Subjective Histories

@kazys Of course. The historian has already done the work so I presume it’s more efficient not to backtrack within the limited time of the class. Not advocating for the reverse chronology; just exercising a thought.

I was thinking of how American history must be taught to young people - both today and 20-30 years ago - and the apparent disconnect of the narrative with the lives of, well, most people. I know that my mother’s [largely Latin American and African] immigrant grade school students couldn’t have cared less about the Constitutional Congress, Civil War and westward expansion. Why should they? This must have been what Jameson meant when he talked about the explosion of “otherness” rendering middle class privilege (and history?) obsolete. How would one communicate a common history to the multitude of others without a critical look at economics as it relates to demography?

In an era of atemporal potlatch the capacity for anyone to trace a history of any significance - especially without resorting to racism (of any group: white, Latino, etc.) - seems compromised. This must be why we see so many mythological and Eastern beliefs, such as Krishna consciousness, Buddhism, and goddess worship, emergent in Western culture, especially in the western United States. If disenchantment resulted from the middle class’s immersion in commodity culture in the 20th century - viewed as nothing more than consumers by our own society - then surely the only meaningful way out is transcendence. But in adopting an other for identification we relinquish our own histories - for they may reveal an embarrassing lineage of hedonism, selfishness and gullability (Baby Boomers?) which we are loathe to claim as our own.