What would postmodernist history look like?
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I have vaguely connected my thoughts on movie reviews to postmodernist history. In this blog, I'll try to discuss "postmodernist history" a bit more and describe this connection I've made as best as I can.
Reviews of movies and other entertainment (TV shows, video games, music) are subjective. I believe there is no objective rating for any type of entertainment. Though I think most people would agree with this statement, most people make the mistake of thinking a review's value is in how "correct" it is. I think a reviews true value is in how consistent it is with the author.
Let's say you're reading a review by someone who historically has hated almost every Tom Hanks movie and almost every animated movie they've seen. Let's say this person watches Toy Story 4, an animated movie with Tom Hanks voicing one of the main characters, and leaves a 5/5-star review. From this review, you would have a pretty good understanding of how outstanding this movie is.
Now let's say you ask me my opinion on the Toy Story 3 movie once every day, and I told you 5 stars the first day, 3 stars the second day, and 4 stars the third day. If I give Toy Story 4 a 5 star review, you have a lot less of an idea of what to think.
Without dragging on this metaphor too long: we talked briefly in class about what a postmodernist history education would look like. We figured one of the problems with a lot of history education is how they aim for "objectivity." The textbook is all that's considered. There's a focus on dates and names, but you never really consider why they're important or who decided they're important. Early in education, there's less of a solution for this. You kind of need someone to decide for you what's important to learn. In higher education, this idea of postmodernist history would have value in the same way as the reviews of the Tom Hanks hater.
In a postmodernist history education, nobody would try to feign objectivity. You would learn to identify a voice and bias from every source you read, and the postmodernist historians would be very good at making their biases clear in their own writings.
This education would succeed mainly through the use of plentiful, varied sources, though it could easily fail in lesser resarched topics of history where there are less sources for.
My description of postmodernist history might illustrate much of the history education you've received in your own life. Where we used to talk proudly of Christopher Colombus discovering America and freeing the native Americans from their "primitive" ways, we now read sources written by indigenous Americans explaining the cruelty and ignorance of the Europeans on American soil, sources from the European side explaining the "savagery" of the indigenous people, and etc. We get a much fuller picture than we did before, without claiming that any of the primary sources are unbiased truths.
I've simplified the idea of "history" down a LOT so I'm curious what everyone else's thoughts are on this topic. Am I reading this right at all? What else would be included in the authoritative postmodernist teachings of history?
Your Columbus example is instructive--not least because this is among the most common fairy-tale-type stories that students of American history receive starting at a young age ("In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" etc.). The problem with the story you summarize here is not the interpretation itself--it's possible for someone to make the case that the arrival of Columbus in the "New World" was on balance a fortunate event from the perspective of the Natives who lived here, even if I find that argument objectionable and disagree vehemently. The problem would come from presenting that story as factual, including the interpretation, and excluding the perspectives of communities that might view these events a bit differently. One of the biggest pushes in American history studies recently has been to reassess the Columbus story--this was a huge controversy as far back as 1992, when the 500-year anniversary was happening, and activists started calling out Columbus as a problematic hero to worship. And to this day we are debating the removal of Columbus statues from public places.
ReplyDeleteA more "pomo" history would maybe acknowledge the "Columbus saves the New World" narrative, and it would reveal it *as* a narrative that has existed and been perpetuated for a long time. But it would also acknowledge the existence of counternarratives and Native perspectives on the same questions, filling in the "blanks" on the map of history to remind us that civilizations existed and flourished in this space before the arrival of Columbus and smallpox. The student would *see* the conflicting narratives *as* narratives, and would be encouraged to take part in this act of interpretation themselves.
For my money, this approach makes history a lot more interesting, engaging, and dynamic. From a teacher's perspective, I'd far rather teach a critically engaged, discursive history class than lecture about a timeline of important events I want everyone to memorize and internalize. Postmodernist history would emphasize the *process* and the *controversy*, in other words.
I love your connection of postmodernism to film reviews! I agree with your point: Post-modernism, in its essence, is taking the story behind the story to form a richer narrative of the event. In your example with the movie reviews, we look at the biases that comes with each author instead of the content of the review itself to get a better understanding of the movie. If the education system were remodeled so that younger students would learn to read all sources and interpret the various biases in the authors, it would allow them to get a deeper understanding of history and the multiple narratives that define any event. Much like Ragtime combines multiple viewpoints to tell a story about the early 20th century, students would be able to use their knowledge to compile information from their own sources to understand their past better.
ReplyDelete"I believe there is no objective rating for any type of entertainment." Actually, Dude Where's My Car is objectively bad despite being so stupid it's funny (best example I could come up with). I don't think anyone who's seen it would disagree. With your Tom Hanks movie analogy, said person might be watching Tom Hanks movies because they love Tom Hanks and then dislike the movie because of something entirely different, not proving anything about Toy Story 4. Again we are lacking all the information. When you expand your analogy to history I think it fits a lot more. Instead of dealing with people's opinions, we can now factually say that Columbus committed atrocities without involving opinion at all. We can get to the point when we have all relevant factual information and draw our conclusions from there.
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