A single (national) line?
Lauren Michele Jackson on the 1619 Project and Doreen Massey on conjunctions of many histories and many spaces.
Lauren Michele Jackson’s smart review of the 1619 Project turns on this crucial question:
Journalism is, by its nature, a provisional and fragmentary undertaking—a “first draft of history,” as the saying goes—proceeding in installments that journalists often describe humbly as “pieces.” What are the difficulties that greet a journalistic endeavor when it aspires to function as a more concerted kind of history, and not just any history but a remodelling of our fundamental national narrative?
Jackson wonders about the limits of the project as a whole: “In spite of all of the ugly evidence it has assembled, the 1619 Project ultimately seeks to inspire faith in the American project, just as any conventional social-studies curriculum would.” She ends by noting that the project’s narrative arc draws not so much on journalism or history as it does the fable, “But a similar thinking resides at the center of the 1619 Project in all of its evolving forms—past, present, and future, arranged in a single line.”
Her critique echoes Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture about the ‘shape of stories’ - the sense that narratives have a shape; or, more precisely, that narratives must have the shape of a single line.
What is the alternative? Again, here’s where I have found Doreen Massey’s writing so generative. In the 1990s, she was responding to two different projects: One was a conservative nostalgia that relied on mobilizations of the ‘true’ character of places to justify a xenophobic politics; but the other was a Marxist project that called for a renewed global analysis to understand the contemporary operations of capital. The former, she said, trapped us in a single narrative; the latter gave up on ‘place’ “blasted from the… continuity of history” (“Places and their pasts,” p. 191). She sought to provide an alternative between “essentialist continuity or a breaking of the relation altogether,” one which “recognised that what has come together, in this place, now, is a conjunction of many histories and many spaces” (“Places and their pasts,” p. 191).
Massey would returning to this phrasing time and time again over the course of her work; the ‘conjunction’ becomes a key part of how she comes to think about a world made up of interrelations, an approach that “wary therefore about claims to authenticity based in notions of an unchanging identity” (For Space, p. 10).
My students in Geography of Memory are teaching me all sorts of things. One has been writing about potter’s fields as sites of what they call “unremembering.” Their phrase reminded me of an observation that came out of our panel on “Marking Violence,” when our discussant asked us to think about the use of “unutturmayacağız” in Turkey (“we won’t let be forgotten”). That word, they noted, simultaneously made a claim upon the durability of memory even as it depended on the possibility of forgetting. Rather than see remembering and forgetting as somehow distinct and separate projects, the word - as with my student’s formulation of ‘unremembering’ - challenges to see them as mutually constitutive. To come back to Massey, “a relational understanding” of remembering and forgetting.
The challenge remains: How do we write about those geographies of remembering and forgetting? The temptation is to fall back into the same kinds of narratives (the single line) and the same kinds of geographies (the container of the nation). How to write these stories so far, but differently?