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World History’s Narrative Problem

2004; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-84-3-431

1527-1900

Micol Seigel,

Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies

Asking Latin Americanists to think about their region in the context of world history provokes an anxious sort of tallying. Does Latin America receive adequate attention in world history courses and textbooks? Within that query lies a justified suspicion: world history as taught in the United States does often relegate Latin America to abbreviated sections and asides, particularly in pre-columbian and postcolonial eras.1 This is not a simple oversight, easily redressed by drawing the field’s gaze southward. It is rather, I think, the product of an incomplete theorization of the narrative frames of ignorance. Latin America and other marginalized places might be better served—and the history of the world better conveyed—by rewriting the fundamental story.The teaching of world history is the site of recurring struggle in the United States over the nation’s relationship to the rest of the world: what it is, what it should be, and how it should be portrayed to young people. Proponents of world history have, in the subfield’s various iterations over the course of the twentieth century, been motivated by similar issues, such as well-founded dismay at North Americans’ scanty knowledge of foreign places beyond the West or the need to chart an alternative to a worldview myopically focused on Europe.2 These concerns have rarely been addressed until recently, when world history courses finally began to make headway against their closest curricular rival, Western Civ, thanks to the momentum generated by decolonization and attendant social movements. The radical social contexts behind world history’s firm foothold today often go unacknowledged, since the field in general is far from radical (the term probably fits neither the World History Association, nor its president, William McNeill, for example). Yet, particularly in circles friendly to postcolonial and poststructuralist thinking, scholars engage world history with generous but exacting critiques. They neither ignore nor reject it, but strive to push world history to fulfill its potential: to revise notions of center and periphery, civilized and savage, self and other, and other discursive buttresses of inequality.Such engagement produces justifiable complaints about the ways most world history monographs, textbooks, and syllabi incompletely sever their ties to Western Civ. Too many world history courses, critics observe, simply add non-European regions without changing the story, producing a Western Civ with “add-ons” or an “Afro-Asian fig leaf.”3 (Alas, even in this critique, the Americas remain naked.) They note that Europe too often retains the status of the universal or poses as the origin of ideas or trends that are then developed elsewhere (the “first in the West, then on to the rest” logic). European themes such as nationalism, the displacement of agricultural society, industrial urban growth, capitalism, and so on, are imposed inappropriately elsewhere.4 Further concern centers on world history’s comfort with the large, structural building blocks of Western Civ, whether of time, geographic space (continents, nations, etc.), or epistemology (“history” and “reason”). These structures are left undisturbed even when world history flips the focus squarely from Europe to not-Europe, an approach that allows for greater depth of coverage but little disruption of Eurocentric assumptions.5These are valid expositions of world history’s failure to move beyond Euro-centrism, and they are points that any scholar in the field ought carefully to heed. Still, I find it less useful to understand the problem as one of Eurocentrism than as one of narrative. What world history fails to transcend, I think, is not simply Eurocentrism, but narrative itself (bracketing, for a moment, the possibility that the two may be inseparable). World history’s central problem is the fuzziness of its story. “Unlike the Western Civilization course,” as Stanley Burstein has observed, “which is built around a generally agreed-upon story, there is currently no agreement concerning either the story that might under-gird the world history course or the goals of the course.”6This deficit is the result of deliberate decisions on the part of many world history teachers, who acknowledge that familiar refrains emerge to co-opt even narrative gestures intended in entirely other directions. They instead prefer to try not to tell any story at all. Others, mindful of the erasures inflicted by meta-narrative, attempt to present multiple narratives that cannot be knit into one, such as the rubric Roxann Prazniak terms “global history.”7 This is the route taken in the highly useful, state-of-the-art world history textbook put together by Robert Tignor and his Princeton team, which aims to provide “not a single, sweeping narrative, but multiple histories, simultaneously together and apart.”8 Yet another group, dominated by scholars located in postcolonial studies, tries to locate stories that radically depart from conventional historical narratives. Dipesh Chakrabarty urges scholars to listen for histories outside the logic of capital, while Ashis Nandy supports “ahistorical” constructions of the past, Ranajit Guha resists “Reason,” and Walter Mignolo calls for macronarratives that begin from Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality—narratives that are “not the counterpart of world or universal history, but a radical departure from such global projects.”9History’s affinity for narratives makes these approaches difficult. In its simplest sense, as a story, narrative is an inescapable aspect of historical thinking. The density of the philosophical-historical debate over narrative can be distracting from this truism.10 Describing change over time necessarily produces a story. An implicit storyline will emerge to contextualize even the most analytic, quantitative research. The reader will fill in the backdrop to a “snapshot,” whether the author does so or not.11 Telling history without imparting a narrative of this sort lies somewhere beyond the range of the awkward and into the realm of the impossible. History without the story?—interrupted tautology, insurmountable paradox.More practicable than the refusal of narrative are attempts to tell multiple or ahistorical stories, stories outside capital, stories that resist the rational, and so on. Still, these are hardly simple solutions, in part because they demand a Herculean deferral of understanding. The teller of such tales must relax a strict hold on “reason” and convey research subjects’ lives and worlds without altogether understanding them. This is something most people who have survived the profound indoctrinations of graduate school are more than reluctant to do. I sometimes feel that I glimpse, out of the corner of my mind’s eye, a Chakrabartyian “history 2” or one of Nandy’s “ahistorical” narratives. In my writing, I ask colleagues to pause and remain with me in acknowledgement of our inability to know key aspects of our common past. Whether these are satisfying strategies remains to be seen. But to convey them to a group of distracted skeptics, by which I mean a class of undergraduates?Students’ receptions of world history are essential measures of the field’s success, for teaching is world history’s primary reason for being. The classroom is the site of its conceptualization and elaboration. The field’s curricular innovation, which has transformed postdoctoral research as well as introductory-level college teaching, has substantially come from “below,” from high school teachers and courses.12 It is in front of a classroom that most historians first encounter world history, since many more teach the subject than consider it their research concentration. This will hold all the more true for HAHR readers, since as students of not-Europe and not-the-USA, Latin Americanists are disproportionately likely to find themselves in front of a world history classroom. World history does not have the luxury enjoyed in academic fields directed principally to other professionals, with students as apprentices and onlookers. “World history, as it exists today is, above all, a pedagogical field.”13 The classroom is its proving ground. It is in the crucible of the classroom, where multiple stories resolve into one, fragments find homes in fully narrative casings, and illogic shifts until it fits expectations of rational thought, that world history comes up short against its narrative problem. The trouble involves academics’ wide reluctance to recognize that “ignorance” is fully narrative and carefully constructed. This pedagogical misconception allows teachers to hope their instruction will redress North Americans’ ignorance of the rest of the world. Such a hope assumes ignorance is lack and students’ minds blank slates to be filled with information. There is no such lack. People are bombarded with details of faraway places and long-ago times as they move through their daily lives. Through print media, commodity packaging, the built environment, art, popular culture, and more, people encounter compelling narratives of the local and the global, self and other, now and then. Caching what is useful and filtering much of the rest, people deal with the chaotic barrage of “facts” in a range of individualized ways, guided by the general outlines some term “ideology,” “dominant discourse,” or “hegemony.”These guidelines, for the most part, are narrative. They are full sentences, in the conventional syntax of one or another European language. The most prominent story, still, is the rise of the West, the advance of progress, and the battle between civilization and barbarism, imagined at times fantastically but always in resolutely racialized terms. This quintessential narrative of Western Civ is ubiquitous; I am constantly astonished at how unimaginative it allows even the most creative people and industries to remain. Take Hollywood: from The Matrix to Lord of the Rings, including all their epic forebears from the Star Wars saga to C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (a candidate for the big screen, if I were the betting sort), audiences are treated to the same stale story, in gorgeous, emotionally evocative, highly pleasurable segments. An interracial or interspecies coalition of good guys, led by a foreordained messiah, triumphs over a voiceless army manipulated by an evil genius. The liberated primitives are appropriately grateful. Large juxtapositions of species groups allegorize civilizational hierarchies, from Star Wars’ stylizations of national and ethnic characteristics to Lord of the Rings’ overt staging of epic struggle between dark, ugly, Orientalized trolls and the white wizard’s army of white people, diversified through that highly convincing trope of difference, height (what were they thinking?)These narrative fortresses bow to postwar, decolonized sensibilities with a light gloss of “tolerance.” They wear the mantle of multiculturalism, that banalization of the powerful antiracist claims levied by twentieth-century social movements. This framework flexes to contain narratives of irreducible difference, to reduce them to a feel-good, “I’m ok, you’re ok” relativism, devoid of power and pain. A colleague told me of the praise his course on indigenous peoples of the Americas receives in student evaluations: “I loved this class because it showed me that no matter how different people are, deep down they’re all the same.”14 As a sophisticated scholar committed to the impossibility of knowing “what the indigenous were really like,” my colleague reads these comments and pulls out his hair. Multiculturalism sands down jagged incompatibilities and synthesizes multiplicity into its sturdy scaffold of “unity in difference.” E Pluribus, Unum—rah rah. Sighs George Yúdice, “It seems multiculturalism ended up being the new Americanism.”15 This easy compatibility with U.S. nationalism sneaks back in all the banished Eurocentrist overtones of Western Civ, leaving the student right back where she knew all along she wanted to begin.If world history teachers fail to disrupt the narratives students bring into the classroom, they will merely lodge a handful of facts among the narrativized images already there: Ethiopian goatherds absorbed alongside cappuccinos and chola fashion tips gleaned from Bratz dolls.16 Simply telling students what we think they do not know assumes a passive relationship between “facts” and narrative, feeding the frustrations of those students who already see history as a flaccid, forgettable subject.17 Though narrative currents are made up of droplets of facts, facts alone cannot reroute those powerful currents. Narrative construction is an active process in which people make the best sense possible of the world around them. People choose narratives, and fit facts to those narratives, in ways that will be useful to them.18 Ignorance emerges from this not entirely conscious, but nonetheless careful, selection.In this active process of narrative construction, world history runs into the same problem encountered by any revisionist historical project. As Barbara Jeanne Fields has argued eloquently, people develop ideologies of inequality to naturalize existing or emerging social divisions.19 Privileged subjects tend to construct narratives that protect their privilege. We all work hard to remember and forget in a manner that can downplay privilege and the ways the actions we take to protect it ensure the subordination of others. Facts successfully forgotten are a thick “absent presence” in collective and conscious memory.20 Ignorance is not the cause of prejudice but the effect of privilege.North American college students enjoy degrees of privilege simply by virtue of their education-based class prospects and national location (and all the more so do North American college professors). Though heterogeneous social positions mitigate and differentiate the expression of that privilege, a great many remain ideologically committed to narratives that obfuscate and protect the operation of national and class privilege—precisely the ignorance that world history this time around was designed to disrupt. Students run world history’s rivers of facts through their highly efficient filters, reinforcing the structures of understanding that allow them actively to forget Latin American and other unimportant, peripheral, poor, backward, “people without history,” including those at “home.”Were world history to acknowledge and address this dynamic directly, perhaps it might begin to interrupt it. In the spirit of imaginative engagement, here are a handful of measures that might move world history in this direction. The first three brief considerations lead to a fourth that is more abstract and sequentially argued. The fifth, finally, proposes an actual course that attempts to respond to these concerns.Such narrative maps can reveal how the ideas and identities that North Americans tend to assign to “the West” depend on the rest of the world. This is the story that can envision the Americas as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and their ilk suggest, as an essential element of modernity, global capitalism, and so on, rather than peripheral and incidental.27 It is, in a sense, the ur macronarrative from the perspective of coloniality. This is the narrative that can, as Fred Cooper urges, resist the view that European ideas were “fixed and self-contained doctrines unaffected by the appropriations and reformulations given to them by processes of political mobilization in Asia, Africa, or Europe itself.”28 To succeed, this story must assimilate Cooper’s insights completely, including his closing caveat (“or Europe itself”). Placing privileged ideas and identities in transnational relation depends on and must explicitly reflect an understanding of the ways subaltern or non-elite subjects “helped define and refine elite options,” across but also within any given geographic unit.29This is not quite the same as approaching the world as “interconnected and interactive,” as do scholars such as Janet Abu-Lughod or Jerry Bentley.30 While their leads are deeply useful for world historians of all stripes, their stories of cultural contact narrate well-bounded, coherent cultural groupings, already formed when they meet each other rather than constituted in relation. They suggest cue balls, as Eric Wolf has objected, “each society with its characteristic culture, conceived as an integrated and bounded system, set off against other equally bounded systems.”31 This is the toxic fiction, Wolf charges, taught both “inside the classroom and outside of it”:To loosen the hold this story has on our collective imagination, a story of interaction that leaves identity constituted outside of that exchange is not enough.The story, instead, of how the West made the rest and the rest made the West substitutes a relational web for a linear portrait of the world. It removes “European” concepts from the sole purview of Europe or the West, demonstrating the transnational collaborations that created ideas from the Enlightenment to poststructuralism. With this story, world history might begin to displace the story of Western Civ, for in this formulation, the “West” is no more, though certainly no less, than the weighty, consequential imagining of such a thing.This sort of approach lies closer to what many scholars are calling “transnational” history. “Transnational,” in this context, is intended to distinguish this field from international history, the study of nation-states interacting as such. Transnational history examines units that spill over national borders, both greater and smaller than the nation-state. International models have guided diplomatic history, military history, and related fields; their state focus is less compelling for historians of non-elite subjects, which in part explains the embrace of transnational method by social and cultural historians.33 Transnational history does not simply cover more ground; it is not equivalent to world history—world historians, like everybody else, must still choose whether to go transnational or international. Most, these days, still choose the latter.World history offers some purchase for transnational approaches, for it can sketch large-scale social formations created through cross-border travels and exchange. But it is also among the more difficult fields to teach transnationally. First there is the problem of scale—the ubiquitous “too much information” complaint. Forcing historians to do justice to unfamiliar material in the classroom guarantees a scrambling for information to dispense rather than a complex contextualization. Second, world historians’ sense of their field as those “problems and processes that work their effects on a large, interregional, hemispheric, or even global scale,” as Jerry Bentley writes, implies that only some problems move in these high-level currents, while others are purely local.34 The implication that some questions are global and others are not compromises a teacher’s ability to demonstrate to students the relevance of the rest to the West. In any place or period, are there not threads from all these levels woven into the fabric of people’s everyday lives? If students of transnational approaches turn out to be persuasive, then just as scholars of gender and sexuality have compelled historians to ask questions about those social categories, regardless of the subject of research, so everyone from microhistorians to students of the longue durée will triangulate their topic within varying levels of magnitude and competing scale.Under these methodological guidelines, world historians could not continue to offer the grand vague sweep we now expect. They could not be content with Leften Stavrianos’s “view from the moon” version of world history, which loses the detail of the local.35 Transnationalists, indeed, think the expression of global forces in local contexts is the meaning of those larger currents, even if in irreconcilably fragmented, multiple ways. Those who assimilate these theoretical priorities will have to imagine something different. Thus, my final suggestion:5. Teach world history as a theme course. Back away from world history as we know it. Some of the most effective English composition courses have taken such a step, away from communiqués of rules enforced by exercises and toward specific, writing-intensive “topics” courses. World history instructors who want to follow them might choose a world traveler from their own story trove and ask it to serve as guide. From the world of ideas one might choose a concept such as “freedom.” Economic possibilities include commodities such as sugar or silk. Migrations of people, coerced or free, could work; so could a technology such as arrows or iron. Environmental currents are easy: water, weather, or wind. In the realm of culture, nearly any thread or form would do. As a student of culture myself, and of the twentieth century, I would pick jazz.A world history of jazz would explore global political, economic, intellectual, social, and cultural events and trends. Whatever material I or my students or department thought might belong in a twentieth-century world history course could be there, cast in the light of this particular lens. The emergence of the modern categories Europe, Africa, Asia, and America (North and South) would be there, in discussions of the processes of conquest and colonization that shaped the conditions within which people created and related to jazz. Nineteenth-century processes of nation building and abolition in the Americas and industrialization and urbanization globally would be there, as would the more recent transnational phenomena helping to set the stage for jazz. Both World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of mass culture, the Great Depression, futurism, indigenism, primitivism, eugenics, migration, Good Neighborism, the Cultural Revolution, the cold war, decolonization, civil rights, and technological developments in communications media from passenger steamers to vinyl disks to the Internet, would be in there, for all shaped and reflect the travels of jazz.Jazz traveled global currents, but it expressed local priorities and experience. To its formative musicians and dancers, jazz has been pleasure, art, and sometimes solidarity, resistance, and survival. To metropolitan elites, jazz has symbolized the freedom of the “savage,” iconoclasm, sensuality, leisure, pleasure, and wealth. Jazz has expressed prejudices and presumptions about modernity, Africa, black people, rhythm, art—what is good, what is bad, what is ugly. In the United States it has guided and expressed regional differences and conflicts. It has carried the hopes of culture-focused, “talented tenth” antiracists and borne the fears of degeneration and the loss of cultural values. It has fed some of the most effective branches of antiracist protest, and insistence on its civilized sophistication and “American” identity has been twisted into the most triumphalist, amnesiac nationalism. In the Soviet Union, jazz indexed the population most likely to see the value of the proletarian revolution. In Third Reich Berlin it signified degraded racial contagion to the regime whose misdeeds would catalyze renunciations of white-supremacist eugenics throughout the world. In Rio de Janeiro, jazz was delicious and ubiquitous from a very early moment. As proof that the gatekeepers of high art had judged black culture acceptable, it dealt a bewildering blow to Francophile elites and offered others a storehouse of antiracist arguments.There is more, of course: endless intriguing vignettes that reveal as much of their local context as of the meanings of jazz or the broader currents it traveled. To discover, with my students, the local meanings of jazz over the course of the twentieth century, we all would have to learn and tell each other specific, contextualized stories, memorable local expressions of transnational phenomena, sustained and constituted by their imaginative connections to each other.Jazz is a good example of a thematic world history that respects Latin America because so much of the musical exchange provoking and fueling the developments we now call jazz took place south of the Rio Grande and along border zones within the United States proper. Plus, these musics met and mingled not only in the Americas but also in the cities of Europe, Africa, and Asia that loved these danceable forms. Its formative transnational interactions explode the assumptions most people hold about jazz: that it was the product of single country, that it was generated in a few key cities, and that in some “true” form it was produced in a fairly limited stretch of time. Showing the intense crossings behind jazz, the hybridity of every phase of jazz and all its precursors, and the difficulty of setting clear dividing lines between jazz and any of its predecessors can therefore provoke broader reflection. It can bring students to consider power and naming, in an instance that continues to hold enormous salience today. The U.S. music industry and its global power gave (and continue to give) North American cultural products disproportionate exposure— even, in some contexts, the African American forms violently marginalized within the nation’s borders, though usually not African Americans themselves. The term jazz came to name a transnational tradition of Afro-diasporic popular music, as the national affiliation of African American music enthroned it above the other (Latin) American and other Afro-diasporic musics that had thrown themselves unstintingly into the cauldron of mutual innovation.Drawing out the process of defining and exalting jazz would allow the course to highlight the filtering process through which subordinate elements are subsumed and forgotten. Students could wonder whether it would have been possible, had power relations been appropriately configured, for a Latin American musical genre, one of the many feeding and provoking the innovation that led to jazz, to have prevailed in memory over jazz, without altering the actual music. Such a discussion could open a window onto ongoing representational struggles over the grounds of culture, whose inherent hybridities allow it to be seen from so many directions. If students were to extrapolate from the defining of musical genres to the setting of geographic, racial, cultural, and other sorts of borders, they would confront the wholly social character of the full complement of categories with which we structure our everyday lives.This attempt to imagine a more productive and pedagogically sound way to approach the teaching of world history is far from a fleshed-out prescription. Whether its partial suggestions are practical is entirely unclear. Certainly high school world history teachers, who teach to a test, would rarely be able to experiment in this way. But might high school teachers who had taken a college course in this vein be better prepared than those who had followed the traditional option? They would not have “covered everything,” but they would have honed their critical edge. When it came time to teach world history in their own classrooms, they would be better prepared to choose, read, and teach world history textbooks.Politicians may compel historians to teach world history, but so far they do not force us to do so exactly as they please. Given the conjoined territory of the Americas and the poverty concentrated south of the Rio Grande, historians of Latin America have a unique opportunity—and a particular responsibility—to tell stories that reveal mutual complicity in the construction of hierarchy and wider participation in the genius of the beautiful.Many thanks, for generous readings and provocative conversations, to Peter Sigal, Richard T. Rodriguez, Stanley M. Burstein, Duane Corpis, Julia Foulkes, Barbara Weinstein, Mary Kay Vaughan, Kathryn Litherland, Jerrold Seigel, and Lisa Kung.