In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance,” and Public History

Bain Attwood

In the last few decades the nature of history making, especially that regarding the contemporary era, has been transformed, changing not only the pasts that are being related but the way in which many people relate to those pasts. The shift in the nature of historical knowledge and historical sensibility owes much to both popular and academic forms of history; indeed, it is largely the outcome of a convergence of the interests and approaches of elite history and culture with those of popular history and culture. Generally speaking, history making has been democratized, but more particularly there has been an unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testimony. People who have experienced an event and bear witness to it have come to be regarded as the most authentic bearers of truth about the past, indeed as the embodiment of history, and their accounts are increasingly received by many as a substitute for the history of the professional historian who seeks to record and explain a past event. This phenomenon owes much to the fact that we live in a global world in which an ideal of human rights has triumphed, a politics of recognition calling for acknowledgment of the collective experience and identity of minority groups has flourished, new institutions and technologies providing a sense of immediacy have expanded, and a culture of intimacy has become dominant in public institutions, not least in the media. Together, these changes have placed the personal at the center of public culture and put emotion on display; the individual and affect wield more power in representing the past than the intellectual and analysis.1

The age of testimony reflects major changes in the discipline of history itself but also presents a fundamental challenge to its authority and to the creation of “historical knowledge” in the sense that Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses here. In large part this is because of the way it renders the temporal relationships at play in historical representation. As Michel de Certeau once stated, “Historiography [in modernity] . . . is based on a clean break between the past and the present. . . . Historiography conceives the relation [between past and present] as one of succession (one after the other), correlation (greater or less proximities), cause and effect (one follows the other), and disjunction (either one or the other, but not both at the same time).”2 Gabrielle Spiegel has described this as the discipline’s founding gesture: “to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography.”3 This clean break between past and present has been fundamental to the way historians have done their work and to the truth claims we have made for the historical knowledge we produce.

However, it might be more useful to express the temporal relationship at the heart of modern historiography in another way. It can be argued that “distantiation” — the process of putting the past at a distance from the present — has been the hallmark of historical work in modernity and so is central to what has been called historicism. Temporal distance is, of course, inevitable in historical work, since we relate the past after the event, yet it is also a construction on the part of both the producer and consumer of history. (This has several dimensions, such as the formal, the affective, the ideological, and the cognitive.) Consequently, there are, in Mark Salber Phillips’s words, “a series of distances (or even distanceeffects) that modify and reconstruct the temporality of historical accounts, thereby shaping every part of our engagement with the past.”4 Phillips has argued that schools of historical work have long been marked by particular forms of engagement with the past and that these can be understood in terms of their various commitments to particular stances in relation to “distance” (by which he means “the entire continuum from proximity to detachment”) and that in the history of historiography significant change has been associated with reconfigurations of “distance.” He suggests that the cognitive might be the most significant dimension of the various dimensions of “distance” and that the reworking of this realm “can be expected to have larger, more disruptive consequences” than shifts in the others.5

Since the rise of history as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century, its work has owed much to an attempt to convey a sense that what happened in the past was particular (or peculiar) to its time and was the result of circumstances other than those of today. A sense of difference between past and present has been a consequence, too, of history’s conception of human time as linear (rather than, say, cyclical), and its understanding of history as a story of progress through time in which the present breaks continuously with the past. The focus on the origins of historical events, on causes and effects, has similarly increased the sense of distance been a past and a present. Most important, perhaps, any sense of proximity between present and past has been diminished by the discipline’s founding ideal of objectivity, with its assumptions that there was a sharp separation between knower (the historian) and known (the past), that historical facts existed before and apart from historical interpretation, and that truth was unitary rather than a matter of perspective.6

Several reasons can be adduced for the rise of historical distantiation, but probably none played a more vital role than writing or, rather, the ideological claims that historians came to make about the nature of writing: that the written word made the past available as an object; that the written word helped create a palpable sense of the past; that the written word revealed historians’ knowledge of the past to be true, and that the written word was the best means of conveying that knowledge. (In this process, any relationship that written modes of communication might have had to oral ones has tended to be erased, as Miranda Johnson discusses in her article in this issue.) More generally, the historian’s authority and power rested on the triumph of literacy in the institutions that dominated public life in the West in the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth. However, during the last fifty or more years, this authority has declined in public culture as the oral and the visual have acquired a new or, more strictly speaking, renewed influence, such that historical knowledge and historical sensibility increasingly bear some resemblance to those of premodern times.7 The rise and reconfiguration of these old ways of remembering has been facilitated by changes in many realms, not least the technological, which has seen the spread of new forms of recording and transmitting the spoken and the pictorial and new institutions such as television. This has had a profound impact on “distance” in historical work.

The ways in which the production and consumption of history have changed in recent decades are exemplified by the particular example of history making I shall consider here: the “stolen generations narrative.” This claimed that an enormously high percentage of Aboriginal children, perhaps as many as one in three, had been separated from their families during the twentieth century; that separations had been forced; and that the principal purpose of the policy of removal was to prevent the reproduction of Aboriginal people, so it amounted to a form of genocide. This account, I argue, was less the outcome of the work of professional history, though it did play a role, and more the result of various forms of historical work we can call public history. For the most part, the stolen generations narrative arose as a consequence of being presented in, or projected onto, a range of institutions that were not historiographical in nature but memorial, literary, filmic, therapeutic, and quasilegal and that recognized and authorized the narrative according to criteria that departed from those customarily used in professional history. This occurred because these institutions constituted narrative contexts with stances that emphasized historical proximity rather than historical distance; and this was primarily so because of the dominant role assigned to testimony, not only formally, ideologically, and affectively, but also, and most important, cognitively.

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This article seeks to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of this way of relating the past and relating to the past, then argues for the need for an approach that seeks to integrate the stances of historical proximity and historical distance.

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Notes

I am indebted to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Miranda Johnson, and Mark Salber Phillips for their comments on a draft of this article.

1. Jay Winter, “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Raritan 21 (2001): 56, 66; Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), xiii, xv, 93, 97, 116, 119, 130, 142; Annette Wieviorka, “The Witness in History,” trans. Jared Stark, Poetics Today 27 (2006): 392.
2. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 4.
3. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 149.
4. Mark Salber Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” History Workshop Journal 57 (2004): 124, 126, 127.
5. Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” 127.
6. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
7. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78.