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estebanana -> RE: What´s up with the lisp? (Oct. 4 2014 0:02:43)
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quote:
Actually, many critics who have a good understanding of the Western European/American canon of history and culture, as well as of historiography in the research and writing of history, do have a realistic grasp of cultural history. Cultural history, i.e., the application of the field of "Cultural Studies" to the writing of history, has been around for about 25 years. The field of "Cultural Studies" is not the same thing as the study of cultures. But it has been incorporated into the writing of history by various "postmodernist," "post-structuralist," and "post-colonial" writers, many of whom are not even historians. They often ignore well-recognized historiographical methods, often depending on peoples "stories," and most demonstrate a decidedly anti-Eurocentric, anti-Western, anti-Neoliberal bias. Two of their patron saints are Edward Said and the ever-dependable Michel Foucault, neither of whom were historians.
You speak of irony. Let me give you an amusing example of irony. Cultural studies and postmodernist history have found their way to the non-Western world. Yet, cultural theories and their relationship to the non-Western world remain paradoxical. A good example is the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty seeks to contest Western intellectual hegemony, and he has used the approaches of postmodernism to criticize Eurocentrism. But the irony is that most of the elements of his critiques have been derived from Western sources. V.S. Naipaul would be amused, as he so often has written of the post-colonial world's attempts to chart an independent course, only to end up aping their former colonial masters.
I agree with the idea you bring up of watering down the discipline of straight up history with all the "posties", you have to understand the canon before you can revise it, right?
Specifically, in an oblique way, I was pointing those on Foro who use art history in rants without first understanding the contexts and works of the artists they compare to Stalin and Hitler. What I find ironic, maddening and plain sad, is that these artists works are misused as political discussion chips and ridiculed unfairly by a person who's knowledge is 100 years ( if that) behind the times in scholarship and historical understanding. And misused so forcefully as to push out any others with more knowledge who might be able to elucidate some of the real histories of these artists. and correct some, if not all, of the FACTUAL errors this writer makes. Ya'll are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. It peeves me that some think they can change facts and create an aggressive argument, no rant, based on *made up facts* and think it suffices as civil discourse.
So Bill as the other Bill said, I feel your pain.
This is exactly what you are talking about, making a 'Postie' argument and using history in a narrow self serving special interest.
As far as Said and Foucault and the likes, Ok here's the deal: if you like hot sauce on your fries and you put a few dabs on great, that is good. But if you put the whole bottle on three fries, not so tasty. Same goes, in my opinion, with the stream of Western history, if writers come in who are not historians and write about epistemology, power relationships between cultures a levels of society etc, then those texts when read in contrast to the main stream view can serve as mirroring devices to open up new ways of thinking about the trajectory and implications of histories by directing some critical thought at how the history was put together.
I have to cut short, but two thoughts- Postie-isms in and of themselves do not make for good histories or history writing; too often now a revisionist take on history is a chic way of saying that an author is reexamining a history due to new facts (I say FACTS) coming to light. What is pushed into a revisionist mold, is really just what should happen to history, it should be checked and rechecked as documents become declassified, and new evidence in the field is found. Good thing is most older academics now remember that the post this -post that phenomena was a European academic trend from the 1960's and in that era took ten years for this teaching to become embedded and taught in the US, by which time it was obsolete. Now news travels faster and academic trends play out faster.
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