Controlling Narratives: Deciding Who Gets to Speak
We’re often told to source any claims we hear very carefully as part of determining the accuracy and reliability of the claim. We should not, however, reject a claim merely due to the personal demographics of the source, whether race, religion, class, or creed. Unfortunately, this happens all the time.
Historically, at least in America, this took the form of racism, sexism, etc. Claims or ideas from someone in a less privileged group would be easily and shamelessly dismissed. Today, thankfully, it’s at least nominally less acceptable, though it certainly still happens. We do have to be vigilant for it still. It’s started coming from another, more well intentioned source as well, though.
I recommend a lot of books to people. One of the most common recommendations I give is John Keay’s India: A History, widely considered the single best volume on its topic in publication. On no less than three separate occasions, however, I’ve received strong objections towards the book on account of Keay being English. (And a 4th identical objection towards Keay’s China: A History.)
This originates in a laudable place. There’s a growing sentiment that histories should be told by their subjects- that a people’s story should be told by them. In theory, I absolutely agree with the sentiment. In practice, it gets a lot more complicated. When it comes to Keay’s history of India, it gets a lot more complicated.
For the past few decades, a school in India choosing the wrong history text can lead to riots. India is rife with controversial divides. Animosity between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious groups. Animosity between Indians and Pakistanis. Regional animosities between Indian states. (Outright denial of the historical role of the northeast is common, for instance). Racial tensions between various ethnicities in India. An alarming number of Indian textbooks get caught up in these controversies.
On top of all that, John Keay is simply a brilliant historian. He wades with special care into the history of his own nation’s colonization of India. He doesn’t try to wash away Britain’s sins, but nor does he demonize it. He instead presents a profoundly nuanced and brutally honest assessment based in the specific contexts of the time and place. It truly is a magisterial work of history.
All of the people who had the initial objection were intelligent people, and quickly processed the issues involved. They’re not really the source of my concern, though. A lot of people- a great many of my compatriots on the left especially- have started carrying the positive ambition of wanting people to tell their own stories much too far. They’ve begun claiming that no one from outside a group can really understand the experience of a member of a group on a meaningful level. That only a member of that group is qualified to discuss their issues, and that anyone else doing it is actively harmful.
This bothers me on a couple levels. First off, I believe that doing your best to put yourself in other people’s shoes is the single highest virtue involved in establishing a pluralistic, multicultural society. This attitude very much runs contrary to that. Sure, there are plenty of people talking over oppressed minorities voices about the oppressed minorities problems, and it’s a problem. (Seriously, stop talking over people you’re claiming to be allied to. Not cool.) That’s not, however, reason to shut down all attempts to put ourselves in their shoes, or even to stop trying to relay their stories secondhand. It just means we should work on being a little less obsessed with having the spotlight.
More importantly, however, it bothers me on a deeply personal level. My mother’s family is a small one today. We’re Jewish, and had only moved over to America in relatively small numbers prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. I won’t go into great detail right now, but to my knowledge, only one member of our family in Europe survived the Holocaust and made it to America. Dealing with this knowledge from a young age… well, it was pretty scary stuff to a little kid. I spent years reading Holocaust histories and survivor stories, as have most members of our family I’ve talked to.
It’s hard for me to talk about this stuff outside (or even inside) my family, but I’ve forced myself to. One thing I’ve been absolutely convinced of since I was a child is that retelling the story of my family, the stories of all the families hurt by the Holocaust, is the best way for me to help work to prevent further tragedies like it. Not only that- I also think it’s critically important for listeners to then retell the story. They need to boost the signal, and on top of that, feel like they’re a PART of the story. To feel like they’re a part of my family, and the families of everyone else that suffered and lost in the Holocaust.
So hearing voices trying to speak on behalf of oppressed minorities shushed- it worries me. People only really become part of a story when we retell it, and if we forbid our listeners from retelling our stories, mistakes they make in the retelling and all… they’re not stories. They’re just advertisements for who has it the worst. The victims need to speak first, but we all need to have their back. I don’t have solutions to the problem of bad allies speaking over those who they’re supposedly backing up, and it does need a solution, but the answer isn’t laying out rules about who is and isn’t allowed to speak.
We need to be a part of each other’s stories in order to see each other as human.
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Bibliography:
India: A History, by John Keay
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/04/07/india-the-war-over-history/#fnr-19
This is a 100% powered up post.
curated for #informationwar
Relevance: Bias in narrative
Uh... I can't say that I think I'm the best choice for selection here. My politics are pretty widely divergent from #informationwar posters, too say the least. (Or, more precisely, many of your members would rightfully consider me their political opponent.)
we arent looking for absolute conformity.
understanding bias in sources, especially in history, is very important in critical thinking
Well, fair enough.
Always a fascinating subject; how much does he go into the Portuguese colonization of India? Seems like a lot of anglo historians either go over this part of history or brush over it quickly.
He goes into reasonable detail. One of Keay's greatest strengths is how he organizes his histories- other historians rush through ancient times so they can spend half the damn work on the 20th century, while John Keay spends about a proportional amount of time on each of India's periods of history.
Nice another to add on my list to read!
The modern "objections" to history would be worth considering, if those who are most vocal can move beyond parroting the racial victim mentality so fashionable in modern academia. Our societies are not divided according to "racial" or "ethnic" divisions, as much as class and caste divisions. Modern Indians may like to imagine all their social woes on the British colonization, but dominance of relatively small number of British over such a vast people as the Indians would not have been possible without the enthusiastic cooperation of the Indian upper castes in the form of the Raj system.
The upper/ruling elites have much more in common with elites of foreign cultural background than with peasants of similar cultural or ethnic background. Focusing on racial or ethnic divisions, while helpful, can distract from the real social events that are always ignored in the remaking of common human experience.
I generally agree- through most of history, class differences have been a lot more important than race differences. Not always, but usually.
To be sure, Britain left a shit ton of problems in India- including Partition, which is easily their single greatest colonial mistake. It is entirely legitimate for an Indian to blame Britain for the shape of international relations on the subcontinent. Partition was a moronic move that was heavily warned against at the time.
You have a very dim view of British competence when regarding her imperial policies. I tend to perceive the Partition of India as one of the masterpieces in political power transition; if fact, the British seems to have been unnaturally generous to their Indian counterparts.
Without an external bogieman in the form of foreign colonial power, i.e. Britain, the Indians would have degenerated into feuding provinces and principalities, as they had been prior to British colonial government via the Raj. Furthermore, the semi-independent Raj states were not all-encompassing, resulting in a severe power-vacuum where the British bureaucracy no longer functioned.
The convenient presence of two major religions allowed for the division of India into two (and later three) major political entities, rather than the hundreds that would have resulted in the ensuing British withdrawal. Rather than Rajputs killing Punjabs, Gujarati killing Sindhs, Kashmiri killing Bhojipuri, etc. the Indian subcontinent was stabilized with Pakistans killing Indians and vise versa. It is eminently better to have two major stable polities hostile to each other rather than disparate ethnic groups causing chaos. A socio-political policy perspective that the upstart 'Muricans would well to do to emulate.
Uhhh... or they could have left it as a single polity, since, you know, India had extrordinarily little ethnic or religious violence in pre-colonial times compared to how ridiculously diverse India is. (Which is to say still a lot, of course, just not proportionally.) And since Partition has resulted in literally millions of civilian deaths in a quite direct fashion. The whole reason two was divided into three? Yeah, not a fun one. I feel pretty comfortable dismissing Partition as a terrible idea based on its real world consequences rather than worrying about an entirely hypothetical eventuality which never occurred.
India had literally centuries of experience being a single polity- splitting it into two out of nowhere? Such a weird move.
It seems that while you have a dim view of British colonial policies, I have a very dim view of humanity in general. :-)
Was not India as a single political unit, a gift, or remnant, of British colonial administration? Prior to British imperial policies, India was divided into separate principalities and kingdoms. Mughal invasion did create a northen empire, but through the will of force, not with assent of the populace.
The modern era of post-French Revolution seems to engender the delusion of national, ethnic, popular "self-determination" (whatever thart means). The fracturing of the Ottoman European holdings, the dissolution of Habsburg holdings, the Irish revolt, the tribal anarchy of the sub-Saharan African "republics," the fragmentaion of former Yugoslavia, etc. seem to indicate an inherent human tendency towards anarchy in the absence of a strong, ruthless central power coupled with modernist political drivel. The only other force that unites disparate human creatures into some type of cohesive polity seems to be xenophobic paranoia.
Maybe India would have remained united without the need to partition a significant group into a hostile, "foreign" entity. But I don't share such optimism within the human spirit.
Great message, thank you! very nice post overall.
Thanks, I appreciate it!
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