About benefits and harms of rewriting history. One of the topics of contemporary historical discourses: philosophical analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol - (2) ◽  
pp. 142-164
Author(s):  
Roman Zimovets
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Identity Transformation ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rewriting History ◽  
Historical Discourses ◽  
Global Communications

When we talk about historical revisionism, negative connotations as a rule are prevailing. Prohibition of revision of certain historical interpretation and assessment is one of the tasks of historical policy which is carried out by adopting so-called «memorial laws». Taking care of the formation of the desired representations of the past (narratives) is directly related to the interests of institutionalized power in its own stabilization and strengthening. Power is a function of the community, whose identity is formed historically. Consolidation of collective identity through the support and reproduction of common representations of the past is one of the tools to strengthen power. At the same time, the very nature of human experience acquisition which is permanent mediation of the horizon of the past and the present, presuppose a reinterpretation of this past. Major shifts in the experience of generations, which occur as a result of certain social changes, lead to a new look at the past of the community. In this sense, rethinking and rewriting history becomes necessary to clarify, update, rationalize the collective identity, which is problematized by new experience. Historical policy can both respond to this need for identity transformation through re- thinking representations of one’s own past and come into conflict with it. In the latter case, the narratives transferring by institutional power begin to conflict with the communicative memory of the generation experiencing a shift. One of the tools of self-preservation of power in this situation is blocking of living historical experience, which can take various forms. The culmination of such a blockade is «hermetization» of historical time that take place in totalitarian state. The living historicity of experience, which requires a constant rethinking of one’s own historically inherited identity, is replaced by an artificial, time-frozen identity, which, precisely because of this nature, becomes fragile and doomed to destruction. On the other hand, the rewriting of history initiated by the authorities within the framework of historical policy may face resistance to the representations of the past rooted in the communicative and cultural memory. The resistance of historical narratives indicates that the collective memory and the identity founded in it are not only a power construct, but also a spontaneous layering of sediments of historical experience. In today’s world of global communications and unified everyday practices, historical narratives are beginning to play an increasing role, as they remain the only seat of identity. At the same time, this process reinforces the conflict potential of communities, which can be observed in many examples of the revival of historically motivated political ambitions. In this situation, a critical clarification of various interpretations of the past becomes a means of rationalizing the historically inherited identity of communities as a necessary condition for intercultural dialogue.

Collective Memory and the Stakes of Power. A Reading of Popular Zairian Historical Discourses

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 195-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogumil Jewsiewicki
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Code ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legitimate Power ◽  
Basic Facts ◽  
Historical Discourses ◽  
The Relationship

For me collective memory is neither a narrative nor collective knowledge of the past (a sort of historical consensus). Contrary to past accounts, be they public or private, memory does not have a narrative form and is thus not of the literary kind (oral or written). Collective memory is above all a semantic code of memorization and of rememorization; it is, as well, a hierarchy of values which structures a discourse in the past while rooting it in the present. Collective memory gives meaning to the past and bears in mind certain places, facts, dates, and persons around which the memory or memories which also legitimate power build themselves. The relationship between a particular remembrance and its basic facts finds its prime meaning here. In this sense collective memory supports and rationalizes collective identity and, contrary to social fiction, offers a “definitive” reading as it bears on real, even though elapsed, relationships. Collective memory thus rejoins and often reinforces fiction and supports role and behavioral stereotypes, etc.“En ce temps là le roi regardant dans sa maison à Bruxelles il étudiait les nouvelles venant de l'Afrique et dans ses nouvelles plusieurs tribus ont montré que les vivres et les matériaux de travail (n'arrivaient) pas à temps après l'expédition de l'Europe et le Roi Léopold II jetta un coup d'oeil sur l'Atlas (carte géographique) du pays et il dit: on trouvera la route pour faire passer les matériaux de travail, un racourci pour faire le chemin de fer rapidement pour que je puisse envoyer plus rapidement les matériaux en Afrique ainsi on aura pas besoins de porteurs.

History and Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alon Confino
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Methodological Approaches

This chapter describes how memory has shaped the academic discipline of history. In the past two decades or so, ‘memory’ as a category to analyze and understand the relation of human beings to their past has become a nearly ubiquitous concept. Triggered jointly by the general crisis of representationalism and by a specific historical experience—the Holocaust—‘memory’ has replaced for some scholars a rather linear and monodimensional concept of ‘society’. Whereas in the past, memory was considered to be subjective and unreliable, it has now moved to centre-stage: it is in individual and collective memory that the past remains present in the contemporary agent. Memory, captured in methodological approaches such as oral history, also foregrounds the historical experience of ordinary people and thus carries the potential to counterbalance official, state-focused, and politically legitimate historical narratives, as well as those more broadly sanctioned by the academic enterprise.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Helen Keller ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Biographical scholarship provides a means by which to understand the past. Disability biography writes disabled people into historical narratives and cultural discourses, acknowledging power, action, and consequence. Disability biography also analyzes the role of ableism in shaping relationships, systems of power, and societal ideals. When written with skilled storytelling, rigorous study, nuance, and insight, disability biography enriches analyses of people living in the past. Disability biography makes clear the multiple ways by which individuals and communities labor, make kinship, persevere, and both resist and create social change. When using a disability analysis, biographies of disabled people (particularly people famous for their disability, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Helen Keller) reveal the relationality and historically embedded nature of disability. In an ableist world, such acts can be revolutionary.

The Specter of the Past: Reconstructing Conservative Historical Memory in South Korea

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-362
Author(s):  
Myungji Yang
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
New Right ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right

Through the case of the New Right movement in South Korea in the early 2000s, this article explores how history has become a battleground on which the Right tried to regain its political legitimacy in the postauthoritarian context. Analyzing disputes over historiography in recent decades, this article argues that conservative intellectuals—academics, journalists, and writers—play a pivotal role in constructing conservative historical narratives and building an identity for right-wing movements. By contesting what they viewed as “distorted” leftist views and promoting national pride, New Right intellectuals positioned themselves as the guardians of “liberal democracy” in the Republic of Korea. Existing studies of the Far Right pay little attention to intellectual circles and their engagement in civil society. By examining how right-wing intellectuals appropriated the past and shaped triumphalist national imagery, this study aims to better understand the dynamics of ideational contestation and knowledge production in Far Right activism.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION: HISTORY FROM BETWEEN AND THE GLOBAL CIRCULATIONS OF THE PAST IN ASIA AND EUROPE, 1600–1950

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
LEIGH K. JENCO ◽  
JONATHAN CHAPPELL
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Subjective Feeling ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Introduction History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Abstract This article argues for a ‘history from between’ as the best lens through which to understand the construction of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe. ‘Between’ refers to the space framed by East Asia and Europe, but also to the global circulations of ideas in that space, and to the subjective feeling of embeddedness in larger-than-local contexts that being in such a space makes possible. Our contention is that the outcomes of such entanglements are not merely reactive forms of knowledge, of the kind implied by older studies of translation and reception in global intellectual history. Instead they are themselves ‘co-productions’: they are the shared and mutually interactive inputs to enduring modes of uses of the past, across both East Asian and European traditions. Taking seriously the possibility that interpretations of the past were not transferred, but rather were co-produced between East Asia and Europe, we reconstruct the braided histories of historical narratives that continue to shape constructions of identity throughout Eurasia.

Studying Palestinian-Israeli Relations at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA)

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-40
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Television News ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
P 16 ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Words And Images

For the Past Five Decades, media texts, broadcast over television air waves, have created a shared identity among viewing audiences. John B. Thompson notes that if culture is understood as “the ways in which meaningful expressions of various kinds are produced, constructed and received by individuals”, then mass media can be understood as central to the creation and maintenance of culture (pp. 122-23). The words and images that construct a media culture are the very building blocks of collective identity. As Michael Schudson observes, “news is part of the background through which and with which people think” (p. 16).

Historical Narratives and Understanding

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Stefan Petkov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epistemic Criteria

This paper defends the view that narratives that bring understanding of the past need not be exhaustively analyzable as explanatory inferences, nor as causal narratives. Instead of treating historical narrative as explanations, I argue that understanding of history can be analyzed by the general epistemic criteria of understanding. I explore one such criterion, which is of chief importance for good historical narratives: potential inferential power. As a corollary, I dispute one of the distinctive features of narratives described by some philosophers: the non-aggregativity of narrative histories. Instead, I propose that historical narratives modestly aggregate and this aggregation depends on the success of the colligatory concepts they offer.

Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

Formation and development of the licensing and licensing system in the Russian State: historical and legal analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (03) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
Anatoly Kononov ◽  
Lyudmila Standzon ◽  
Elena Emelyanova
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Public Life ◽  
State Institution ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The Past ◽  
Russian State ◽  
The Social

The administrative reform that has been permanently carried out in Russia over the past decade, as well as the ongoing efforts to eliminate administrative barriers in business, lead to increased interest in the historical experience of solving issues of optimizing public administration in various spheres of public life and the economy of the country. An important place among them is occupied by the issue of improving licensing and permitting activities. The article examines the historical experience of the formation and development of the licensing and licensing system in Russia, and suggests the author’s periodization of this area of history. The author analyzes the social and economic conditions in which the formation and development of this state institution took place, examines the content of normative legal acts adopted at different stages of national history.

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