peabody2012

@Article{ peabody2012,
    author = {Sue Peabody},
    title = {Microhistory, Biography, Fiction: The Politics of Narrating the Lives of People under Slavery},
    journal = {Transatlantica},
    volume = 2,
    year = 2012,
    url = {http://transatlantica.revues.org/6184},
}

http://transatlantica.revues.org/6184

Good explanation of what Microhistory does well in paragraph 8:

The microhistory works on at least three levels: 1) it recovers the lost stories of individuals’ struggles; 2) it situates them in the wider macrohistorical context of their times; and 3) it illuminates the relations of power and conventions of representation to show why subalterns’ stories are so very hard to reconstruct in the first place.

Paragraph 27-28:

Microhistory, which emerged first in Italy and was later adopted by French Annalistes and their emulators in the United States, was a self-consciously political attempt to move beyond the limitations of previous social history trends, like cliometric history, to recover the lived experience of the underclass—the “people without history.” While cliometric historians, who typically analyzed vast arrays of serial data (e.g. fertility, morbidity and migration), shared the microhistorians’ goal of writing a “total” history of the popular classes, they nevertheless tended to portray the downtrodden as the subjects of external forces: economics, disease, politics or religion. By casting peasants as the subjects of powerful narratives, the purveyors of microhistory deliberately cast these people as heroic resistors to official power.

Another defining characteristic of microhistory, besides its choice of subject, is a postmodern tendency to explicitly signal the elements of historical interpretation, especially when historical evidence is scant or contradictory. … Davis, like other practitioners of microhistory, is committed to foregrounding what we know and how we know it, as well as marking what we do not know. By contrast, biographers—especially those writing for the general public—are more inclined to paper over these ambiguities in a clear, declarative narrative that does not force readers to struggle with the ambiguities of the historical record.

Paragraph 37:

It may be significant that several exemplary life histories of enslaved people have focused on the stories of entire families or communities, rather than the limited stories of particular individuals. (I’m thinking here of Gordon-Reed, Scott, and Jones.) Judith M. Brown proposes such “family life histories” to explore the social networks in which people live their lives (Brown, 2009, 591). Such a narrative strategy implicitly foregrounds the interdependence of people and the social ties that help them through adversity, as well as the specific mechanisms in relations of exploitation. It seems to me that the social biography, then, offers an alternative political vision of human experience to the individualism of more conventional biographies.

Paragraph 48:

What is the political value of telling the stories of people who lived under the legal regime of slavery? And are there implicit dangers therein? Furcy’s story has the capacity to teach us many things: about the particular history of France’s relationship to slavery and its peculiar (to present-day Americans) blindness to the workings of both institutional and quotidian racism; about the determination of some individuals to claim a measure of dignity within such a system; about the use of lawsuits to stimulate public opinion and bring about legal reform, but also about the inherently conservative nature of written law and how mechanisms of exceptionalism (like the Free Soil principle) can paradoxically work to reinforce slavery itself by legitimating its continued existence outside the boundaries of the “free” nation state. Many of these elements have corollaries in contemporary society but may be easier to see at a historical distance.