History 548
Historiography Seminar
Wednesday, 9:30-12; 1197 Buchanan Tower
Prof. Alejandra Bronfman
Office: 1121 Buchanan Tower
Office hours: Wednesday and Friday, 1-3pm
This course is meant to introduce students to some of the debates, issues and practices of history writing. Rather than a comprehensive overview, it takes on two themes: materiality and narrative. The idea is to be attentive to the ways that historians assemble their texts. What components are necessary for the construction of historical narratives? What is the nature of narrative and how does it work? How have these changed over time, and in space? This leads to questions about who or what are the subjects of history, and of the relationships among those subjects and historians. We will not answer all of these questions, but we will consider them through the readings, our writings and discussions. By the end of the semester, students will be ready to participate in conversations in their own fields about what’s at stake in the production of historical knowledge.
This is a graduate seminar. Students are expected to be active participants in all aspects of this course. Part of the purpose of a class like this is to develop your own voice with regards to broad historical issues, so it will be important to use and develop that voice in flexible and thoughtful ways. Listening is key. We will work to create an environment that is challenging, comfortable, responsive and inclusive. If we succeed, everyone will change their minds, disagree with me and their fellow students in respectful and productive ways, defend their positions, and take lots of chances over the course of the semester.
Course organization and assignments:
We will meet for 2.5 hours each week. The sessions will include detailed discussions of the readings, and presentations by students. I will briefly introduce readings and steer the discussions if necessary, but my expectation is that students will take an active role in raising issues and setting the tone.
Assignments:
Blog postings: Students will post weekly reading responses on the course blog. These will be one or two paragraph considerations of a particular question or problem that interests you. DO NOT summarize the reading. Instead, focus on a single aspect, or critique, or connection to other readings and reflect on it for a couple of paragraphs. Use these opportunities to write clearly and make an argument, or critique, or raise a question. We will use these as the starting points for our discussions.
Out of 11 weeks of possible blog postings, you may miss two, for a total of 9 postings.
Presentations: Each week, a team of two students will present the supplementary readings as a way to contextualize our readings in a broader field. Students may do this in whatever manner they choose, but the overall purpose will be to familiarize the rest of the class with a broad set of issues and a sense of how historians have addressed those over time. As part of this exercise, they will add one or two (or more!) titles to the list. These lists will then be useful for the final writing assignment as well as for PhD students putting together their lists for comprehensive exams.
Participation in discussions and colloquia: See above for discussion guidelines. Students will be marked on the quality of their contributions, rather than the quantity. As part of this course, students are expected to attend the department colloquia on Thursdays. If everyone asks at least one question over the course of the semester, the entire class will receive a reward, TBA.
Historiographic Essay: For the final essay, students will choose one theme and two or three books that are in conversation with one another, and use the paper to think through the theoretical, methodological and historiographic questions raised by the readings. We will talk about these in class. The assignment will include a brief proposal, and a rough draft for peer review.
Each aspect of the class will be worth 25% of the final grade. No student will pass the course without completing all of the components.
Schedule
Read Binding Memories: Women as Makers and Tellers of History in Magude, Mozambique, by Heidi Gengenbach (E-Gutenberg, Columbia University Press) over the summer.
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/geh01/frames/fgehnot.html
September 9: Introductions and discussion of Gengenbach
September 16: What/why/where history?
Edward H. Carr, “The Historian and His Facts,” in idem, What Is History? (New York: Penguin, 1964), 7–30.
Robert M. Stein, “Literary Criticism and the Evidence for History,” in Nancy F. Partner, ed., Writing Medieval History (London, 2005), 67–87.
Julie Cruikshank, “Negotiating with Narrative: Establishing Cultural Identity at the Yukon International Storytelling Festival” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 56-69
Supplementary readings: Moe
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)
Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (1969)
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, Basic Books, 1984)
Geoff Eley, The Crooked Line (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2009)
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
CLR James, The Black Jacobins, 1938
September 23: The apparatus, Pt. 1
Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)
Supplementary readings-Katie
Anthony Grafton, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge, 2012 [1982])
Lucien Febvre, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800 (New York: Verso, 2010)
Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999)
Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)
Marshall McCluhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
September 30: The apparatus, Pt. 2
Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)
Supplementary readings: Conor
Carolyn Steedman, “’Something She Called a Fever’: Michelet, Derrida and Dust (or, In the Archives with Michelet and Derrida)” American Historical Review, Volume 106 no. 4 (October 2001):1159-1180
Eric Ketelaar, “Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection” Archival Science2, no. 3 (2002): 221-238.
Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences” American Historical Review Volume 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 350-379
Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)
Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)
October 7: Sources and perspectives, pt. 1
Olaudah Equiano, “The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African” (first published 1789)
Vincent Carretta (1999) Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New light on an eighteenth‐ century question of identity, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 20:3, 96-105
George Boulukos, “Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Africa” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 40, Number 2, Winter 2007, pp. 241-255
Supplementary readings
James Sweet, Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
Rebecca Scott, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)
Greg Grandin, Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Necessity in the New World (New York, Picador Press, 2015)
Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2008)
Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an African Slave Trade, 1600-1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
October 14: Sources and perspectives, pt 2
Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago Press, 1986)
Supplementary readings: Tyler
EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage Press, 1966)
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Press, 1990)
Daniel James, Dona Maria’s Story: Life History, Memory and Political Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001)
Elsie Paul and Paige Raibmon, Written as I Remember It: Teachings (?ms ta?aw) From the Life of a Sliammon Elder (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015)
October 21: Politics of Narrative, Violence and Memory
Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)
Supplementary readings: Victoria
Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (3 volumes) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) (translation of Les Lieux de mémoire)
James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage Press, 1995)
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Press, 1996)
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland New York : HarperPerennial, 1998.
Erik Meuggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington: Indiania University Press, 2003)
John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)
October 28: Politics of Narrative, Family and Nation
Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011)
Supplementary readings: Max and Aaron
Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976)
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Press, 2006) [1983]
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
November 4: Politics of Narrative: scales of space and time
Smail et al. Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)
Paper Proposals due
Supplementary readings: Devin and Tryggvi
Emmanuel LeRoi Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
Philippe Aries, A History of Private Life (5 vols, 1987-94)
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2001)
David Christian: Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California, 2011)
Naomi Oreskes, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future (Columbia Univ. 2014)
Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015)
David Armitage and Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014)
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (Paris, 1949)
Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago, 1982)
November 11: No class, Remembrance Day
November 18: The Posts: post-colonial
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event”
David Scott, “The Theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the Poetics of Universal History” Small Axe Vol 18 no. 3 (November 2014): 35-51.
Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, (1999) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, Chapter 1;
Stuart Hall “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” Identity: community, culture, difference, edited by
Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990).
Supplementary readings: Clayton
Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern Studies Reader
Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies
AHR Forum on Subaltern Studies as Post-Colonial Criticism, December 1994
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past
Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke, 2004)
Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis
Glen Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks
November 25: Post-humanism: Things, networks, ecologies
Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015)
Supplementary readings Barrie
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991)
Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Susan Stewart, On Longing
Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things
Lorraine Daston, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy
December 2: Fun with Foucault
The Order of Things (1966) An exploration of the epistemological foundations of the human and social sciences
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) A kind of methodological rumination on approaches to epistemes and discourse analysis
Discipline and Punish (1975) Notions of power, self-hood, and the transition from external to internal disciplinary regimes.
History of Sexuality (1976) The invention of sexuality, production through repression, exploration of binaries such as normal/abnormal,
Power/Knowledge (1980) A book of essays in which he tries to explain his work and projects in more simple language.
Supplementary reading: David and Jacob
any other book by Foucault
Norbert Elias, History of Manners
Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture
Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
December 9:
Drafts due: Writing workshop
Papers due: December 17
and for me, over winter break….
Post-linguistic: Affect, emotion, and historicizing the present
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
Supplementary readings:
Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion
William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling
Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling
Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject
Willliam French, A Heart in a Glass Jar