Theorizing Historical Consciousness (review)

'Historical consciousness' has worked its way to the centre of contemporary discourse about history without benefit of consensus on its precise meaning. The semantic sprawl is on display in this volume of essays from the conference that helped launch UBC's Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness in 2001. Editor Peter Seixas cogently defends a broad construction of the phrase and struggles to impose thematic unity on the collection. Nevertheless, the contributions reflect a baffling diversity of topic and approach, and a few lapse into an obscurity that often accompanies a willingness to use theorize as a transitive verb. Still, the collection nicely frames the issues at stake in the study of historical consciousness, sometimes with insight and power.

'Historical consciousness' often denotes the collective memory of the past evinced by non-historians. Such consciousness seems to be intensifying currently, as evidenced by today's plethora of commemorations, re-enactments, and memorializations; the profits of the heritage industry and the politicization of the past; media interest in popular history; and the emerging link between shared historical experience, ethnic identity, and the politics of suffering. Historians are nervously aware that the past no longer belongs to them as exclusively as a few decades ago.

Contributors to this collection mostly seek the cause of today's return to the past in the recent collapse of socialism, the liberal nation-state, and the homogenizing progress-narratives they kept alive. 'When the future collapses,' John Torpey compellingly writes, 'the past rushes in' (242), bringing with it identity politics, 'diasporic consciousness' (249), and (in his own valuation) forms of popular consciousness that refuse 'at the level of ideas to come to grips with the hard realities of wealth and power' (246). Contributors interpret popular and academic approaches to the past mostly as hostile and antithetical to each other: Collective memory allegedly brings the past into the present, academic history distances and relativizes it. Persuasive as these assumptions are, both deserve more critical scrutiny; the second, in particular, discourages contributors from comparing popular and academic forms of historical consciousness closely or analysing their interaction in any venue but the classroom. Christian Laville, however, raises these issues in his intriguing attempt at a history of the historical consciousness movement.

In Europe the 'study of historical consciousness' implies something altogether different, namely the pedagogy and didactics of K–12 history-teaching. Several contributions analyse why the academic interpretations presented in school history seem so ineffective in displacing traditional narratives and collective memories about national experience, whether in post-Soviet Russia (James Wertsch) or Quebec (Chris Lorenz, Jocelyn Létourneau, Sabrina Moisan). Peter Lee reports empirical findings on the levels of sophistication evinced by British students in explaining discrepancies between differing historical accounts of essentially the same events. Jörn Rüsen presents his well-known theoretical typology of four types of historical consciousness (traditional, exemplary, critical, and genetic) – each, he argues, distinguished by the nature of the moral imperative felt to be imposed by the past. Several contributors touch on the typology's potential application to pedagogy.

The volume raises yet another sensitive issue about historical consciousness. Chris Lorenz charges that professional history neglects 'liminal, catastrophic ... traumatic ... or ... sublime' historical experiences (27). Roger I. Simon argues for the personally transformative and redemptive nature of encounters with historical testimony to massive suffering and victimization. Simon calls for a 'non-indifference' to such testimony and the need for a 'transitive public history.' He acknowledges that concerns about the narrative adequacy of such testimony and the typicality and causation of the events to which it points may be received as 'obscene questions' implying a 'renewal of psychic violence' (193). Is it possible, then, for the altered forms of historical consciousness prompted by such evidential encounters to be assimilated to traditional forms of awareness of the past or understood as a recasting of conventional narrative expectations? The dialogue on this question (reproduced in the volume) tiptoes around this topic. The exchange points, however, to the seismic nature of the issues raised (and...