahmood Mamdani.