Literary Historiographies: A Workshop

There is a common expression in Southern American Englishes that like the phrase “Once upon a time…” or "Il était une fois…" in French or “es war einmal…” in German that signals the recounting of a story. A quick internet search of the phrase “What had happened was…” will tell us that in the context of “African American Vernacular English” it serves as the “narrative tense”. Similarly, the word itihaas that is used across several Indian languages to primarily mean “history” in the “modern” sense of the term. However, were it to be translated in a rather literal sense, the word itihaas pretty much means, “It thus happened…”

We propose to understand the act of writing and how it shapes the very human activities that make history. Poesis and performance located in the concrete existential world can only be understood as human action and hence structured as human relations by politics and ethics. History writing, historiography as a distinct set of textual and discursive practices is an existential activity; an intentional practice of being in the world; across modalities of understanding in literary, linguistic and cultural contexts.

We propose, through this workshop, a coming together around a shared understanding of the poetics and ethics of historiography as an intellectual project that is fundamental to a practice of Comparative Literature. Located in plural societies we have been in conversation across individual and global histories through our shared experience of engaging with and in this globalised virtualised stratified world. Our experience of history leads us to question the location of grand universal normative theories which flood academic scholarship, and reflect on our own understanding – beginning with the poesis or making of literary histories as not simply alternative or supplemental to the political project of “History” but as a form of gathering together and forging space and pedagogies for plural experiential realities.