How the Intimate Lives of Subaltern Men, Women, and Children Confound the Nation's Master Narratives

Dirk Hoerder

From her erudite postcolonial perspective, Ann Laura Stoler invites historians, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities to look at the racializations and the intimacies generated by empires in the cores, the United States in particular, and to avoid privileging strategies emanating from the metropoles over circuits of people and ideas. She engages scholars not to read the nineteenth century by its state- and nation-building projects alone but to look also at people and their intimate lives. To heed Stoler's call, I will emphasize imperial centers and the circulation of ideas and policies between the masters of the national narrative and subaltern men, women, and children. I divide the argument into two parts. The first, autobiographical, addresses the intimate lives and the circulation of ideas that shape historians' subconscious frames of reference. The second, a series of brief historical case studies, looks at the intimate lives of people on the margins, the social construction of their bodies, and the way they asserted their centrality and thereby undermined the traditional histories of nations. In contrast to an older form of social history, this essay is not primarily concerned with global processes, demographic shifts, or local communities. I turn instead to the "tense and tender ties" that shaped individuals, groups, and nations.	1
Like the Dutch East India Company men in Java, republican North American ideologists constructed subalterns. Their new republic cum empire colonized African and, for example, Iroquois men, as well as women regardless of culture and color. The self-liberation of the latter and their entry into the ranks of that nation-state's historians have made us aware—as international scholarly exchange has—that we as historians succumb to particular national, class, and gender strategies to present our arguments. 1 Even with the best of intentions, our ways of thinking follow national traditions of the Western world; no Javanese, Chinese, Yoruba, Tupi, Kwakiutl, or Navajo perspectives are part of our modes of expression.	2
As a first step, I suggest that we remind ourselves that the intimate frontiers of cultural space and power relationships, to which Stoler refers, have an equivalent in the intimacies of our craft. Before teaching at a school, a junior college, or a prestigious university, all historians began in the intimate setting of some kind of cradle sucking their mother's milk or infant formula and, more often than not, seeing little of their fathers. This first and most important combination of the personal and societal—socialization—establishes the hegemony of one generation over the next, circulates one generation's experiences and ideas as fairy tales, stories, knowledge, or master narratives to the next. It occurs within a family, a particular region, a metropolis, and in a larger national discourse and statewide institutional frame. Scholars of childhood and of individual identity formation inform us that by the age of five our ways of organizing emotions, knowledge, and aspirations are formatted but hidden in the sub-conscious. 2 By the time future historians enter first grade, not to speak of their freshman (freshwoman?) year in college, they file new information into mind-sets already formed.	. . .