24/07/2010. Comments at the book launch, Singapore National Library.
Professor Prasenjit Duara
This is a unique book in the field of history. While it is about historical matters and also about historical materials and historiography to some extent, it is really about something else: it is about how a society is able to produce its history.
It is about the conditions of historical knowledge production— political, institutional, global, social and epistemological. It is organized around three gates: the ‘front gates’ of institutions, the ‘side gates’ of transnational sources, and the ‘memory gates’ of oral histories.
As such it registers a high degree of historical reflexivity—a coming of age when a field of knowledge can look upon how it constructs itself and its influence. Given that the notoriously anti-theoretical historical profession is also a powerful gate-keeper, I once wrote an essay called “Why is history anti-theoretical?” In a way, this work bypasses the fraught question of theory and history, and asks how can history be self-reflexive?
Initially, I thought this book was going to be quite a radical critique of the relatively closed nature of the archives and unavailability of sources. There is a fair critique of those limitations but it is not a rant. But there are 23 essays covering a range of positions and angles on the problem of historical knowledge production.
The volume is a serious reflection on the limitations that affect archives as an institution nationally and globally, but also about the limits and demands of historical sources, about the relationship between history and memory, about the conflation of individual and national memories, and about ways to get around all of these problems—at least partially.
I will spend the rest of my time trying to locate such a unique work in a wider historical canvas about historical production. I work principally on China and some Japan and India. For many years I worked on history and nation. In 1995, I published Rescuing History from the Nation which made the bold claim that the two were tied at the hip from late 19th c.
I argued about the role of modern historical consciousness for the emergence of nations. In national histories, societies no longer claim their legitimacy or sovereignty from God or Heaven’s mandate or the ideals of sage kings. Rather they claim their sovereignty by alleging the evolution of an originally, if often mystically, united people and culture. History then is a way of documenting their progressive evolution to modernity. The conception of history creates the conditions for a sleek national body of entitled, but also sacrificing, citizens who are propelled by virtue of existing in linear, progressive time, into a competitive modernity.
Of course, Singapore cannot make such a mythical claim of primordialism, but the problem of national unity may become that much more important.
What has happened in the last 30 years or so, especially in the West, is that the national narrative has become relatively less important than it was for the hundred years or so before that. Globalization, migration, multiculturalism, and relative weakening or withdrawal of the state in neo-liberal economic model, were some of the factors behind this.
These trends also affect the non-Western new nations of the post-war era, but less so. The new nations are at a relatively early stage of nation-building and this process has been accompanied by a fair amount of external and internal violence. Nonetheless, for various reasons, this violence has been more moderate than the violence of Western powers at a similar stage in the 19th and early 20th c. Note for instance the two World Wars or the brutal US conquest of American territory.
But real time complicates the temporality of historical stages. Newer nation-states are forced to engage simultaneously in nation-building and globalization. What this means is that they may be driven by concerns about nation-building but also exposed to all the forces of globalization which is also an imperative for them nowadays.
How does one deal with this issue? The three societies I know which are faced with this problem are China, Japan and India. Although Japan is not a new nation-state it has special problems because it never came to terms with decolonization after WWII (because of the Cold War) and was faced in the 1990s, by massive demands on its national, criminal past whether by the Comfort Women or charges levelled in China.
In China, we know, and Jason Lim and others in the volume make the point, the archives are notoriously inaccessible although your connections can get you quite far. Now monetization too, of archival services is a problem. While, as a democracy, India is more open, it keeps its archives away from people by being disorganized or decentralized—they refer you from Ministry to Ministry.
It is interesting to see how the Japanese Foreign Ministry dealt with the problem. They digitized their entire archives by 2002-2003. I have not researched this problem, but I hypothesize that it has to do with the increasing demands made upon it. Of course, much had been destroyed during the War and much carried away to US. We also don’t know what they kept classified, but they made it largely available in the public realm. Other ministries and archives are also doing that. It was a pro-active stance that may have disarmed the demanding neighbours.
On what to do in this situation, I am in basic agreement with the thrust of this book.
1) Documents should be made publicly available since the institutions also have a mandate to serve the public.
2) General public availability during these globalized and multi-cultural times makes information usage more pluralized and put to individuated uses rather than for political mobilization. Historical information is most often sought by individuals and groups to create cognitive and affective maps for a reflective and moral life – to come to terms.
3) There is a co-existence of state narrative with individual ones. They are often linked to each other, at some angle, but mostly not as fully alternative.
4) While it may sometimes prove irritants for the state, by and large, dissemination, diffusion and dispersion of information create goodwill for the state and its projects, especially among professional historians.
5) In a globalized era, narratives of national history produced from transnational sources (the side gates) can be more risky and damaging. Having the national historical profession more identified with state project is the best defence against such destabilizing efforts.
Professor Prasenjit Duara is a historian of China and more broadly of Asia in the twentieth century. He also writes on historical thought and historiography. Duara spent a major part of his career teaching at the Department of History of the University of Chicago, where he was also chairman of the department from 2004-2007. Since then he has been Raffles Professor of Humanities at the National University of Singapore where he is also Director of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences. Several of his books and essays have been translated into Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
