GVGK Tang
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Narrating Legacy: Oral History Conundrums

10/24/2017

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Picture
   "Genevieve Willcox Chandler interviews Ben Horry for the WPA Federal Writers Project" Between the Waters. Accessed October 24, 2017. http://betweenthewaters.org/friendfield-village/laura-carrs-house-c-1840/
root-doctor-healer-and-conjurer.   

The oral tradition can be a medium of empowerment, used to document the histories of disenfranchised people. However, oral traditions have also been used to erase “undesirable” aspects of a community history, while lionizing (and fictionalizing) others. Leon Fink encounters this conundrum, much like Carolyn Kitch in Pennsylvania in Public Memory. As he describes on page 120 of his article "When Community Comes Home to Roost":

"I witnessed an impressive harnessing of history to community identity ... heightened by the use of oral history in the hands of local 'organic intellectuals.' On the other hand, 'heritage' history here ultimately appeared ... to confirm and disseminate certain conservative and exclusionary political values ... the unhappy outcome, for me at least, forces a critical reckoning with the 'will-to-community' within historical studies as well as contemporary affairs."
Put another way, oral history is both an inclusive and exclusive practice. It remedies gaps in traditional historiographies that rely mostly on documentary evidence produced by the power elites. It also circumscribes communal memory. Sporadic accounts of the past, founded on old animosities or the specter of a foreign Other, are reproduced generationally – like fading carbon copies of an incomplete narrative – and compose inexact stories of exceptionalism.

But perhaps we shouldn’t take such a dim view of oral history. I once claimed oral histories are like hand-me-downs – passing through various people, traveling strange and unexpected routes. They accumulate little details, lose others; they get a bit misshapen along the way, and all the more wonderful. With the advent of recording technologies, they can be frozen in time, rather than transmuted by word of mouth. What were once quotidian anecdotes have become part of a larger-than-life mythos, a constellation of historical half-truths. Too often we question the cognizance, honesty and accuracy of our interviewees (or our narrators as Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan refer to them in The Oral History Manual). Should we not be equally skeptical of our written sources and their authors? To reference Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, let us be wary of all four stages of historical production: "the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)" (26). Perhaps history is just a macrocosmic collection of semi-fictions.

We must turn around and problematize the oral historian’s position in this exchange – their "gazing," perhaps better described as their listening, interviewing, or interpretation. As illustrated by the picture for this post, there is something simultaneously perverse and consoling about the white historian's consumption of POC narratives (or materials). We find a vested interest in the preservation of disenfranchised legacies. Or do we? Oral historians steal the words and memories of their subjects, do with them what they will, and get lauded for the work, ultimately profiting off the histories of Others. Sommer and Quinlan identify "good narrators" as those who have firsthand knowledge, who "represent all sides of an issue," "can communicate effectively," and are willing participants (49). How do interviewer biases inform these value judgements? The nonpartisan approach to history does not exist. Firsthand knowledge of an event is inherently one-sided because it comes from an individual account. Effective communication and participant willingness is dependent upon the relationship between the interviewer and the narrator. And how do language barriers play a role in selection?

Community connections are a necessity. I'm wary of white middle-class historians who tour contexts beyond their own and expect willing narrators to surrender their histories for outsider interpretation. Presumption is a common theme. In “When Subjects Don't Come Out," Sherrie Tucker asks, "Where did I get the idea that my sexuality-sensitive intersectional analysis must involve ... clearly delineated, immutable categories of sexual desire? ... While my interviewees don’t come out, they do reveal the power of a structure that conceals, shapes, and imperfectly contains sexual contents ('Don’t write about that')" (298). Historians have a vested interest in imposing their own meanings and understandings onto other people's lives. Unlike dead sources, oral histories are alive, rife with contested memory, fact, identity, interpretation and narrative construction. Respecting the human agency of self-identification and self-disclosure is paramount, regardless of structural forces – or perhaps because of them.
2 Comments
Hilary Iris Lowe
10/26/2017 05:51:09 am

Grace, How would you do an oral history project for a group of individuals with whom you had no community "insider" status?
Can historians ever do historical work that doesn't impose their own meanings and understandings?
How should historians collect primary source information from human subjects? Or should they, if they are just going to "steal" words and memories? What are our pratical options for understanding the past?

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GVGK Tang
10/26/2017 08:55:57 am

Hilary, Thanks for your questions!

First, we need to parse the idea of insider/outsider status. I'm asking that we differentiate between different positionalities – or stratified, intsersectional spheres of experience and influence. For example, I have no qualms about insinuating myself into the old boys' club of white gay history because my presence disrupts the masturbatory cycle of white men studying other white men. But that means I'm devoting more attention and resources to a white history that, arguably, already has sufficient institutional support.

I'm assuming the premise of your question was actually meant to draw attention to my own privileges as a half white, middle-class individual – fair enough. My engagement of Black and Brown histories has always been mediated through a white institution. In an act of virtue signaling or in order to meet the quotas set out in "inclusive" strategic plans, historians and institutions create exhibits about Black and Brown people without including Black and Brown people in curation or interpretation. These exhibits use Black and Brown people's materials without full credit, nor do they identify how the subsummation of these materials into the institution's collections will benefit the communities from which they came. Therein lies the rub – the act of "legitimation" that characterizes the public history profession's newfound interest in and consumption of working-class, POC histories.

Historians collect, preserve and interpret primary source materials on behalf of their institutions because they are working on projects for non-community members, outside of community contexts. For example, even when graduate thesis projects are meant to serve community interests, students are still doing the work for a degree and for a job in the professional public history workforce after they graduate. To reiterate why I'm seemingly obsessed with insider/outsider dynamics – I've repeatedly witnessed white scholars who "specialize" in POC history get chosen for curatorial and advisory group positions over actual Black and Brown community leaders, some of whom these white scholars had interviewed for their professionally lauded projects. White savior public historians envision themselves "rescuing" or "empowering" Black and Brown people's histories. Their project leadership gets them news headlines, commendations, prestige and position. But what does it do for community members? Public history practitioners need to offer their services and resources – funds and labor – for the creation of grass-roots initiatives that take place within and for the community (given community members' interest and assent).

So, no, of course historians can never do historical work that doesn't impose their own meanings and understandings – that's why I insist objectivity is a myth. But, as you know, my working group proposal set out how disenfranchised people tend to have a more holistic perspective on social and historical structures. As bell hooks once wrote, "Living as we did – on the edge – we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out … we understood both.” Given the inevitability of human subjectivity, we need to recognize the epistemic privilege of POC.

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