Historiography Archives - Not Even Past

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography

October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Native activists have been at the forefront of this movement. Here is a twitter thread discussing the global campaigns to reframe the day:

I'm going to be tweeting about #IndigenousPeoplesDay a lot this weekend. I think about it a lot since I've been working on multiple #IPD campaigns during the past 4 years. pic.twitter.com/73jk2IHt3J
— ndnviewpoint (@mahtowin1) October 12, 2019

It is difficult to study or teach American history without including Native peoples. That said, many historians limit mention of Indigenous peoples to the period before 1776 or even 1840, but the narrative that the cultures died or were replaced by the United States relegates Native peoples to the past, furthers the colonial project of erasure, and simply does not do enough scholarly diligence. There is a difference between talking about Native peoples and teaching Native histories. “Decolonizing your syllabus” by including one Indigenous, Black, or POC scholar is not sufficient either.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’d like to suggest some easy additions to your syllabus, playlists, and bookshelf. This is a brief review of some seemingly untraditional academic works by Native authors, scholars, artists, and creators. My reflection on Native literature here includes scholarship in a number of forms that could easily be incorporated into a syllabus or added to your Comprehensive Exam List. This list is a starting point and I’d encourage readers to go further by listening to Native leaders, scholars, and artists.

ART

Images via Blanton Museum of Art and FrankWaln.com

The Blanton Museum of Art recently featured the work of Cherokee and Choctaw artist, Jeffrey Gibson in an exhibit called “Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day.” Gibson’s art was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation when he was awarded a 2019 MacArthur Genius grant. The exhibit was celebratory, sincere, and visually stunning. Gibson’s talent was on full display in a wide range of pieces. They included sculptures, textiles, paintings, film, even several boxing bags. Descriptions of each piece were written by Gibson himself. (They are generally written by exhibit curators so to have Gibson’s narration was an honor!)

View of Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, July 14, 2019–September 29, 2019 (via Blanton Museum of Art)

A room of the exhibition hall was dedicated to the ghost shirt, a garment used by ghost dancers during the ceremony but reinterpreted here by Gibson. Each ghost shirt carries its own symbolism and messaging. Gibson’s use of a wide range of materials, textiles, prints, and textures allows his work to explore ideas of race, sexuality, gender, and religion. Gibson’s perspective bridges cultural practices and modern art forms and visualizes coalitions in the global struggle for Indigenous rights. Gibson wrote, “A garment acts as the mediator between the wearer–myself in this case– and the rest of the world. It can protect me, draw attention to me, celebrate me, allow me to be another version of myself.” The exhibit closed on September 29th, but you can find out more about Gibson’s work on his website.

Frank Waln’s “What Makes The Red Man Red” and “AbOriginal” are must listens. The music video for the former shows imagery and lyrics from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Scholars and social commentators have observed the obvious racism in the almost 70-year-old animated film, however, Waln’s work includes both audio clips and an answer to the question “what makes the red man red”?:

You made me red when you killed my people
Made me red when you bled my tribe
Made me red when you killed my people
(Like savages/ Like savages)

In “AbOriginal,” Waln goes home. The lyrics talk of life in his reservation— the pains, protests, and resilience that comes from his tribe.

I got this AB Original soul/ I got this AB Original flow
I got this pain that I can’t shake/ ties to my people I can’t break
Got this history in my blood/ got my tribe that shows me love
So when I rise/ you rise/ come on let’s rise like

Similarly, the music video pays tribute to Waln’s tribe and hometown in Rosebud, South Dakota. (ALSO–today he is releasing “My People Come From the Land,” a track that he worked on in collaboration with a Lakota language teacher and is his debut of playing the Native flute.)

PODS

Cherokee scholar Adrienne Keene (@NativeApprops) and Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilbur (@matikawilbur) host the All My Relations Podcast. Their podcast bridges Keene’s expertise in the history of appropriations of Native culture and Wilbur’s interest in the modern for a truly delightful podcast. Their guests include academics, tribal elders, creatives, aunties, and artists. Their latest episode, “Beyond Blood Quantum” features Charlotte Logan, Gabe Galanda, Tommy Miller, and David Wilkins, and discusses the tribal implications, legal basis, and colonial origins of blood quantum.

Rick Harp (Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation) hosts Media Indigena, with regular roundtable guests Candis Callison, Brock Pitawanakwat, Kim TallBear, and Kenneth T. Williams. The scholars, journalists, and policymakers discuss the latest developments in North American news and the direct impact on Indigenous peoples in the 21st century. The conversations are pointed and nuanced. Each guest brings their expertise and insight into the complex issues facing Indian Country. Their latest episode, which was recorded live in Edmonton, Alberta, is called “Is the Green Movement Still Too White?” and looks at the global green movement, the media attention that propelled Greta Thunberg into the spotlight, and some of the pushback from Native Twitter.

This Land, a Crooked Media podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation) is especially timely. Nagle unpacks how a 20-year-old murder case in Oklahoma made it to the Supreme Court in 2019, the history of land divisions in Indian Territory, the Trail of Tears, and the long-term ramifications for tribal sovereignty and Native land rights.

BOOKS & BOOKLISTS

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (2019) is edited by Elissa Washutta and Theresa Warburton. This is one of the best books I’ve read as a graduate student and holds a permanent place on my shelf. The collection was composed with care and intention. As the editors described it, Shapes of Native Nonfiction is meant to hold structure throughout like a basket. The collection is structured in four terms based on the basket metaphor: technique, coiling, plaiting, and twining. Each represents a different style of non-fiction writing The editors and contributors are speaking directly to the idea that the academic essay is the only valid form of nonfiction. Form here is critical to the decolonial process. The editors write, “our focus on form-conscious Native nonfiction insists on knowledge as a resource whose coercive extraction is used to narrate settler colonialism in order to normalize its structure.”(11). It is a phenomenal collection specific to individuals, peoples, and places.

Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter calls into question basic assumptions about what makes up Indigenous literature and, as the title states, why they matter. Justice’s work urges readers to expand their view of what should be considered “Indigenous Literature.” This work is accessible to the generalist and the specialist, yet acknowledges their added significance: “our literatures are just one more vital way that we have countered those forces of erasure and given shape to our own ways of being in the world…they affirm Indigenous presence– and our present.” (xix)

The Elizabeth Warren Syllabus, which seems to become timelier every year, combines the specialties of several scholars already mentioned and citizens of the Cherokee Nation: Adrienne Keene (@nativeapprops), Rebecca Nagle (@rebeccanagle), and Joseph M. Pierce (@pepepierce). The syllabus was meant to not only address Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Cherokee ancestry but to contextualize the history of such claims by non-natives to Native ancestry. The Syllabus is structured by theme and topic and generally touches on the ideas of DNA and genetic testing, Indigenous citizenship, Cherokee history, erasure, cultural appropriation, blood, and tribal sovereignty. The syllabus was published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.

Finally, one way to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day is to support the UT Native American and Indigenous Studies program and institutions that support Native students. Show up to events. Rally around causes. The NAIS Program provides an undergraduate certificate and graduate portfolio for UT students and also hosts a number of speaker series and workshops. This semester’s lineup includes Angelo Baca (Hopi/Diné), Tiya Miles, Héctor Nahuelpan (Mapuche), and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf (Mapuche). Consider attending one or several of these events.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

Photo of Alfred Crosby (via Washington Post)

By Megan Raby

This essay is adapted from Dr. Raby’s remarks at a symposium to honor Al Crosby that was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin on February 4, 2019.

Alfred Crosby’s work has been with me for a long time––actually longer than I can remember. I routinely assign Ecological Imperialism in my undergraduate course on Global Environmental History, but long before I had ever read that book, I had unknowingly encountered his work. That is, of course, through the concept of the “Columbian exchange”––also the title of his most influential book. By the time I went to elementary school, this once revolutionary way of framing the role of disease, crops, weeds, and domestic animals as central to world history was presented simply as common knowledge.

By putting environmental history at the center, Crosby replaced the older narrative of conquest with a narrative of biocultural encounter and exchange. Instead of a one-way process largely determined by European might, Crosby showed the importance of, on one hand, the great tragedy of virgin soil epidemics and indigenous demographic collapse and, on the other, the ongoing story of how the crops domesticated by the indigenous peoples of the Americas remade the landscapes and cultures of the rest of the world.

In many ways, I think we take this narrative shift for granted today. But to be taken for granted in this way is, I think, a major accomplishment for any historian…perhaps especially for an environmental historian. Even as the field continues to be one of the most rapidly growing subfields of history, many environmental historians still fear that their work remains on the fringes. Is environmental history still seen as a novelty or fad? Do our colleagues take the field seriously enough, say, to give pigs and dandelions a key place in a survey course on U.S. or world history?

Al Crosby’s feat is all the more impressive because he was essentially writing “environmental history” before there was such a thing. In interviews, he often pointed out that half a dozen presses rejected The Columbian Exchange before it finally got published in 1972––its biological perspective on European contact with the Americas was seen as just too arcane of a subject.

But only a few years later Crosby could be counted among the first generation of self-described environmental historians. Crosby was one of the founding members of the American Society for Environmental History, for example, when it was founded in 1977. There was now a new group of scholars who insisted on taking nature seriously as an actor in human history––focusing not on military conquests or presidential politics, but rather on how humans and nature have fundamentally shaped and reshaped each other.

Crosby was no longer alone, but he still stood out. And the ways in which he stood out reveal the lasting impact and relevance of his contributions.

For one thing, it is important to note that the other major founders of environmental history were, for the most part, focused on the United States and especially U.S. Western history. In contrast, Crosby’s work was truly global in scope. Rather than the one-way story of European expansion, The Columbian Exchange shows us New World crops remaking Europe, Africa, and Asia. And with Ecological Imperialism, he tested his thesis about the interplay of ecology and empire not just in the Americas, but with cases everywhere from the Canary Islands to Iceland and New Zealand. In fact, in all his books––on everything from the rise of quantification to the history of energy––Crosby explored truly global exchanges and transformations.

Some of the most groundbreaking work in transnational African and Latin American environmental history in the 1990s and 2000s––works that are themselves now classics––were in fact directly inspired by aspects of Crosby’s arguments. Elinore Melville explored the process of ecological imperialism beyond the temperate zone, by following Spanish sheep into sixteenth-century Mexico. James McCann showed how New World maize became an African staple, adapted to local cultures and climates. Judith Carney argued that rice culture in the Americas took more than just the movement of seeds; its success was dependent on the enslaved Africans who worked in the rice fields and their agricultural experiences and knowledge. These works took the interconnections between biology and cultural knowledge that Crosby himself emphasized, but pushed them into new contexts and new corners of the world.

With the sole exception of his book on the 1918 flu pandemic, Crosby’s temporal scale was as grand as his geographical scope. Recently, there has been a surge of self-described “Big Histories” or “Deep Histories” that view human history and the present through the lens of evolution, neuroscience, or even cosmology.

Crosby was doing “Big” and “Deep” history well before the arrival of these studies. The full title of Ecological Imperialism notes that it starts in 900, but in fact, its explanatory frame extends back beyond the Norse expansion into the North Atlantic. It begins 200 million years ago, with the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea, and, hence, the beginning of the evolution of quite distinct biogeographic realms in the Old and New Worlds.

This event was cataclysmic because it brought human and geological history into the same frame, in Crosby’s words:

“The seams of Pangaea were clos[ed], drawn together by the sailmaker’s needle. Chickens met kiwis, cattle met kangaroos, Irish met potatoes, Comanches met horses, Incas met smallpox––all for the first time.” (131)

This, Crosby explains––along with the penchant of Old World humans for living at close quarters with domesticated animals––was the ultimate cause of that immunological difference that made the Columbian exchange so unequal and allowed the empires of Europe their sweeping success in lands with similar climates.

Crosby brought in Pangea and the Paleolithic, but unlike some “Big Histories,” he was not trying to write a history of everything. Nor, I think, did he reduce history to geological and biological science. The scope, scale, and interdisciplinary nature of his work flowed necessarily from the kinds of questions he asked. These were indeed big questions, and also fundamentally historical questions––questions about human agency, about global inequalities in power, and about the roots of global imperialism.

At a time when others might attribute the spread of European empire to “their superiority in arms, organization and fanaticism,” Crosby had the audacity to ask, in the Prologue of Ecological Imperialism, “but what in heaven’s name is the reason that the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion?” (7)

In the years since, authors like Charles Mann and Jared Diamond have sold many books repeating or updating aspects of Crosby’s argument. Other authors have dug deeper into the theoretical frameworks he offered, building on and extending them. One example is Stuart McCook’s new work on the “neo-Columbian exchange”––by which he means a second wave of globalization of crops and plant pests since 1700, mediated by imperial scientific institutions and global corporations. Likewise, UT History PhD, Gregory Cushman, has explored the role of fertilizer in enabling a process of “neo-ecological imperialism”––the importation of nutrients and energy from far away ecosystems to prop up a new crop of colonial powers. Not coincidentally, both authors place seemingly mundane historical objects at the center of modern history––a common approach today in global histories, after Crosby’s dandelions–for McCook it is the humble cup of coffee, for Cushman it is bird poop!

In many of these direct and more subtle ways, Crosby’s influence is indelible. Crosby helped to make mosquitos and sheep a respectable topic for historians––something that might even have something to tell us about “big questions,” like the rise and fall of empires.

I really regret that I never got a chance to meet him in person. At the same time, in some ways I feel almost like I have met him because, much more than most academic writers, Crosby’s personality, his great enthusiasm for his topics, and his often wry sense of humor shine through in his writing. Crosby’s voice and approach live on as much in the expanding new scholarship of environmental history as in his own body of work––as pervasive, permanent, and familiar in the historical landscape as the plentiful dandelions that sparked his imagination.

Reinventing Modern China

By Huaiyin Li

Since the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and political elites have written about China’s “modern history” with various, often conflicting, explanatory narratives. Looking back over the last century shows that historical writing on “modern China” has evolved primarily in response to the historians’ present concerns.

Chinese soldiers marching past peasants. Chinese Stamp, 1952 (Wikipedia)

To write about modern China was to trace the historical roots of the country’s current problems in order to legitimize their solutions rather than seeking to reconstruct the past as it actually happened. From the 1930s through the 1990s, two master narratives rivaled each other to dominate history-writing in China. One is the narrative of revolution, which tells modern Chinese history as the grand process of Chinese people engaged in a century-long struggle against feudalism and imperialism, beginning with the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating in the Communist Revolution in the 1920s through 1940s.

Cultural Revolution poster- Propaganda Group of the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai No. 3 Ink Factory, 1969 (Wikipedia)

This historical narrative centers on the economic and social changes brought about by the encroachment of foreign capitalism. It accentuates the worsening livelihood of the peasantry, the vulnerability of the emerging modern economic sector, and subsequently the necessity of a political revolution for China’s healthy development. It exalts collective violence against feudal and imperialist forces and downplays the role of reformist elites and foreigners in China’s progress. In this telling, modern Chinese history lead inevitably to the Communist revolution and China’s transition to socialism.

A Chinese school for girls Che-foo China c. 1902

A school for girls in Che-foo, China, 1902 (Wikimedia Commons)

The other dominant narrative is the history of modernization, which is diametrically opposite to the revolutionary account. It sees modern Chinese history as the long-term transformation of China from an insulated, backward civilization into an industrialized and democratized society under the positive influences of the West and the reforms by enlightened elites. It necessarily leads China to the establishment of a capitalist system and Western-style democracy.

Governor General Li Hongzhang (L) and Commissioner Lin Zexu (R)

These two competing narratives give rise to contradictory accounts of individual events and assessments of historical figures. While Governor-General Li Hongzhang, for instance, was depicted in the modernization historiography as an open-minded statesman who was committed to China’s “self-strengthening” by borrowing from the West, the same person was denounced by the revolutionary historians as a traitor who was preoccupied with the aggrandizement of his own clique at the expense of China’s national interest. On the other hand, Commissioner Lin Zexu appears in the revolutionary narrative as a patriot because of his heroic acts of confiscating and destroying the opium from English traders, but the same figure is depicted in the modernization histories as an unrealistic, arrogant mandarin who cared more about his personal reputation than the security of the country.

Historians Fan Wenlan (L) and Jiang Tingfu (R)

A fundamental problem with history writing in modern China, as these instances suggest, is the politicization and teleology found in both the revolutionary and modernization literatures. For the leading historians in twentieth-century China, whether affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party or the Nationalist Party, writing about the nation’s recent history was not for the purpose of reconstructing the past as it actually happened, but “using the past to serve the present” (gu wei jin yong). Historians reinterpreted the past in order to legitimize the agendas and goals of the political forces they favored. This was true for Fan Wenlan, the most famous historian of the Chinese Communist Party, and Jiang Tingfu, a leading Nationalist historian, in the 1930s and 1940s. It was also true for almost all of the Chinese historians in the Mao era, despite the resistance of a few who adhered to the principle of “objectivity” in history-writing at the cost of their lives during the Cultural Revolution. It was even true in the 1980s and 1990s, when modern China was reinvented to render support to the reform and opening up policies of the post-Mao leadership.

Since the late 1990s, Chinese scholars have increasingly lost their interest in the grand narratives revolution and modernization and instead have shifted their attention to social and cultural histories, in particular, the history of the subaltern. In the absence of a master narrative, historical writing has become increasingly “fragmented” (sui pian hua). The in-depth study of historical events at the micro level is often achieved without making sense of the new findings in larger contexts of historical developments and theoretical debates.

Three shots from the films made in the 1980s about Long Bow village: a bride, preparations for Lunar New Year, and a Catholic village doctor. One Village in China

To overcome the problems of teleological and fragmented history, I propose a new approach to rediscovering modern China, which I term as a “within-time and open-ended history.” It is “within time” because it looks at a specific event in modern China from the point of view of the time when the event was taking place, when different possibilities for the development of the event existed simultaneously, and when participants in the event were not as conscious of its results as were historians of a later period. It is “open-ended” because it rejects the teleological historiography of revolution or modernization, in which the “ending” of the history was clearly defined on the basis of ideological assumptions. Historical representation can be closer to the realities of the past only after we overcome the results-driven, teleological approach inherent to twentieth-century Chinese historiography; and it can be more meaningful only after we put the fragmented pieces of the past back into a larger whole.

Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing
University of Hawaii Press, 2013

For more reading on Chinese history click here.

People Are Not the Same by Eric Silla (1998)

by Tosin Abiodun

This book follows an academic tradition that illuminates the historical experience of everyday people, particularly individuals and groups hidden from the limited vision of African nationalist historiography. Eric Silla, scholar and leading member of a think-tank on African Affairs in the US Department of State, brings his skill to an assessment of leprosy, otherwise known as Hansen disease, in Mali. His primary objective is to situate bodily transformations and the social identity of Malian lepers within a broad context of human experience, especially within a framework that accounts for historical changes marked by ‘big events’ such as migrations, technological innovations, bio-medicine, colonialism, political evolutions and economic innovations. The events described follow a detailed chronological order that covers much ground in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history of Mali.

Silla’s central argument is that from a historical point of view, lepers in Mali have been accorded a “stigmatized social identity.” This identity, rooted in human fear and lack of medical understanding, reduces the social power and humanity of carriers of the disease. Silla explains, for instance, that during the pre-colonial era, some agrarian communities in Mali restricted lepers from participating in ritual activities and getting married. French colonial administrators and health officials took the stigmatization of lepers a step further during the colonial period, especially when they labeled lepers who moved too close to European settlements or urban areas as “vagabonds and criminals,” instituted penal codes to restrict the migration of lepers, called for the physical confinement and segregation of lepers to agricultural leper villages and segregation camps, and created medical institutions such as the Institut Central de la Lepre, in which health directors and medical doctors fostered a martial atmosphere which made the surveillance and social control of lepers possible. The stigmatization of leprosy patients did not end with the termination of colonial rule. In Mali today, most lepers have been reduced to a beggarly status, becoming easy targets for police ‘round-ups’ and victims of unlawful incarceration.

Silla’s analysis is elevating and satisfying mainly because it gives credence to the historical agency of Malian lepers. He argues that in spite of social and political constraints, lepers in Mali found creative ways to negotiate their identity and make their demands and discontents known. For instance, during the colonial period, segregationist policy backed by French administrators failed as a result of the resistance put up by lepers. Lepers who chose to remain within medical institutions fostered a sense of communal identity and organized revolts to protest against oppressive medical administrative policies. In the post-colonial context, a number of informal associations were created by former leprosy patients to lobby for medical assistance and welfare services. The Association des Malades Lepreux du Mali instituted by leprosy sufferers in Dijkoroni quarter of Bamako serves as a clear example.

Two significant attributes make this study stand out in historiography on leprosy in Africa. First, the author delivers great scholarship with the use of a wide variety of historical materials. Archival sources consulted include French missionary documents, letters, and diaries located in Bamako, Dakar, Aix-en Provence and Rome. Other non-conventional sources used in the study include Arabic texts, linguistic evidence, and oral testimonies. Silla provides a multi-voiced narrative by conducting interviews with leprosy patients and health practitioners at Bamako’s leprosarium known as the Institut Marchoux. Second, the book offers a remarkable comparative perspective that links the experience of lepers in Mali to that of lepers in China, Brazil, Hawaii, Europe, India, West Africa and the United States.

Overall, this study is an important and consequential piece of scholarship that students of history would be advised to read. Its impressive innovative ideas set an agenda strong enough to engage the attention of social historians, medical practitioners, international organizations and policy makers for a long time.

Yoav di-Capua on Egyptians Writing History

By Yoav Di-Capua

“History,” at least as Egyptians read, write, think, and know it today, is actually of surprisingly recent origins. As both an idea and a method, it was put to work only at the very end of the nineteenth century, and in a few short decades, it had managed to completely replace a rich and venerable nine hundred year-old scholarly tradition of Islamic historiography. The shift was extremely rapid, almost automatic – and as such, it raised a few interesting questions: could non-Western countries like Indonesia, Kenya, Peru, China, or, in this case, Egypt, import the European historiographical model in a fashion that would satisfy their cultural and political needs, or is history-writing culturally bound? If the European model is adopted, what should these societies do, and what have they done so far, with their centuries-old historiographical traditions? More specifically, which dynamics have characterized the career of modern historiography in Egypt during the past century and what can we learn from them? Below are a few reflections that may bring us a step closer to understanding how some societies outside the European tradition “think with history.” Most importantly, they challenge us to ask to what degree we can say the modern mode of history writing is universal.

In Egypt, until the mid-nineteenth century, Islamic historiography accounted for all things past through an extraordinarily diverse range of written and oral forms. These genres are unique to the degree that in some cases, we do not have proper equivalences for them in English: khitat (geographical and ethnographic surveys), tarajim and tabaqat (biographical dictionaries), rihla (travel literature), in addition to chronicles, diaries and world histories. By approaching the past through multiple written genres Islamic historiography created a mélange of mythical, literary, poetic and ontological writing that allowed readers to re-experience the past as intimately as possible. Indeed, experiencing the past, that is, invoking the lost aesthetic sense of past times, was an important historiographical ideal.

Similar to all other branches of Islamic knowledge, the procedures for making sense out of the past placed God’s hand, or will, at the center of the work. In that sense, as in many other medieval cultures including European Christianity, history had a strong philosophical bond with theology. With God situated at the center of history, the task that fell to Muslim historians was not so much to explain human actions as it was to exemplify known truths and turn them into moral models. This was another historiographical ideal.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, classic Islamic historiography was still functioning. It left us, for example, with a rich and beautifully written account of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. But just seven decades later, this tradition was dead. How did this happen? The answer is that it was replaced by “historicism,”—the basic modern European mindset which seeks to establish the causal and scientific origins of any given phenomenon. Although it is not well known, historicism was, in fact, Europe’s number one intellectual export to the colonial world. Coupled with Darwinism, it established a new cultural gold standard for thinking about how the past shapes the present. Given the fact that during this time Egypt was drawn closer and deeper into the global economic order, for instance by building the Suez Canal in 1869, historicism became an irresistible habit of mind.

Historicism differed markedly from the Islamic historical model. Islamic historiography recorded all meaningful events on a monthly or annual basis in a kind of immersive fashion, usually without an overarching narrative and without a consistent commitment to establish causal relationships between them or to aspire to find objective empirical truth in the past. But historicism advocated both causality and objectivity. By the 1880s, the modernized educated classes had embraced historicism and had begun to view Islamic historiography as a fictional account full of forgery, myth and childish miracles. Losing its cultural credibility and seeing its practitioners marginalized by new classes, the diverse tradition of Islamic historiography completely collapsed.

By the early 1900s it began to be widely recognized that because of its teleological and narrative properties, modern history writing could be used to legitimate and justify political action. As young nationalist politicians began composing their first books, the strong affiliation between history writing and popular nationalism became quite obvious. Increasingly, the subject-matter of history writing became the nation-state and the forces that created it, and, equally important, who should represent it. This new focus situated the historical method at the heart of a political struggle between fervent nationalist parties and a paternalistic monarchy. In 1920, faced with the possibility of losing the historical battle over the place of the monarchy in modern Egyptian history and hence, his very legitimacy to rule, King Fuad established Egypt’s first and only historical archive. The archive was housed in his downtown Cairo residence, the ‘Abdin palace, safely within his reach and just a few floors below his bedroom.

This was no ordinary archive but an all-inclusive, in-house operation that offered custom-tailored collection of documents, translation of source material, guidance on how to do archival work, free office space and paid residency, editing, publishing and international marketing. It thus provided an umbrella of services beginning with collecting source material and ending with the publication of close to eighty thick tomes on modern Egyptian history. All of these publications were written by paid European historians in French, Italian and English and were thus internationally visible.

In supporting this formulation, the ‘Abdin archive manipulated source material, introduced selective translations, and effectively created the myth that there are not now, nor were there ever, alternative sources for the study of Egyptian history. Because of the archive’s politicized and selective structure, all books researched there ended up showing how the monarchy had fathered modern Egypt. The roles of ordinary Egyptians such as peasants, women, and the poor were ignored. Such an undemocratic politics of knowledge instilled the sense that the past is dangerous and must be controlled.

Modern historiography requires institutions: universities, professional associations, conferences, seminars, fellowships and of course, libraries and archives. But it also requires a professional culture or an ethos. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the colonial world, the formation of such an ethos was a middle-class enterprise, which began in the late 1920s in close cooperation with the royal archive. Under the leadership of the Western-trained historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, a close community of followers developed a professional creed that included four elements: a) the designation of a body of esoteric historical knowledge that practitioners were required to master, (b) professional autonomy in controlling the work and its practitioners, (c) a bid for monopoly of historical knowledge, and (d) the creation of an ideal of service which was both a commitment and an ethical imperative. Given the commanding presence of the royal ‘Abdin project, professionals believed that the methodological process of historical investigation was bound to yield objective scientific truth. This newly-constituted notion of professionalism served as an important identity codifier for these historians, and they used it, along with their ‘Abdin-based notion of scientific objectivity, to fend off competition from popular nationalist historians.

One such excluded historian was ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi’i. Al-Rafi’i was by far the most prolific and popular chronicler of nationalist Egyptian politics and the author of a series of books that flew in the face of the monarchical party line, arguing that it was in fact the Egyptian people who had created modern Egypt. A political adversary of the King, he was banned from working in the archive and had to make do with journalistic accounts and interviews. In the eyes of the newly-emerging professional academics, his politics and his usage of journalistic sources branded him an unprofessional amateur. Though shunned by the Egyptian academy, his popularity soared among ordinary Egyptians. He became Egypt’s foremost nationalist historian. The legacy of this early experiment with professionalism was a debate that haunts Egyptian historians to this very day: who has the right to tell the history of Egypt? The absence of a politically neutral archive, providing documents for verifying competing historical arguments contributes to this state of affairs. Yet, the revolutionary events of the last few months are likely to radically change this dynamic.

Contemporary History as Taboo

Reacting to the use and abuse of history under the monarchy, the 1952 Revolution that overthrew the King eliminated the ‘Abdin project and much of the academy that had supported it. Under the guidance of the revolutionary state, a new attitude toward the past promoted celebratory accounts of the nation and its leader. This self-congratulatory historiographical logic prescribed the writing of patriotic accounts of liberation and struggle that were useful for the formation of collective national identity and group cohesion, but useless as public critique. Since the state and the nation were practically indistinguishable, critical historiography of the sort that questioned established political patterns, habits and trends was treated as unpatriotic, dangerous and, ultimately, illegitimate.

And so, beginning in the 1950s, the state refused to share its records with the citizens and systematically frustrated the possibility of using the past in order to establish a critical account of the nation’s affairs. In doing so, it established the notion that contemporary history writing was a taboo. Even after the surprising and crushing military defeat of 1967, civic forces were unable to examine historical documents to investigate the failure and understand its causes. Other major events in contemporary Egyptian history, such as the controversial 1979 Peace Treaty with Israel, also remain virtually unknown. Deprived of state records and with a predominant disdain for historiographical critique, the public-regime interaction lacks transparency and accountability. A few decades later, by the 1980s, a host of Egyptian historians, pundits, writers and novelists began talking about the death of the modern Egyptian historical consciousness. Though at the same time, historians who studied the politically irrelevant medieval past, faced little or no state opposition.

A Universal Practice?

Reflecting on a century of historical thought and writing, one can say that the endurance of the historiographical apparatus that arrived in Egypt a little more than a century ago was dependent on the thriving of a democratic and transparent political culture. The absence of such conditions, the manipulation of the archives by the state, along with the inherently alien philosophical origins of modern history writing, triggered a chronic questioning of the historicist values (objectivity, accuracy, accountability, transparency and truthfulness), historical concepts (change, reform, revolution and continuity), historical themes (the nation-state), and organizational forms (training and accessibility to historical records). Thus, more than questioning the past itself, it is the mode of its interpretation, which was constantly being questioned. Such evidence casts doubt on the alleged universal tradition of history writing. Standing on the doorstep of a new political cycle, one that promises to be more democratic and open, the method of Egyptian history is ready for a new re-configuration.

Yoav di Capua, Gate Keepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt

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