Thinking Historically From the Racial Margins

• In Event: 63.081 - Teaching History in a Racially Diverse Democracy

Abstract

Objectives
How can history pedagogy account for the relationships racially marginalized students have to the history discipline? How do historians account for the ways experiences of marginalization impact historical thinking in the present? How can history classrooms grapple with the conflicts between subjective experience and the goal of objective historical knowledge? This paper first locates these questions through historiography within the broader discipline, and then asserts the specific historiographic insights of several feminist and Afro-Caribbean scholars in order to make historical thinking pedagogy more effective for classrooms comprised of racially marginalized students.

Theoretical Framework
In order to account for racialized experiences in historical thinking, we must first establish social theories of race and racialization. The works of Frantz Fanon, Charles Mills, and Anibal Quijano assert Eurocentrism as foundational, underlying both material lived realities, and how people experience and interpret the world. Frantz Fanon (2008) and Charles Mills (1997) expose the line distinguishing being and non-being, which then determines of who is capable of being a subject of history, prior to any questions of recovering histories of the “other.” Anibal Quijano (2000) asserted that the coloniality of power manifests through Eurocentrism to create a global hierarchy of knowledge. These forces have shaped the history discipline in whose knowledge, documents, and interpretations are privileged and legitimized.

Methods and Sources of Evidence
David Lowenthal (1998) cautioned against historical work that seeks redemption of one’s heritage because it can warp history for the sake of people in the present at the expense of historical accuracy. Nonetheless, people of color’s encounters with history are frequently shaped by prior relationships and experiences with the history discipline. The first section looks to historiographic writing by established historians to consider the particularities of the historian in the present. Specifically, R. G. Collingwood, Walter Benjamin, and Hans Georg Gadamer each consider the role of the historian in the present, pointing to central disagreements and assertions within the methods of doing history. The second section engages historiography from the marginal spaces of feminist (Susan Buck-Morss and Joan Wallach Scott) and Afro-Caribbean scholarship (Sylvia Wynter, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, and David Scott). What can be learned from historians of marginalized groups about the methods for doing history? For example, Joan Scott (1991) directly addresses the question of what sort of evidence racialized/gendered experiences can play within historical knowledge.

Scholarly Significance
This research builds on previous work on the impact students’ cultural/racial backgrounds have on their historical thinking (Barton & McCully, 2005; Epstein, 2008; Porat, 2004). Unfortunately, too many history classrooms reaffirm identities through broadening the progressive multicultural narrative. By turning to historians from the margins, history classrooms can offer more rigorous methods of historical thinking that directly build on and support students’ racialized experiences with history. Those experiences of marginalization ought to allow history to open up our thinking rather than reify what we want historical evidence to tell us. In order to develop historical thinking for a racially diverse classroom, we must turn to the racially diverse history discipline and historiography.

Author

• Tadashi Dozono, California State University - Channel Islands