The Impact of History? by Pedro Ramos Pinto Bertrand Taithe

Author:Pedro Ramos Pinto, Bertrand Taithe [Pedro Ramos Pinto, Bertrand Taithe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Historiography, Study & Teaching, World
ISBN: 9781317537212
Google: 4McqBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-03-24T01:25:04+00:00

8 ‘Different and better times’?

History, progress and inequality

Emily Robinson1

A great deal of recent academic work (my own included) has put forward the idea that we are living in an age of ‘presentism’, cut adrift from the great emancipatory and nationalist narratives of history. Instead, we look to the past not as a guide, but as an open-ended source of inspiration; a dressing-up box where we can find whatever form of historical identity we choose. ‘Pastness’ here has cultural cachet but no ability to bind or limit us. Rather than making us the end product of a linear narrative of development, this way of using the past allows us to be, in Peter Mandler’s words, ‘artists of our own becoming’.2

This is a compelling account of the uses of the past in an age of what has been called ‘liquid modernity’.3 It is fluid, unstructured, malleable. On the one hand, this has radical potential. In 1991 Keith Jenkins expressed the hope that recognizing history ‘as what it is, a discursive practice that allows present-minded people(s) to go to the past, there to delve around and reorganise it appropriately to their needs’ might create the space for ‘fresh insights’ to emerge about aspects of the past ‘that have previously been overlooked or sidelined’. Jenkins believes this could ‘actually make emancipatory, material differences to and within the present’.4 On the other hand, as Tristram Hunt has argued more recently, it has left us without the necessary frameworks to critique historical and political structures. Hunt is particularly critical of the way in which traditional social history – with its ‘social purpose, analytical relevance and contemporary relevance’ has been replaced by an individual ‘quest for identity and empathy’ within a past that has become ‘an attractive and lucrative media commodity’.5

The point I would like to make in this chapter is that contemporary uses of the past are not quite as free-floating as they appear. While the grand narratives of both left and right may have broken down, a more fundamental belief in Progress-with-a-capital-P persists and is embedded in many of the ways in which we encounter historical narratives in both daily life and as leisure activity. However, this progress is imagined as something that has already been achieved. It is the means by which we arrived at the present moment – with social discrimination, absolute poverty and the class system seemingly having dissolved along the way. But unlike grand narrative history, it does not point forward to an imagined future destiny. Indeed, as we will see, the idea that progress has gone ‘too far’ is also common. This militates against the radical emancipation looked for by Jenkins.

For instance, and as Hunt points out, an interest in the lived experiences of poverty and inequality is now a part of mainstream popular culture. The ‘new heritage’ sites invite us to explore the lives of working people, whether through industrial heritage exhibits or by foregrounding the ‘below stairs’ areas of country houses, while the experiences and hardships of ‘ordinary people’ also form the mainstay of ‘living history’ TV.

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