Collective Memory: Alex Champion's Week 6

It was an eventful Week 6 at The HistoryMakers. The week was bookended by a Tuesday lecture by Dominican University professor Cecelia Salvatore and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and University of Illinois journalism professor Leon Dash. Their lecture and workshop, respectively, were not coordinated but it is my habit to see connections or other relationships where none were intended. Dr. Salvatore talked about collective memory that, to simplify, is the history that we hold as a culture or civilization; it is distinct from history in that it is passed on and can be explored but not discovered and compiled except in large scale efforts; the HistoryMakers video archive is just such an undertaking. Rather than examine archival records or personal papers THM is piecing together a collective, black experience based on the common experiences and memories of blacks—especially those in the middle or upper classes. Its scale is so large that The HistoryMakers fellows are abandoning the labor intensive interview evaluation processes and focusing on special collections processing of paper and electronic records.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida got the Postmodernism ball rolling

The most memorable reading for the archives lecture was a Mark Greene piece that, surprisingly, I never read previously. The volume 65 American Archivist article’s title, “The Power of Meaning: The Archival Mission in the Postmodern Age,” made me skeptical immediately. As my mentor Rick Pifer of the Wisconsin Historical Society joked, “Mark always likes to write about whatever he’s doing…” The implication, confirmed by reading nearly a dozen articles, is that Greene is perhaps the last archivist I would expect to write about post-modernism--excepting Luciana Duranti, whose emphasis on evidential value is criticized throughout the article--and my skepticism about postmodernism is palpable. “A pragmatist,” as one scholar claimed, “must ask whether postmodernism has anything useful to say to archivists…” about particular concepts. Postmodernism asks a lot of unoriginal questions, provides no answers, and confuses anyone who digs too deeply. Thankfully that above quoted scholar was Greene himself in the article’s final pages. In nearly the same breath as his sentence on pragmatists he goes on to say that postmodernism is the rose colored “lens” through which “the subjective archival paradigm” that Duranti and Richard Cox oppose “looks better now than ever before”; the trend of modern archives, which accommodates practices associated with collective memory, is to fill gaps that may not be well represented in the historical record in the evidence-based approach favored by Cox and Duranti.

There was much to this collective memory concern in Leon Dash’s oral history workshop. The Friday and Saturday sessions were very conversational and anecdote-based, that is to say they felt improvised, and underscored an activist collection and synthesis of innately personal yet endemic circumstances that shape our society. Canadian journalist Walter Stewart prefaced a 1970s book with a line that graces my facebook page: "[This book] has the weaknesses of the journalistic technique: the argument by example, the drawing of general conclusions from specific incidents , [and] the willingness to make judgments on cases in which the last details may never be known." Stewart knew that the journalistic approach created scholarly unimpressive books. As an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin, Madison—before I came across Stewart’s book—I hated the journalistic “history” books; In one class I expressed a negative opinion of one textbook for similar reasons as Stewart, albeit less cogently, and accurately surmised the author was a journalist. This power impressed the TA and several students for some reason.

Julieanna Richardson and Leon Dash

Leon Dash’s approach to long form journalism did not bother me, however. Rather than write a history book with journalistic technique he wrote true long form journalism. Although I am only familiar with the required reading concerning his Pulitzer Prize winning series on Rosa Lee, a drug addicted, HIV positive, public assistance dependent enabler, I know he is concentrating on documenting what he sees within the context of contemporary history rather than writing the context of history by documenting what he sees; on a personal level I realized I did not hate long form journalism—I simply hated journalism that masqueraded as history.

Dash and fellow Fellow Cynthia

All of this is perception. Thinking back to my Soviet film class I remembered the most profound term of art for a discipline I was previously ignorant of: The Kuleshov Effect. 

Through simple editing techniques in the earliest days of Soviet cinema, Lev Kuleshov demonstrated that audiences can perceive identical facial expressions to be reactions to events implied by edits. An identical shot of a man’s expression perceived to be caused by him seeing a bowl of soup, a girl, or a coffin could communicate hunger, lust, or grief, respectively.  Apart from the edits the only thing that changed was the perception of the audience. I hope we can learn an important lesson from that.