Thank you! It did for me as well.
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That said, the stuff that wasnāt familiar was freshly horrifying.
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For sure. It also made me self-conscious about how Iāve spoken to repair people. I have family members who work in industrial maintainence, so I hope Iām okay.
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After reading that, I at least feel better about the times Iāve invited repair people into my house when it was a bit of a mess; I doubt the clutter that constitutes a ādisasterā for me even registers for them (except that one time that I invited a water-filtration salesman in: my house was a legitimate disaster then, but, seriously, fuck that guy).
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same writer
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The thing that stuck with me the most about this one was not so much the stories about the customers (because we all know people are weird), but just how petty and exploitative her employer was. The points system, and the pee-free schedule, and the drug-tests (apparently intended specifically to avoid liability for on-the-job injuries, no less). That was just depressing, not to mention sending them out in blizzard conditions.
A friend of mine used to occasionally crash on my couch when the weather was going to be crappy, because I lived only a few blocks from where he worked and he didnāt want to risk icy roads making him late; they had a points system where if you were x minutes late in the last n days, you got summarily fired. It was nuts.
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You wouldnāt believe the industrial shitshows that happen when Portlandās weather has a January oopsie. Operations managers wandering around the factory wielding printed copies of the current released isoYAMMRPWWR9000-compliant nonsense asking machine operators who played by 1930s residency rules and owner-raper traditions (mennonites and southeast asian stories always had a similar vibe, to my ears) to break the rules of engineering control and GET THESE MACHINES GOING.
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I have not gotten done with this last one, but the other 2 Iāve read and theyāre interesting:
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A couple of good ones from my sunday long form reads:
And posted in wanderthread, but Iāll throw it up here, too:
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Please, no.
I think white supremacism and race realism take advantage of historical ignorance and anthropological ignorance. A literary approach tends to privilege āgood stories,ā and āedifying stories,ā and sanitized war stories, over sorting out what happened, and why. So I donāt think a literary approach is what we need.
P.S. Maybe itās part of what we need. But itās definitely not all of what we need.
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I agree that narratives can be weaponized and I donāt think he argues otherwise? But some of the best histories of race, gender, sexuality, and other weighty issues come from people who have managed to blend compelling storytelling with a clear analytical (Foucauldian) lens. Too many important histories suffer because they are too weighted down with dry analysis and dense language that doesnāt make the argument or the āso whatā question clear to the reader - and it comes off as smug and arrogant in the process. Itās little wonder that some people view academics as living in an ivory tower and not understanding the ārealā world - many write like they donāt! Narrative can have the advantage of bringing in people who might not otherwise read a history book as being too dry and boring.
A great example of a great melding of Foucauldian analytical framework and compelling storytelling is To Joy My Freedom, which is about African American women in the post civil war era to the beginning of the great migration in Atlanta. One gets the more critical reading against the grain thatās necessary to tell the stories of those whose voices have been oppressed and who left very little in terms of written material for us to consult about their lives. But at the same time Hunter still brings you into the daily lives of the women whose stories sheās telling- a fight between black and white working class women during a labor strike, a gathering at a local church to encourage the striking women to hold the line, a fight outside a movie theater, dancing in a jukejoint on Decatur street, middle class black women moralizing against some of the few pleasures available to working class black women, white anxiety over black success in the city, sitting at the bedside of a sick relative, the real time trauma of the Atlanta Race Riotā¦ I think pairing a narrative approach with a strong marxist or foucauldian analytical tools can be a powerful means of making a strong argument about history and in helping people to understand that people in the past were indeed real - empathy can be a powerful means of getting people to understand something, after all.
None of that equals sanitizing the past or it doesnāt have to. Plenty of stories that are compelling are so precisely because they are clear about things like violence, oppression, and individual roles in society itself - especially when a society that deems specific individuals as not being worth of inclusion. A good story can be a powerful corrective to that exclusionary mind set. A good story comes from exploring the grey zones within a particular historical context (specifically thinking about Primo Levy and his Holocaust essays, which explores the very morally ambiguous universe he found himself in).
I think heās arguing, more than anything else, that the traditionalists who are little more than closet racists have more power in writing history, because they themselves write in clear narratives, which hide their true agenda (of making white supremacy seem inevitable). Why should we accept that they are the ones who tell good stories, when WE have just as good stories to tell? Stories that are compelling, complicated, and that others can find ways to relate to?
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I got there with *Metahistory. Iāll get back to it but for now Iām taking a break.
*Crap, I meant Metahistory.
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This. The problem is not the telling of stories. The problem is in the gatekeeping process that dictates which stories get told.
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Isnāt there a difference between academic history and history written for the non-historian? I know there is in science - e.g., journals vs. Scientific American.
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Well, as a game designer, I have to simplify history, and popularize it. But itās largely numerical pop-history instead of purely narrative pop-history.
I think we need numerical history because it can show things traditional narrative history canāt-- for example, the impact of soil depletion in late Roman and post-Roman Europe, or soil salinification in Mesopotamia.
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I agree that those sorts of historical works matter, too and wouldnāt argue otherwise. I just think we can do both the numerical while also doing the narrativeā¦ how did the people who lived through soil depletion experience that challenge. The numbers matter, but Iād say what makes for compelling history is showing why that matters. I donāt think we need to give up narrative form at the expense of facts and figures, rather that we can combine the two in ways that make for more compelling, accurate, and engaging history.
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I see no reason why a good historian canāt do both. why let journalist dominate popular histories if we can write just as compelling works as they can. Given the state of affairs in academia and how opportunities for tenured jobs are drying up, and how little people seem to give a shit about that, there is no reason why historians shouldnāt reach out to the public through writing of more popular histories and there is certainly no reason why we shouldnāt be trained in such things.
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Oh I agree with this. One disappointment I have with Scientific American is that journalists have replaced scientists as some of the authors. There was one article a few months ago that I absolutely hated for all the unnecessary mealy-mouthed and flowery language. I expect a little of this from journalists, but this was over the top.
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Thatās just standard hack writing. Scientists and journalists, when theyāre hacks, are just hacks in different idioms.
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Itās like the Kevin Kruse thread where he talks about teaching about lynchings in America, and how you can throw out the numbers all day and people just shrug it off, but when you can tie those numbers to people, the horror really sinks in.
For far too long and for far too many of us, history has been taught about numbers and facts. There was no tying it into people. There was no context. For most of us, that dropped history into one of those dreaded courses where you had to memorize lots and learned nothing. Itās a method that serves supremacists well, incidentally. The more you can take people and human stories out of it, the easier it is to dismiss the humanity of the victims. The easier it is for us to file away facts, with no emotional impact.
Itās no coincidence that weāre dealing with a Nazi resurgence at a time when the stories of the survivors are disappearing. Itās no coincidence that labour unions got dismantled as we lost the stories of those who fought to form them, and weāre hurtling back into a world where (in an increasingly number of cases), work is a privilege the worker pays for, not the other way around.
For most of us, stories are how we connect and empathise. Stories are what make us human. And history is fundamentally a human enterprise.
I think Terry Pratchett covers it beautifully in Hogfather when he says the sun would fail to rise. A flaming ball of gas would illuminate the world, but thatās it.
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