The Knowledge Producers

History Against the Grain

"And how does one tell impossible stories?” A question well placed for our time, and one confronted by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who has journeyed through the heart of darkness of slavery’s archives in search of Black lives past. Yet in their efforts to recover those stories, scholars like Hartman and professional historians compete in a broader marketplace of historical knowledge, where our public memories are fed, constructed, and often distorted by public memorials and statuary, patriotic commemorations and school namings, and even the archives themselves, only to serve patriotic narratives that erase the past lives and histories that contradict the boastful and exceptionalist claims of national identity. Think this pressure for patriotic history happens only in the U.S.? Our special guest this week is historian Xin Fan, whose new book World History and National Identity in China reveals the dramatic and often agonizing personal and professional journeys undertaken by Chinese scholars to maintain intellectual autonomy across four generations of historical writing in modern China.

“Before you study the history, study the historian,” warned Carl Becker. So join us for another HAG episode as we consider the fears and fancies, fights and fault lines of the knowledge producers.