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History From Below

This document discusses the concept of history from below and inverting the traditional gaze of history. Looking at history from the perspective of common people and rebels reveals stories that were left out of traditional historical narratives focused on ideas like progress, modernity, and power. Telling history from below has the potential to fundamentally rearrange our understanding of historical imagination. Several historians in the 1970s argued that the history presented as ours is only a partial history, and that we must consider the history of common people and their collective acts that have shaped society through the centuries. De-elitizing the social sciences was seen as part of intellectual decolonization efforts. Traditional Confucian views portrayed common rebels as "non-persons" outside the view

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Irene Sultana
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69 views1 page

History From Below

This document discusses the concept of history from below and inverting the traditional gaze of history. Looking at history from the perspective of common people and rebels reveals stories that were left out of traditional historical narratives focused on ideas like progress, modernity, and power. Telling history from below has the potential to fundamentally rearrange our understanding of historical imagination. Several historians in the 1970s argued that the history presented as ours is only a partial history, and that we must consider the history of common people and their collective acts that have shaped society through the centuries. De-elitizing the social sciences was seen as part of intellectual decolonization efforts. Traditional Confucian views portrayed common rebels as "non-persons" outside the view

Uploaded by

Irene Sultana
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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History from Below

What can we mean by world history, if one inverts the position of the gaze? if we
saw revolutions, will we see static continuous, monotony? what's visiting it mean
for ‘time’, to suddenly be divisible by the amount of lenses we deploy at history?
to work out history from the inverted position of gaze will reveal stories that did
not make it to the final word cut of discourse that has shaped ideas like progress,
modern, power and universal humanity. to figure out history from below, and
also then to tell the history from below therefore, may be a frightening task, one
with the potential to rearrange the planes of historical imagination we currently
possess. a gaggle of yanked historians within the first 1970's: "We face the matter
that the history presented as ours is solely a component of our history.... What of
the history of the history less', the anonymous folks that in their collective acts,
their work, daily lives and fellowship, have forged our society through the
centuries?”1 In another assemblage country Rodolfo Stavenhagen. within the
front rank of his profession in Mexico, necessitated the "de-elitization" of social
sciences as a component of the strategy of intellectual decolonisatioIl. 2
Chesneaux, the French Sinologist. He points out the quaint tradition of Confucian
mandarins of per common rebels as fei-a negative grammatical expression
denoting non-persons, a denial of their existence within the eyes of history. 3

References

1) Angel (quientero Rivera, Workers' Struggle in Puerto Rico: a documentary


study, New York, 1976, pp 6-7. This is a publication of a group of radical
historians and social scientists called Centro de Estudios de la Realidad
Puertoriqueno.

2)Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Between underdevelopment and revolution: a Latin


American perspective, De l h i, I 981, pp 1 84 -1 8 6.

3)Jean Chesneaux, Pasts and Futures, London, 1978, p 19.

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