Subaltern History Makers and Alternative Constructions of the Past

Despite numerous studies of historiography, collective memory, and amateur history, U.S. historians have only begun to investigate how members of subordinated groups consciously constructed alternative popular versions of the past. In this round table, we bring together two articles that address such history-making projects. In “Meta Warrick's 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory,” W. Fitzhugh Brundage looks at the visual representations of African American history created by the black sculptor Meta Warrick for the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition. In “The Politics of Transnational History Making: Japanese Immigrants on the Western ‘Frontier,’ 1927–1941,” Eiichiro Azuma studies the group identity created by Issei historians of Japanese American life. Both articles show how subaltern history makers reworked the historical themes and representational strategies of the dominant culture. The makers of popular history depicted in both essays acknowledged and incorporated a history of racial subordination and placed racial minorities at the center of history's dramas. They claimed, as Brundage writes, “a position the dominant white narrative denied,” and they engaged in what Azuma calls “a racialized reinvention of a collective self.” The histories they constructed emphasized oppression, striving, and achievement and testified to the abilities and agency of groups of people elsewhere cast as inferior

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Historiography · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Official history · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Subaltern · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Race, History, and American Society