The Problem of History: Historiography’s Imperial Legacies

Two-thirds into Gyasi’s debut novel, a middle-aged history teacher named Yaw finds himself questioned by a class of schoolboys. The young boys, hailing from rural parts of what is still called the Gold Coast, have already heard of this teacher and his heavily scarred face. The teacher, who is working on a manuscript titled Let the Africans Own Africa and eagerly awaits his country’s independence, turns their natural curiosity into a teachable moment. Under the header “History is Storytelling,” the teacher urges his students to present their hearsay version of how he got his scar, only to conclude:
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‎This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories. […] We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this choice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture. (226-227)
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‎The chapter on Yaw, and in particularly this passage on the narrative constructedness of history, is crucial for understanding the novel’s metahistorical stance toward the diaspora. Yaw’s chapter plays on the various notions of historicity exercised in the novel, particularly the way that fiction and historiography intersect in the historical novel. The chapter reads
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‎78 patently metafictional, but it is also very much emplotted within the particular temporal structure of the novel, as well as its redemptive arc. It is noteworthy that, in his classroom, Yaw uses personal anecdote to arrive at a metahistorical commentary on historiography, while at the same struggling to write a proto-national history of a people. In the beginning, we are told how he is close to scrapping his manuscript, an obvious reference to the Pan-Africanist phrase Africa for Africans, coined by Martin Robison Delany.” Unable to catalyze what he identifies and admires as the “academic rage” of the contemporaneous US-American Civil Rights Movement, Yaw’s book project stalls as he feels unable to muster anything but “a long-winded whine” (228). When Yaw, in conversation with his politically active friend, notes how he believes that the revolution “start[s] with ourselves” (223), the sentiment anticipates another canonical text, Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ -wa Thiong’o (1986). It is also, quite literally, in keeping with the novel’s theme of personal family history, as Yaw is able to write his book only once he has confronted his mother and revisited the “evil” in his own home (241). In a way, Yaw exemplifies a metahistoricist position in which various forms of representing history are vying for attention. Yaw references the orality of “the olden days” as something not only unmistakably lost, but also reliant on a romanticized notion of unified meaning or mimetic imminence. As soon as we “come upon the problem of conflicting stories,” the discursive influence of power reveals itself. Yet even if one remains attentive to the stories suppressed by “the one who has the power,” this still creates only a “clearer” and never a perfect picture. Apart from conceding to these limitations on historiography, Yaw is also unable to write a revolutionary counterhistory of the Gold Coast. He is struggling with simply adopting the content of a form that not only imposes a nationalist narrative but also thrives on a notion of history in which Africa has no place.
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‎Both the historical novel and historiography itself pose a particular set of problems to non-Western writers. Many of Yaw’s concerns can be traced to 19th-century European thought, as well as important 20th-century discussions of this period that, unwittingly, reproduce the epistemological lacunae of that Imperial age even as they attempt to show the fictitiousness of historiography or the historical novel’s alignment with ordinary agents of history. One example of the latter is the fusing of personal with
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‎national history, signposting “The Classical Form of the Historical Novel” as laid out by Georg Lukács in the eponymous chapter from The Historical Novel (1962). Positively gushing over the novels of Sir Walter Scott, particularly his Waverly from 1814, Lukács writes: “Scott’s greatness lies in his capacity to give human embodiment to historical-social types. The typically human terms in which great historical trends become tangible” (1969: 34). For Lukács, the historical novel’s verisimilitude lies not in thick or picturesque description, but in the complex way that the underlying current of historical
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‎progress – the “historical factor” – is folded back into personal, human lives (ibid. 42). In Scott’s historical novels, it is indeed the realm of the personal and the familial where the political drama of history is played out. Here, “certain crises in the personal destinies of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis,” and thus “the split of the nation into warring parties always runs through the centre of the closest human relationships” (ibid.). In many ways, Homegoing also expounds the kind of “dramatic concentration of the epic framework” that characterizes the historical novel for Lukács, where the central crisis “is never a matter of one single catastrophe, but of a chain of catastrophes,” bound together by people “connected and involved with one another” (ibid.).
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‎However, the major difference between Homegoing and Waverly lies in the historical and ideological contexts of the 19th and 21st centuries, respectively, as well as the different genres and literary chronotopes from which they evolve. Lukács notes how, prior to Scott’s figure of Waverly, there had never been a “mediocre, prosaic hero at the central figure” (1996: 34) and that Scott thus departs from the “Romantic hero-worshippers” who explain “the age from the position of the great representatives” (40). As the founding text on Scottish Highland culture, Waverly is arguably romantic in terms of its mythologized subject matter. Yet what distinguishes this “historical romance,” as Amy Elias notes, is that it ultimately shows how “the mythicized Highland cultures were doomed in the face of an epistemic shift to rationalist modernity” (2005: 164). Lukács also sees the inevitability of historical progress, the way that “historical necessity asserts itself” as the defining feature of Scott’s classical historical novel (1969: 64). For Lukács, as an historical materialist, this is clearly a matter of “class timbre,” but the notion that the representation of historical progress is brought into productive tension with literary realism is not limited to one ideology of history alone (50). With a quote by the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, Lukács draws attention to the cultural context of Scott’s historical novels and points toward their astonishing contemporaneous success: “Strange whim of the people! They demand their history from the hand of the poet and not from the hand of the historian” (Lukács 1969: 61).
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‎This “strange whim,” as well as the intricate link between historiographic and fictional writing, has more or less been at the center of Hayden -White’s entire oeuvre. His most well know publication Metahistory: The
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‎Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (1973) and his later article “The Discourse of History” (1979) trace this link to the 19th century, where the rise of the realist novel coincides with the institutionalization of history as a discipline. For White, 19th-century historiography is fundamentally troubled by literary realism. In becoming more “realistic,” literature “fatally
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‎undermined” the claims of historians “to deal in a discourse that was realistic, transparent, concrete, and illuminative of events by virtue of the stories it told about them” (2010: 192). Because narrative fiction was not only problematizing of language itself, but also traded in the same “rhetorical mode that conventional historiography relied on to convey authority,” historiographers engaged in a more and more frantic effort to distance itself from it – a tendency White traces through to the positivist debates of the 1950s and onwards (ibid. 190). Yet it is particularly against the backdrop of the 19th century that the reciprocal relation between historiography and fiction becomes most legible.
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‎Only a few years after the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed that the young nation “was suffering from the consuming fever of history” (1997: 60). Scholars have extensively discussed why historiography would matter in an age that was also the intellectual and political cradle of nationalism, to the point where the mention alone might even seem superfluous. However, the fact that it is also the cradle of imperial colonialism is more easily overlooked. While both Lukács and White presuppose the central role of nationalism in their analyses, neither of them accounts for its imperializing tendencies. For Lukács, it is no surprise that the appeal to national independence and national character is “necessarily connected with a re-awakening of national history” (1969: 23), and he links this to the rippling effect of the French Revolution – an event that “for the first time made history a mass experience” (ibid. 20). What he lauds in Scott’s novels is indeed the way that Hegel’s “national character” is embodied by social types realizing themselves as active agents of historical change (36).
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‎Yet where Lukács limits this historical consciousness to “a European scale” (1969: 20), he overlooks the significance of the Haitian revolution, the paradoxical relation between the Enlightenment concepts of freedom and bondage, and the particular manner that Hegel’s notion of Universal History is predicated on these lived contradictions. Hayden White, on the other hand, while noting the Eurocentric implications behind the burgeoning concept of “proper history,” supplements his analyses with universalisms of another kind. Identifying the 19th century as a time of political and epistemic crisis, White notes how the historiography of this period is affected not only by the unresolved “truth claims” of realist writing, but also by the all-encompassing teleological arc provided by “the philosophy of history.” White cites Hegel’s eponymous lectures merely as an example of philosophy’s push toward subjecting history to some form of master narrative. It is interesting that White’s observations are finely attuned to what he describes as a “profound cultural anxiety” expressed by the 19th-century historians, a “cultural malaise” arising from the “social pressures” of industrialization that takes the form of an almost pathological obsession with history (2010: 188). For
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‎White, this obsession exceeds what he naturalizes as the fundamental desire to develop “[c]onsciousness of the past and awareness of a possible future” in order to “distinguish human beings from their animal prototypes” (ibid.). He identifies the denial of historical discourse’s “literariness” as an enduring symptom of this malaise, while remaining conspicuously silent about the racializing discourse not merely supplementing but structuring and mobilizing a founding liberal text like Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. While almost parenthetically asserting humanity’s universal desire to distinguish the human from the non-human, White’s silence is certainly telling, if not even equally symptomatic. From a postcolonial perspective that admittedly supersedes these writers, the oversights in White’s metahistorical and Lukács historical materialist accounts of the 19th century simply reproduce the institutionalized silence, or disavowal, as Sybille Fischer would argue, around the violent and contradictory condition of Western liberalism. A postcolonial reading would first historicize the category of the human and the universal in order to recognize their epistemic and illocutionary ramifications. As Lisa Lowe asserts in The Intimacies of Four Continents, the “modern distinction between definitions of the human and those to whom such definitions do not extend is the condition of possibility for Western liberalism” (2015: 3).
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‎Hegel’s lectures, notoriously prefaced with the advice to “give up” the “category of Universality” when thinking about the “African character” (2011: 110), have since been subjected to much critical scholarship, yet these repercussions have played out in more or less isolated disciplines, leaving the grand récits of philosophy and history mostly intact. Scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Sibylle Fisher, Susan Buck-Morss, and others have noted how particularly the Haitian Revolution has been systematically overlooked in historical and philosophical scholarship, pointing toward an institutionalized silence around the flagrant incongruity between the discourse of freedom and the utter thingification of slavery. 79
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‎In some cases, as in Hayden White’s constructivist view of history, certain historiographic absences are indeed acknowledged and accredited to the limited viewpoint of Eurocentrism. Yet this justification alone fails to consider the vital role these “absent causes” might have played in the construction of (capital H) History itself. There is a mutually constitutive tension between Hegel’s notion of Africa having no history and his assertion that the Spirit of History unfolds within the laws of the European nation state. The paradox that a thinker like Hegel could develop the concept of mutual recognition in the master-slave dialectic, and at the same time dismiss “the Negro” as being “capable of no development or culture” and thus fit for enslavement, fundamentally destabilizes the image Western thought holds of itself (2011: 98). This “glaring discrepancy between thought and practice” marked the large-scale transformation of global capitalism, ushering in the social context
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‎of the 19th century (-Buck-Morss 2009: 22). If, as C.L.R. James observed in The Black Jacobins, the wealth generated by the slave societies of the Americas specifically fattened the French bourgeoisie – and with it the discourse of the ‘rights of man’ – then the burgeoning nation states and expanding empires of the 19th century relied even more heavily on the revenue of plunder and primitive accumulation. A certain academic unwillingness or agnotological inhibition to reckon with what Buck-Morss calls simply “a certain constellation of facts,” can thus be read as the avoidance of “an awkward truth” that threatens “not only the venerable narratives, but also the entrenched academic disciplines that (re) produce them” (Buck-Morss 2009: 22-23).
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‎Yet not only the example of James’s eighty-year-old publication shows that these historical entanglements have long since been exposed and critiqued. Particularly Hegel’s remarks on Africa and “the Negro” have been impossible to overlook, contrary to dominant Hegel scholarship, but instead have spawned a long and often productive tradition of intellectual engagement. Indeed, many of the most influential Black intellectual writers of the 20th century explicitly or implicitly take on Hegelian concepts, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, 80 Considering the sheer ubiquity of Hegel’s historicist theories, their quick absorption first into 19th century dominant German, European, and finally US-American schools of thought, it might be fair to say that whenever a 20th-century person of African descent addressed issues of history, progress, or even freedom, the spirit of Hegel haunted their endeavors.
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‎One reason for the tenacity of these traces was the fact that Hegel’s contribution to History, what Glissant calls “a highly functional fantasy of the West,” was so fundamentally tied up with the idea of the nation (Caribbean Discourse 64). In “The Subject in the Plot,” Herman Bennett identifies the conflation of historical progress and the nation state as a particularly pervasive 19th-century plot, in which the 20th-century Black subject struggled to insert itself – often through ill-directed Black Nationalist efforts (2000: 101-124). Indeed, as Michelle M. Wright notes, the major pitfall of 20th.
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‎century Black intellectual counterdiscourses was the fact that they functioned just like other “nationalist narratives in the West” (2004: 12). Constructing a world “in which men possess the power to give birth (to other men of course!),” Black Nationalist narratives project a “linear progression of time and space that starts and stops when they want” (ibid.).81
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‎Homegoing nonetheless avoids the masculinist rhetoric of (Black) national liberation, especially in its detailing of a nascent independent Ghana. Despite projecting gender balance in terms of characters, its overall emphasis on female agency manifests not only in its matrilineal structure.
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‎Read thus, Yaw’s inability to produce a Black Nationalist narrative is even more significant, as are the gendered terms in which this inability is represented. Unable to channel what he identifies as an “academic rage,” he is only able to produce, in his ears, “a long-winded whine” (228). Generally, it is striking how the popular Pan-African plot around Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence is hinted at yet remains largely inconsequential to Yaw’s personal liberation story. This kind of plotting corresponds with the novel’s overall method of unfolding intimate family stories against the background of specific historical events like the War of the Golden Stool on the Gold Coast or the Fugitive Slave Act under US-President Taylor. Yet by avoiding the oftentimes-glorified Independence narrative, the novel foregrounds a particular kind of historicism. Despite its iconic Pan-African status, the legacy of Ghana is not idealized, neither in the period of the slave trade nor later. Instead, the notion of linear progress, and most certainly the idea of the nation as its principal carrier, is put into question. This does not mean that the very concrete and symbolical significance of the first independent African nation are invalidated, but the event itself is not brandished as proof that Hegel’s “Spirit of History” or Marxist “Historical Necessity” finally unfold on the African continent. Moreover, Homegoing seems to reject what Sidney Lemelle and Robin D.G. Kelley have identified as “the gendered iconography of Pan-Africanism – Black men coming to redeem the soil of a ‘Mother Country’ ‘raped’ by Europe” (1994: 6).
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‎Historicizing historiography means reckoning with the limitations of nationalist narratives and rejecting the kind plotting that accompanies the classical form of the (historical) novel. These considerations are also at the heart of Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse from 1989. Glissant identifies this discourse as not simply adversarial or melancholically attached to the past, but also as an inherently creative and innovative response to the project of capital H history. For Glissant, it is indeed the role of the writer to fill in the void of a “ruined history” and counter the notion of linear progression proper to the national ideal (1996: 244). According to Glissant, the totalizing historical systems of the West have not only run their course and confronted their own limitations but have also been forcefully undermined through the eruption of subaltern histories focused on a poetics of relation rather than diachronic ascension. He writes:
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‎If Hegel relegated African peoples to the ahistorical, Amerindian peoples to the prehistorical, in order to reserve History for European peoples exclusively, it appears that it is not because these African or American peoples “have entered History” that we can conclude today that such a hierarchical conception of “the march of History” is no longer relevant. (64)
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‎Fighting not only for food and freedom, but also struggling against “the double hegemony of History with a capital H and a Literature consecrated by the absolute power of the written word,” the people inhabiting the “hidden side of the earth” have developed other modes of narrating their past (Glissant 1996: 76).
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‎Homegoing also provides a literary image of the African Diaspora that, as in Glissant’s vision, contains not the hierarchical chronology of empires or nation states, but the “histories and voice of peoples” (Glissant 1997: 77). Notably, Homegoing’s account of the Gold Coast is one of mutual entanglements and messy histories that do not necessarily unravel into discreet periods and genealogies. As a character notes early on: “Everyone is part of this. Asante, Fante, Ga, British, Dutch, and American” (Homegoing 98). Accordingly, the novel doesn’t construct the myth of a pure ancestral homeland or singular origin but presents the Gold Coast as a synchronic assemblage of collective histories, a complexly flavored “pot of groundnut soup,” stirred up by the British and others before them, and already intrinsically diverse, cosmopolitan, modern (98). Even though the scope and thrust of the novel could be read as epic and thus easily reduced to a mythologized quest for origin, there is no harmonious state of innocence to return to and, crucially, also no ‘classical’ sense of historical or national progress.