3. In
his introduction to The Postmodern History Reader, Keith Jenkins
asks what "do (or would) postmodern histories look like?"
How would you answer this "difficult" (as he concedes) question?
Does the emergence of the Web make it easier to imagine what these "histories
of the future" will look like? |
Not being well-grounded
in postmodernism theory, I read a chapter in Pauline M. Rosenau’s
Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (1992) before tackling
this question. Rosenau has separated postmodernists into two schools:
the skeptical and affirmative. Because the skeptics take such a negative
view of history I have adopted the views of the affirmative postmodernists
for this essay. This latter group is willing to adapt history, to make
a “New History.” These historians are diametrically opposed
to the traditional “upper case” history that Keith Jenkins
so colorfully describes--the history of the white, male elites. In addition,
postmodernists reject the “lower case” histories of the
masses because traditional historians still employ the same tired, theoretical
framework. Instead, the postmodernists are more concerned with description,
storytelling, subjective interpretation, deciphering texts, and employing
“micro-narratives as alternatives to history.” (Rosenau,
p. 66)
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While Jenkins
succeeds in outlining what postmodernists oppose: whether using the
descriptors bourgeois/liberal/progress/Truth/facts/unbiased or Marxist/proletarian,
he does not so readily describe what a postmodern history looks like.
Jenkins cites Richard Price’s Alibi’s World (1990)
as an example of this genre. Indeed, Price wrote a non-traditional book--seeking
to “evoke a past world rather than simply to represent it.”
(xii) Instead of organizing his book along traditional categories of
“religion, politics, economics, art, or kinship,” Price
emphasized “rhetorical devices, to focus attention on activities,
encounters, and relationships.” (pp. xviii-xix) For Joan W. Scott
in her Gender and the Politics of History (1988), the “story
is no longer about the things that have happened to women and men and
how they have reacted to them; instead it is about how the subjective
and collective meanings of women and men as categories of identity have
been constructed.” (p. 6)
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Because postmodernists
are so open to interpreting history in new ways they should embrace
the exciting new potential that the Web offers for studying history.
The Web’s capacity for presenting history is underutilized today
because we still think of it often as a multimedia medium and not the
revolutionary new media that it is. Through the vast world of hypertext
we can engage the reader in an interactive milieu where he can be linked
to a document and interpret it himself without the filter that the historian
has presented in the past. Postmodernists eschew hierarchy and linearity
(Landow, p. 1) in their presentation of history. The Web is their perfect
medium. |
What can hypertext
do that footnotes cannot for the histories of the future? It can link
the reader not just to a citation but also to documents where the reader
can read and interpret an original letter and become his own historian.
Hypertext can link one to a map that is not static but interactive,
providing just those variables that interest the reader. Because of
the prospect that future histories on the Web will be distributive and
engage the reader more actively than the print media ever did (see Roland
Barthes on readerly and writerly texts) it is possible that historians
will become more attuned to a nonscholarly audience in their quest to
define what is history.
Christine Hughes
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