SCHOOL OF HISTORY

SUBALTERN HISTORY
Subaltern Studies emerged around 1982 as a series of journal
articles published by Oxford University Press in India. A group of
Indian scholars trained in the west wanted to reclaim their
history. Its main goal was to retake history for the underclasses,
for
the voices that had not been heard previous. Scholars of the
subaltern hoped to break away from histories of the selected
group
that is superior in term of ability and the foucing on european or
history to the exclusion of a wider view of the world, implicitly
regarding European culture as pre-eminent bias of current
imperial
history. In the main, the wrote against the "Cambridge School"
which seemed to uphold the colonial legacy—i.e. it was elite-
centered. Instead, they focused on subaltern in terms of class,
caste, gender, race, language and culture. They support the idea
that there may have been political dominance, but that this was
not
hegemonic. The primary leader was Ranajit Guha who had
written
works on peasant uprisings in India. Another of the leading
scholars of subaltern studies is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She
draws on a number of theoretical positions in her analysis of
Indian
history: deconstruction, marxism, feminism. She was highly
critical
of current histories of India that were told from the vantage point
of
the colonizers and presented a story of the colony via the British
adminstrators . What she and other historians (including Ranajit
Guha) wanted was to reclaim their history, to give voice to the
subjected peoples. Any other history merely reconstructs
imperialist hegemony and does not give voice to the people—
those
who resisted, those who supported, those who experienced
colonial
incursion. According to the Subaltern Studies group, this history
is
designed to be a "contribution made by people on their own, that
it,
independently of the elite".
Thus subaltern history will help to lay bare previously covered
histories, previously ignored events, previously purposeful
hidden
secrets of the past .
According to Ranajit Guha, subaltern studies intervened in
historical schools of thought that could not represent the history
of nationalism in India without celebrating the role the elites
played in bringing the larger nation into the discourse. This
existing version of history, Guha argues, discounted subaltern
contributions, and so the subaltern studies group sought “to
rectify the elitist bias” in a field “dominated by elitism —
colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism”
Though the original subaltern studies group emerged out of
historical and cultural studies, the concept of the subaltern has
expanded in interpretation from the original configuration to
apply to any population that is disenfranchised and
unreachable due to hegemonic oppression. Subaltern turns in
other fields, specifically literature, anthropology, and women’s,
gender, and sexuality studies, have been made by scholars
across the globe. Subaltern studies often overlaps with
postcolonial studies as having similar aims and projects.

NEW HISTORY

The concept ‘new’ History is marred with controversy but

the wording of the concept has attracted every historian
worth his or her salt. Others vehemently argue on
behalf of the ‘new’ History movement even with scanty
knowledge about issues involved and some still castigate the
concept as a catch phrase that is just but hollow
with nothing new after all. The truth, however, is that
whatever the understanding of ‘new’ History, it has sent
some shockwaves on the teaching of History in schools.
It is the intention of this chapter to explore the
epistemological and curriculum roots of the concept
‘new’ History, explain the meaning of the concept and
discuss how the concept has impacted and should be
implemented in the learning and teaching of History. The
writer acknowledges that the concept ‘new’ History is
relative and fairly ambiguous as ‘new’ History in Britain in
the 1960s is still regarded as ‘new’ History in Zimbabwe
today. The position of the writer is that, efforts should be
made to use child centred methods without ourselves
confusing each other with controversial terms like ‘new ’or
‘old’ history for definitions sometimes fail to give respect to
time progress.
In most cases, the shortfalls of the existing status quo
give rise to the need for new dimensions to
knowledge. According to Chitate [2005], history can be
viewed in two major epistemological forms. History as a
body of knowledge; knowledge ‘that’ and history as a form
of knowledge: knowledge ‘how’. History as a body of
knowledge can be referred to as ‘old’ history and
considering history as a form of knowledge is what is
referred to
as ‘new’ history. Freeman in Steele [1976;2] explains ‘old’
history as, “loading the child’s memory without ever
appealing to the imagination.’’ The aim of ‘old’ history was
the transmission of facts to memory without personal
processing of information on the part of the student-
knowledge out there. The child was expected to memorise
facts and reproduce them when required. Curzon
(1985:58) argues that, “knowledge is an active process…”
Students learn best not by committing a body of knowledge
to the mind but through participation in the process
that makes possible knowledge generation. The concept of
‘new’ history was thus an attempt to make the child
the centre of learning through the teaching of skills
fundamental in historical thinking. The shift to teaching
pupils
skills instead of content only was a result of a number of
factors.
The term new history is from Nouvelle Histoire, a French
term which is associated with cultural history. It
is also referred to as total history. The New History
Movement gathered momentum in Britain from the 1960s
when the Schools Council History [13-16] Project was started
to examine the problems bedevilling the teaching of
History. One of the major issues to be addressed was
the issue of relevance of History as a subject in the
curriculum. According to Steele [1976], most pupils regarded
History as a useless subject that would not benefit
them in real life situation. It is against this background
that the concept of ‘new’ history emphasises on skills.
Skills are lifelong assets that one may use even in other
areas. Skills of selection, analysis, evaluation and
empathy which are central to the ‘new’ history approach can
be used in economics, politics and even in family life
decisions. So by including skills to the content, this ‘new’
history concept was and is trying to make History more
relevant.
The article by Mary Price (1968), “History in Danger”
contributed to the rise of “new” History. The article
created a sense of urgency by even exaggerating on
pupils’ feelings towards History. According to Mcbride
(1979), attacks on the teaching methods of History made it
appear as the world was prepared to throw History
into the dustbin. From this observation, one can argue
that there was nothing fundamentally “new” but it was
simply a review of the teaching methods. The term was
suggested as a panic bell for fear of extinction in a stiffly
contested curriculum space. In as much as the article
instilled fear, it was also meant to rally support for the
subject through encouraging proper child centred methods.

GENDER HISTORY

“Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” has no

visible date of expiration.
Of all the American Historical Review articles on JSTOR, Scott's
has had by far the most traffic. Since JSTOR first began
posting scholarly articles online in 1997, users have accessed
“Gender” more than 38,000 times and printed more than
25,000 copies. For the past five years, it has consistently
ranked in the top spot as the most frequently viewed and
most frequently printed of JSTOR's AHR articles.
In part, it may be a matter of architecture.
Scott built “Gender” with an artful use of argument. In one
brief essay, she managed to summarize the advent of gender
history, provide critiques of earlier theories of women's
subordination, introduce historians to deconstructionist
methods, and lay out an agenda for future historical studies.
But as we all know, academic reputation rests on more than
compellingly structured argument, even when the argument
is displayed well in a top-tier scholarly journal. For
historians, the surest way to explain a text is to place it in
historical context. Thus, a short history of “Gender” the
article might help us assess its rise to prominence and its
influence within the field of U.S. history. And an even
shorter history of “gender” the concept might suggest the
article's longer-lasting contribution to American social
thought.
AS SCOTT NOTED, BY 1986, feminists had already
adopted the term “gender” to refer to the social construction
of sex differences, and theorists had already posed “gender”
as an analytic category, akin to class and race. A few
historians had begun to use the term “gender history” in
addition to “women's history,” and a handful had looked at
men and masculinity as part of a gender history that did not
focus solely on women. Scott intervened in this
historiographic process at a critical moment. For some
historians of women, the shift toward gender history was
mostly unwelcome. To replace “women's history” with
“gender history” and to include men and masculinity
seemed to some at the time like a conservative retrenchment,
a quest for respectability, or an abandonment of the study of
marginalized and oppressed groups. Scott recognized the
pitfalls and offered reassurance. She directly repudiated the
use of “gender” as a de-politicized, social-scientized
synonym for women or sex, and she promised to
reinvigorate feminist history by expanding its realm of
influence. In this way, she helped historians of women to
approve (and other historians to discern) an emerging shift
in historiography.
Scott outlined a problem faced by women's historians and
proffered a solution. Two decades after the launching of the
field, women's history was, she implied, stuck in a
descriptive rut, relegated to the limited byways of social
history inquiry. It had failed in its earlier claims to rewrite
the master narrative of history, and it had not yet adequately
explained the “persistent inequalities between women and
men.” Existing theories, Scott said, were ahistorical and
reductionist. She offered a different approach for rethinking
and rewriting history. Influenced by Derrida's
deconstructionism and Foucault's formulation of dispersed
power, she asked historians to analyze the language of
gender, to observe how perceived sex differences had
appeared historically as a natural and fundamental
opposition. These perceived differences, she wrote, had often
subordinated and constrained women, yes, but they had also
provided a “primary way of signifying” other hierarchical
relationships. This was the heart of her contribution: she
invited us to look at how “the so-called natural relationship
between male and female” structured, naturalized, and
legitimated relationships of power, say, between ruler and
ruled or between empire and colony. The history of gender
could, it seems, inhabit more of the historical turf than could
the history of women. It could even enter and remap the
most resistant domains, such as the history of war, politics,
and foreign relations.
Although she promised to expand the realm of feminist
influence, Scott could not deflect the critics from within her
own fractious camp. Her embrace of poststructuralism and
her consequent emphasis on the language of sex difference
provoked a number of pointed rejoinders from prominent
women's historians. Judith Bennett, for example, worried
that “the Scottian study of gender ignore[d]
women qua women,” avoided reckoning with “material
reality,” and “intellectualized and abstracted the
inequality of the sexes.” Likewise, Linda Gordon suspected
that a “focus on gender as difference in itself” as “a kind of
paradigm for all other divides” had replaced “gender as a
system of domination” and thereby substituted a pluralist
vision of “multiple differences” for the study of “power
differentials.” Joan Hoff went further, even overboard. She
accused poststructuralist gender historians, and Scott in
particular, of nihilism, presentism, ahistoricism, obfuscation,
elitism, obeisance to patriarchy, ethnocentrism, irrelevance,
and possibly racism. Poststructuralism, she found, “erased
woman as a category of analysis,” undermined the
“traditional stage of historical fact-finding” for those groups
of women whose history had not yet been written, and
damaged political activism for women's rights. She titled her
essay “Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis.”
The critical commentary also came from historians who did
not write women's history, especially those who questioned
the linguistic turn. Critiques of Scott's work came from both
the left and the right. Bryan Palmer, for example, decried her
repudiation of historical materialism, and Gertrude
Himmelfarb complained about the undermining of fact,
reality, and objectivity. In the United States, as others have
suggested, “feminist historians” were “in the vanguard” of
poststructuralist historical practice, especially in its
manifestations outside of intellectual history, and Scott stood
out at the front. In this sense, “Gender” came to represent
something larger than itself. Scott served as the whipping
girl not only for gender history but also for the challenges of
poststructuralism, the revisionism of the latest new history,
and the vogue—the “intellectual haute couture”—of
imported French theory. She may not have enjoyed the
public flagellation, but it no doubt played a part in attracting
readers to her essay.
DESPITE THE MISGIVINGS OF SOME HISTORIANS,
gender soon took on a life of its own. Within the field of U.S.
history, much of the new work on gender had little direct
connection with Scott's essay. Case studies of the
intersections of race, class, and gender, for example, and
accounts of how various groups of women and men
participated differently in politics, labor, and consumption
did not necessarily draw on Scott's Derridean, Foucauldian
model. Some new histories of gender in public cited Jürgen
Habermas and Nancy Fraser more often than they cited
Derrida and Scott. But Scott's article did have
unquestionable influence, even among those authors who
did not adopt the deconstructionist method wholesale. In the
1990s, it inspired a cohort of scholars who wrote gender
history in a range of forms and fields. Within this cohort, a
number of authors followed Scott's proposal to foreground
the discursive use of perceived sex differences and track how
they constituted relationships of power. In U.S. history, the
case studies of “women's worlds” and “female cultures” that
had proliferated in the 1980s dwindled as accounts rose of
the ways in which the language of gender had shored up
hierarchies of race, class, region, politics, nation, and empire.

UZMA FAZAL

HISTORY

BA LLB(1 year)