Practical historians and adversaries: 9/11 revisited

Abstract

This article extends the idea of ‘structured immediacy’ (Leudar et al., 2008b) by investigating methods that adversaries use to make the past relevant and consequential in conflicts. Our strategy was to revisit our analysis of political discourse immediately following the 9/11 attacks in the USA (Leudar et al., 2004; Leudar and Nekvapil, 2007). We did this to document what the adversaries did as ‘practical historians’. We found that they used two related methods. One was to situate contemporary events relative to historical antecedents, alongside other contextual particulars, and by doing this provide these events with history-contingent meanings. The other was to attempt to constrain historical understandings of the contemporary events in the future. We interpret the results using the concept of ‘structured immediacy’ that points to how context — historical and otherwise — enters immediate settings of talk as a source of meaning.

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