World History’s Narrative Problem

Abstract

Asking Latin Americanists to think about their region in the context of world history provokes an anxious sort of tallying. Does Latin America receive adequate attention in world history courses and textbooks? Within that query lies a justified suspicion: world history as taught in the United States does often relegate Latin America to abbreviated sections and asides, particularly in pre-columbian and postcolonial eras.1 This is not a simple oversight, easily redressed by drawing the field’s gaze southward. It is rather, I think, the product of an incomplete theorization of the narrative frames of ignorance. Latin America and other marginalized places might be better served—and the history of the world better conveyed—by rewriting the fundamental story.The teaching of world history is the site of recurring struggle in the United States over the nation’s relationship to the rest of the world: what it is, what it should be, and how it should be portrayed to young people. Proponents of world history have, in the subfield’s various iterations over the course of the twentieth century, been motivated by similar issues, such as well-founded dismay at North Americans’ scanty knowledge of foreign places beyond the West or the need to chart an alternative to a worldview myopically focused on Europe.2 These concerns have rarely been addressed until recently, when world history courses finally began to make headway against their closest curricular rival, Western Civ, thanks to the momentum generated by decolonization and attendant social movements. The radical social contexts behind world history’s firm foothold today often go unacknowledged, since the field in general is far from radical (the term probably fits neither the World History Association, nor its president, William McNeill, for example). Yet, particularly in circles friendly to postcolonial and poststructuralist thinking, scholars engage world history with generous but exacting critiques. They neither ignore nor reject it, but strive to push world history to fulfill its potential: to revise notions of center and periphery, civilized and savage, self and other, and other discursive buttresses of inequality.Such engagement produces justifiable complaints about the ways most world history monographs, textbooks, and syllabi incompletely sever their ties to Western Civ. Too many world history courses, critics observe, simply add non-European regions without changing the story, producing a Western Civ with “add-ons” or an “Afro-Asian fig leaf.”3 (Alas, even in this critique, the Americas remain naked.) They note that Europe too often retains the status of the universal or poses as the origin of ideas or trends that are then developed elsewhere (the “first in the West, then on to the rest” logic). European themes such as nationalism, the displacement of agricultural society, industrial urban growth, capitalism, and so on, are imposed inappropriately elsewhere.4 Further concern centers on world history’s comfort with the large, structural building blocks of Western Civ, whether of time, geographic space (continents, nations, etc.), or epistemology (“history” and “reason”). These structures are left undisturbed even when world history flips the focus squarely from Europe to not-Europe, an approach that allows for greater depth of coverage but little disruption of Eurocentric assumptions.5These are valid expositions of world history’s failure to move beyond Euro-centrism, and they are points that any scholar in the field ought carefully to heed. Still, I find it less useful to understand the problem as one of Eurocentrism than as one of narrative. What world history fails to transcend, I think, is not simply Eurocentrism, but narrative itself (bracketing, for a moment, the possibility that the two may be inseparable). World history’s central problem is the fuzziness of its story. “Unlike the Western Civilization course,” as Stanley Burstein has observed, “which is built around a generally agreed-upon story, there is currently no agreement concerning either the story that might under-gird the world history course or the goals of the course.”6This deficit is the result of deliberate decisions on the part of many world history teachers, who acknowledge that familiar refrains emerge to co-opt even narrative gestures intended in entirely other directions. They instead prefer to try not to tell any story at all. Others, mindful of the erasures inflicted by meta-narrative, attempt to present multiple narratives that cannot be knit into one, such as the rubric Roxann Prazniak terms “global history.”7 This is the route taken in the highly useful, state-of-the-art world history textbook put together by Robert Tignor and his Princeton team, which aims to provide “not a single, sweeping narrative, but multiple histories, simultaneously together and apart.”8 Yet another group, dominated by scholars located in postcolonial studies, tries to locate stories that radically depart from conventional historical narratives. Dipesh Chakrabarty urges scholars to listen for histories outside the logic of capital, while Ashis Nandy supports “ahistorical” constructions of the past, Ranajit Guha resists “Reason,” and Walter Mignolo calls for macronarratives that begin from Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality—narratives that are “not the counterpart of world or universal history, but a radical departure from such global projects.”9History’s affinity for narratives makes these approaches difficult. In its simplest sense, as a story, narrative is an inescapable aspect of historical thinking. The density of the philosophical-historical debate over narrative can be distracting from this truism.10 Describing change over time necessarily produces a story. An implicit storyline will emerge to contextualize even the most analytic, quantitative research. The reader will fill in the backdrop to a “snapshot,” whether the author does so or not.11 Telling history without imparting a narrative of this sort lies somewhere beyond the range of the awkward and into the realm of the impossible. History without the story?—interrupted tautology, insurmountable paradox.More practicable than the refusal of narrative are attempts to tell multiple or ahistorical stories, stories outside capital, stories that resist the rational, and so on. Still, these are hardly simple solutions, in part because they demand a Herculean deferral of understanding. The teller of such tales must relax a strict hold on “reason” and convey research subjects’ lives and worlds without altogether understanding them. This is something most people who have survived the profound indoctrinations of graduate school are more than reluctant to do. I sometimes feel that I glimpse, out of the corner of my mind’s eye, a Chakrabartyian “history 2” or one of Nandy’s “ahistorical” narratives. In my writing, I ask colleagues to pause and remain with me in acknowledgement of our inability to know key aspects of our common past. Whether these are satisfying strategies remains to be seen. But to convey them to a group of distracted skeptics, by which I mean a class of undergraduates?Students’ receptions of world history are essential measures of the field’s success, for teaching is world history’s primary reason for being. The classroom is the site of its conceptualization and elaboration. The field’s curricular innovation, which has transformed postdoctoral research as well as introductory-level college teaching, has substantially come from “below,” from high school teachers and courses.12 It is in front of a classroom that most historians first encounter world history, since many more teach the subject than consider it their research concentration. This will hold all the more true for HAHR readers, since as students of not-Europe and not-the-USA, Latin Americanists are disproportionately likely to find themselves in front of a world history classroom. World history does not have the luxury enjoyed in academic fields directed principally to other professionals, with students as apprentices and onlookers. “World history, as it exists today is, above all, a pedagogical field.”13 The classroom is its proving ground. It is in the crucible of the classroom, where multiple stories resolve into one, fragments find homes in fully narrative casings, and illogic shifts until it fits expectations of rational thought, that world history comes up short against its narrative problem. The trouble involves academics’ wide reluctance to recognize that “ignorance” is fully narrative and carefully constructed. This pedagogical misconception allows teachers to hope their instruction will redress North Americans’ ignorance of the rest of the world. Such a hope assumes ignorance is lack and students’ minds blank slates to be filled with information. There is no such lack. People are bombarded with details of faraway places and long-ago times as they move through their daily lives. Through print media, commodity packaging, the built environment, art, popular culture, and more, people encounter compelling narratives of the local and the global, self and other, now and then. Caching what is useful and filtering much of the rest, people deal with the chaotic barrage of “facts” in a range of individualized ways, guided by the general outlines some term “ideology,” “dominant discourse,” or “hegemony.”These guidelines, for the most part, are narrative. They are full sentences, in the conventional syntax of one or another European language. The most prominent story, still, is the rise of the West, the advance of progress, and the battle between civilization and barbarism, imagined at times fantastically but always in resolutely racialized terms. This quintessential narrative of Western Civ is ubiquitous; I am constantly astonished at how unimaginative it allows even the most creative people and industries to remain. Take Hollywood: from The Matrix to Lord of the Rings, including all their epic forebears from the Star Wars saga to C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (a candidate for the big screen, if I were the betting sort), audiences are treated to the same stale story, in gorgeous, emotionally evocative, highly pleasurable segments. An interracial or interspecies coalition of good guys, led by a foreordained messiah, triumphs over a voiceless army manipulated by an evil genius. The liberated primitives are appropriately grateful. Large juxtapositions of species groups allegorize civilizational hierarchies, from Star Wars’ stylizations of national and ethnic characteristics to Lord of the Rings’ overt staging of epic struggle between dark, ugly, Orientalized trolls and the white wizard’s army of white people, diversified through that highly convincing trope of difference, height (what were they thinking?)These narrative fortresses bow to postwar, decolonized sensibilities with a light gloss of “tolerance.” They wear the mantle of multiculturalism, that banalization of the powerful antiracist claims levied by twentieth-century social movements. This framework flexes to contain narratives of irreducible difference, to reduce them to a feel-good, “I’m ok, you’re ok” relativism, devoid of power and pain. A colleague told me of the praise his course on indigenous peoples of the Americas receives in student evaluations: “I loved this class because it showed me that no matter how different people are, deep down they’re all the same.”14 As a sophisticated scholar committed to the impossibility of knowing “what the indigenous were really like,” my colleague reads these comments and pulls out his hair. Multiculturalism sands down jagged incompatibilities and synthesizes multiplicity into its sturdy scaffold of “unity in difference.” E Pluribus, Unum—rah rah. Sighs George Yúdice, “It seems multiculturalism ended up being the new Americanism.”15 This easy compatibility with U.S. nationalism sneaks back in all the banished Eurocentrist overtones of Western Civ, leaving the student right back where she knew all along she wanted to begin.If world history teachers fail to disrupt the narratives students bring into the classroom, they will merely lodge a handful of facts among the narrativized images already there: Ethiopian goatherds absorbed alongside cappuccinos and chola fashion tips gleaned from Bratz dolls.16 Simply telling students what we think they do not know assumes a passive relationship between “facts” and narrative, feeding the frustrations of those students who already see history as a flaccid, forgettable subject.17 Though narrative currents are made up of droplets of facts, facts alone cannot reroute those powerful currents. Narrative construction is an active process in which people make the best sense possible of the world around them. People choose narratives, and fit facts to those narratives, in ways that will be useful to them.18 Ignorance emerges from this not entirely conscious, but nonetheless careful, selection.In this active process of narrative construction, world history runs into the same problem encountered by any revisionist historical project. As Barbara Jeanne Fields has argued eloquently, people develop ideologies of inequality to naturalize existing or emerging social divisions.19 Privileged subjects tend to construct narratives that protect their privilege. We all work hard to remember and forget in a manner that can and the ways the we to protect it the of are a in and Ignorance is not the of but the of college students of simply by of their class and national all the more so do North college Though social and the of that a many remain committed to narratives that and protect the of national and class the ignorance that world history this time around to world history’s of facts through their highly the structures of understanding that them to forget Latin and other without including those at world history to acknowledge and this it might begin to In the of are a handful of measures that might move world history in this The first to a that is more and The an course that attempts to to these narrative can how the ideas and that North tend to to on the rest of the world. This is the story that can the Americas as Walter Aníbal and their as an essential of global capitalism, and so on, than and It is, in a sense, the from the of This is the narrative that as resist the that European ideas were and by the and to them by of in or Europe this story must including his Europe ideas and in on and must an understanding of the ways or subjects and but any geographic is not the same as the world as and as do scholars such as or their are useful for world historians of all their stories of already when they other than in They as has with its culture, as an and against other This is the taught the classroom and outside of the hold this story has on our a story of that outside of that is not story, of how the West made the rest and the rest made the West a for a of the world. It from the of Europe or the West, the that ideas from the to this story, world history might begin to the story of Western Civ, for in this the is no more, no than the of such a sort of approach lies to what many scholars are in this is intended to this field from history, the of as history that over national greater and than the have guided history, history, and their focus is less compelling for historians of which in part the of by social and history does not simply more it is not to world must choose whether to go or these choose the history some for for it can social through and But it is among the more fields to teach there is the problem of much historians to do to in the classroom a for to than a world sense of their field as those and that work their on a large, or even global as that some move in these while are The that some are global and are not a to to students the of the rest to the In any or are there not from all these into the of students of approaches out to be then as scholars of and have historians to ask about those social of the subject of so from to students of the will their of and these guidelines, world historians not to the we now They not be with from the of world history, which the of the think the of global in local contexts is the of those even if in multiple who these will have to something my world history as a from world history as we know of the most courses have taken such a from of by and World history who to them might choose a world from their story and ask it to as the world of ideas one might choose a concept such as such as or of people, or so a such as or currents are or In the realm of culture, any or do. As a student of and of the twentieth century, I world history of global and and I or my students or might in a twentieth-century world history course be in the light of this The of the and America and be in of the of and that the which people and to of building and in the Americas and and be as the more to the for World the the rise of culture, the the the and in from to to the be in for all and the of global but it local and its and has been art, and sometimes and has the of the and has and about people, is what is what is In the United States it has guided and and It has the of and the of and the of It has some of the most of antiracist and on its civilized and has been into the most In the the most likely to see the of the In it to the of the world. In and from a As that the of high it a to and a of antiracist is more, of that as much of their local context as of the of or the currents it with my the local of over the course of the twentieth century, we all have to and tell other stories, local of and by their to is a good of a world history that Latin America because so much of the and the we now of the and along the United States these and not in the Americas but in the of and that loved these the most people hold about that it the product of that it generated in a key and that in some it in a of the behind the of of and all its and the of between and any of its can It can bring students to consider power and in an that to hold The U.S. and its global power to North in some the marginalized the nation’s not The term to a of popular as the national of it above the other and other that themselves into the of out the process of and the course to the filtering process through which are and whether it have been power been appropriately for a Latin one of the many feeding and the that led to to have in over without the Such a a over the of culture, it to be from so many directions. students were to from the of to the of and other of they the social of the full of with which we our attempt to a more and to approach the teaching of world history is far from a Whether its are is entirely high school world history teachers, who teach to a rarely be to in this But might high school teachers who taken a college course in this be better than those who the They not have but they have their it time to teach world history in their they be better to and teach world history may historians to teach world history, but so far they do not to do so as they the of the Americas and the of the historians of Latin America have a a tell stories that in the construction of and in the of the for generous and to Stanley Barbara and

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