Modern singular-linear historiography marginalizes the past as primitive and serves imperial power.

Evidence

Walter Mignolo argues that modernity’s concept of history is singular, recognizing, that is, a single line of narrative. When a new development occurs, what existed before it is pushed back into the past, precisely into “history” and the “historical.” This process, pervasively epistemological, carries with it profound implications, since the very conception of linear, singular history, coupled with a trenchant theology of progress, always locates the past within the marginal and less privileged. History is history, less “developed” and thus wholly or partially primitive, medieval, antimodern, and most importantly irrelevant to the new and modern, to the “true” expression of “progress.” Beginning with Vico and early Nietzsche and ending more recently with Hayden White and de Certeau, this conception has been critically interrogated, creating anxiety but little change among professional historians. Deeply implicated in nationalism and modern state domination, modern historiography and historical imagination remain implicated in imperialism and colonialism, that is, in the mechanics of destructive power. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 522

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of historical theory: Hayden White’s ‘plotting,’ de Certeau, and the idea that historiography has mythical/imaginary structure. Also parallels arguments from The Defeat of the Spanish Armada about contingency in history.
• DEFINE: Defines and contrasts two models of history: the modern singular-linear model versus the premodern circulatory model.