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Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies)*
ARIF DIRLIK
University of Oregon
| I will take up a question in this discussion that has intruded insistently in my thinking in recent years as I have contemplated the writing and teaching of world history, a question that arises out of the contradictory demands on our conceptualizations of the world of a fluid global situation. This is the question of how best to conceive and organize the spatialities of the world in its historical formations so as to answer to the demands both of a critical historiography and the public pedagogical functions of history.1 The question is one that bears more heavily on the pedagogical functions of world history, I think, than on its historiographical premises and implications. |
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First a caveat: I have never undertaken to write a history of the world or thought of myself as a "world historian." What I have done is to write critically of the practice of world history: of the world conquest and ideological structures it generated that produced the notion of "world history" in the first place; of the hegemonic implications of the idea when viewed from perspectives outside of Euro-America; of the closely connected methodological and ideological problems presented by the spatial and temporal presuppositions that almost inevitably shape all world histories; and, lastly but perhaps most importantly from a personal standpoint, of the naïve political and ideological hopes invested in world histories, motivated most recently by visions of a global multiculturalism, that perpetuate those presuppositions unreflectively and contribute to the very problems that they wish to overcome. I would like to think that these criticisms have been intended not to undermine the necessity of a global vision in historical analysis, or thepractice of world history as such, but rather to challenge complacent acquiescence in its virtues and to provoke confrontation of the ideological implications of different ways of organizing (or, "performing") the past, including the very idea of "the world" as an organizing principle of history. The ideological implications of practices that on the surface appear to be merely historiographical are of the utmost importance in critical historical writing. They may be even of greater moment in the teaching of history. |
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It seems to me that there are two major reasons for the practice of world history. One is historiographical. A world or global perspective makes for better history, first, because it enables the pursuit of historical phenomena and processes across boundaries of all kinds, vastly expanding the spaces available for inquiry and explanation; second, because it opens up historical vision to the proliferation of spatialities and, therefore, temporalities and allows for a more complex understanding of the processes of history; and, third, in the cognizance of totality that it enforces, it enables a more critical historical consciousness. World history, in other words, is not just a subject matter; it is also a methodology that at once complements and challenges other ways of doing history. |
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The other reason—equally important—is to foster among students and the general public (not to speak of many of our fellow historians) an appreciation of the political, economic, and cultural configurations of the world, and of how they came to be, that may be essential to living in a world where differences among humans have acquired unavoidable visibility in their very entanglement, which is the condition of what I have described elsewhere as "global modernity." Such appreciation is a necessity not just of teaching in the narrow sense of schooling, but as public pedagogy. And it is profoundly political in its implications. |
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