Historical writing reflects the historian rather than the past

Evidence

History is not so much an account of how people in the past lived; it is the mirror in which the image of the historian herself appears. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s interest in how knowledge/representation is self-indexing — echoes the earlier kept claim ‘Representation metaphors suited to small assertions fail on large debatable ones’ and work on historical objectivity. — connects to: Sartre’s dramatic quartet repudiates the historian’s claim to know the past; The constructed image of the primitive past serves a hermeneutic, not historical, function — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 176; History is a selective construction by high-status narrators — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 641
• SEED: An essay angle: how every ‘objective’ account of a foreign culture is really a mirror of the writer’s own subjectivity — with Orientalism as the case study.
• DEEPTHINKING: A compact, paradigm-shifting statement about the self-referential nature of historiography — in the top tier of the chapter’s insights.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 301