'The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below' by Priya Satia (2023) Journal of Social History comments
In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation. ...
In his now classic 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It also marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” As a scholarly goal for those working on histories of enslaved people, restoring agency to the enslaved ultimately made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and still perhaps ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the more dimly lit era before 2003. As it turns out, the original turn to agency in the 1950s and 1960s contested liberal notions of selfhood and explicitly sought to forge a two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting the motivations behind that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making, illuminating what we can expect from academic scholarship on the dispossessed.
In the 1950s, scholars like E. P. Thompson strove to rescue the dispossessed “from the enormous condescension of posterity” in the very particular context of (seeming) imperial twilight. In questioning the judgment of history, Thompson challenged the longstanding whiggish presumption that failure represented history’s verdict on a struggle. He redeemed “lost causes” to illuminate the historical agency of those that liberal narratives took as history’s objects rather than subjects, and to open up new possibilities for exercising political agency in his own time. He rummaged in the past for democratic forms of revolutionary agency that might empower twentieth-century people caught between the chilling conformism of the Communist Party and the oppressions of the Cold War British state. History writing was a mode of redress for the past and source of resistance in the present: therapy and politics.
... The 1990s also saw renewed faith in liberalism in both the academy and the world. With Project Minerva, the new millennium’s “war on terror” once again coopted the Western academy into colonial projects. Even as awareness of the academy’s historic complicity in the oppressive projects of the modern era intensified and universities investigated their historic ties to slavery and colonialism, (partly as backlash against such “wokery”) they became more corporatized, slashing budgets for humanistic learning.
This setting helps explain how by the time of Johnson’s critique in 2003, scholarship that diligently invoked “agency” wound up reinforcing “the universality of a liberal notion of selfhood” even in conversations about slavery. The “we” in Johnson’s worry that “we are practicing therapy rather than politics” gestured to a majority-white academic establishment; but history-from-below had been part of a challenge to this academy devoted to cultivating liberal selfhood and liberal empire. Those writing history-from-below from within the halls of a neoliberal academy are trying to make something of the bathwater without the baby. Hence the inability to go beyond reestablishing, ad nauseum, that members of every demographic are as “human” as the male white subject that was liberalism’s initial default human being. In the establishment academy, history-from-below was shorn of its original purpose of reimagining how humans act through culture and illuminating alternative selfhoods for our present. Historians obscured how enslaved people “theorized their own actions and the practical process through which those actions provided the predicate for new ways of thinking about slavery and resistance.”
