The past constrains identity but is always narrativized, not literally recovered.

Evidence

It is not a free-floating open space because history has lodged on it the powerful, tendential organization of a past. We bear the traces of a past, the connections of the past. We cannot conduct this kind of cultural politics without returning to the past, but it is never a return of a direct and literal kind. The past is not waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against. It is always retold, rediscovered, reinvented. It has to be narrativized. We go to our own pasts through history, through memory, through desire, not as a literal fact. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 256

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the relation to the past in constructing identity: constrained by history yet always retold, reinvented, narrativized.
• XREF: Echoes Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities — nations and identity-groups are narratively imagined constructions, not literal recoveries. Also resonates with Parable of the Sower’s forward-not-backward orientation. — connects to: The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 434; A person’s varied past selves all exist in the mode of having been — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 418; The past is only meaningful through the end one currently chooses — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1183 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: This refusal of a literal, recoverable origin past — ‘the past is not waiting for us back there’ — is a direct denial of the graft-with-pure-root metaphor in ‘Grafting & Growth’: every root is itself a retelling.