History is always narrated through present relations of power

Evidence

Another possible requirement for teachers who assume the position of public intellectuals is the need to develop new ways to engage history in order to develop a critical watch over the relationship between historical events and the ways in which those events are produced and recalled through the narratives in which they unfold. This suggests that educators reaffirm the pedagogical importance of educating students to be skilled in the language of public memory. Public memory rejects the notion of knowledge as merely an inheritance, with transmission as its only form of practice. In its critical form, public memory suggests that history be read not merely as an act of recovery but as a dilemma of uncertainty, a form of address and remembering that links the narratives of the past with the circumstances of its unfolding and how such an unfolding or retelling is connected to “the present relations of power” and the experience of those engaged in the rewriting of historical narratives. Public memory sees knowledge as a social and historical construction that is always the object of struggle. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2691

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘public memory’ as a critical pedagogical concept — history as dilemma not inheritance, knowledge as object of struggle.
• SEED: Angle: public memory as a lens for evaluating how civic monuments, curricula, and archives are rewrites of the past in service of present power.
• XREF: connects to: The subaltern subject is the knowing limit of all historical narration — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1774; Temporal concordance among time levels is contested and always political. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 100; Taken-for-granted cultural narratives exert the most power — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 143