On Presentism and History; Or, We’re Doing This Again, Are We?

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There are so many urgent—one could argue, dire—issues which members of the community of historians face. The ongoing right-wing war against public and higher education has intensified to the point where even the idea of teaching history honestly is a Thoughtcrime to the regimes controlling states like Florida and Texas. Funding cuts, adjunctification, and the administrative proclivity to equate pedagogy with “content delivery” have immiserated the vast majority of those doing the actual work of teaching history in this country. Violent white supremacists have become increasingly emboldened to act out their race-war fantasies, while much of our media apparatus lacks the historical sense to clearly reckon with this threat and instead chooses to simply lament “incivility” and “polarization” as somehow being startlingly novel. I could go on, but that’s enough existential dread for us to discern that we historians have an abundance of five-alarm problems in this moment (many of which we share with the larger society in which we find ourselves). And if you think that the elected president of the largest and most broadly-constituted professional society of historians in this country was busily addressing those threats by marshaling the resources they’d acquired by being a tenured full professor at an elite research university as well as the titular head of an enormous and prestigious professional guild, well…you would be wrong.

Instead, James Sweet is here to warn us about the mortal threat to our discipline posed by….(checks notes)…“presentism”: 

This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. 

James Sweet, “Is History History: Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,
AHA Perspectives, August 17, 2022.

That’s right, it’s really the scourge of presentism—”history, not as method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for the articulation of competing politics,” in Sweet’s telling—that’s the real problem. To bolster his argument, Sweet draws from a wide array of examples in the historical literature, as well as from a vast archive of syllabi and materials from history courses across US higher education, to demonstrate how the field has turned into nothing more than a scramble for social media clout. LOL; JK! HE DIDN’T DO ANY OF THAT. Rather, the following pieces of evidence for a relentless and destructive presentism afflicting the scholarly practice of History are offered up for our consumption, much like hours-old representatives of various ethnic cuisines languishing under the heat lamps at an all-you-can-eat buffet:

• The use of The 1619 Project by Ghanaian interpreters of that nation’s historic sites related to enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade, and a subsequent sighting of “a dog-eared copy of The 1619 Project” belonging to the member of a miltigenerational African family (who, one assumes, should presumably have been situating it properly in the historiographical debates over memory and enslavement).
• A forthcoming movie from Sony studios starring Viola Davis.
• The written jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

This is a curious set of choices for trying to prove a sweeping assertion about a scholarly discipline. Another choice—not taken here—might have been to include examples drawn from the discipline itself. Surely, if such a large number of practitioners of History have embraced “identity politics” and thus sold their scholarly souls to presentism, as Sweet’s sweeping generalization would have us think, there would be abundant examples of their work from which to choose. Instead, we get a curious array of artifacts that one cannot help but think is offered up in service of a wishy-washy “both sides do it” argument. 

That’s bad enough, but It is worth noting that on the “left” (-ish?) side of this artificial dichotomy, Sweet has centered work most visibly associated with two Black women as his avatars of How Not To Do History. This choice (and it was most certainly a choice), coupled with the care Sweet takes to ensure we are aware of his role as a scholarly critic of The 1619 Project, makes his equation of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s and Viola Davis’s work with the shoddy jurisprudence of Thomas and Alito an insidious one. On one “side,” we have two national officials who clothe themselves in mantles of scholarly detachment and offer cherry-picked facts so far divorced from their context that they—combined with those facts the justices left out entirely—construct a past which did not empirically exist. Moreover, that act of construction is used to make the case for taking away the basic rights of large swaths of the country’s population. On the other “side,” we have journalism and art which boldly and explicitly challenge the orthodox methods of interpreting the past. They do so, in part, by decentering white agency and pointing to the mendacity underlying the noble-sounding posturing of enlightenment-era “founders”—but they don’t actually, you know, present stuff which didn’t happen as though it did. Through this clumsy sleight-of-hand, Sweet positions outright mendacity as identical to pointed disruptions of scholarly orthodoxy. Given the pervasive and obvious ways in which Right-wingers, Nazis, and other bad-faith actors have deployed strikingly similar tactics in the service of white supremacism and misogyny (and misgynoir), one might wonder why a white, male historian of Africa and the African diaspora would deploy a rhetorical strategy that centers these particular examples. I mean, I certainly do.

Moreover, and it’s hard to see this when we’re busy wading through the snarky insinuations about “identity politics” ^[1] and these-kids-and-their-twitter-nowadays, but Sweet’s larger argument is…well, a mess. We read, for example, that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors,” from the president of an organization whose mission statement materials trumpet, among other things, the fact that “the AHA has developed resources on the history of racist violence, the January 6 insurrection, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the COVID-19 pandemic.” This statement, in fact, resides on the AHA’s “About” page, where we see that one of the mission-driven areas of the AHA’s work is “Providing historical perspectives on contemporary issues.” So where is the line dividing “interpreting the past through the optics of the present” (BAD!) from “providing historical perspectives on contemporary issues” (GOOD!)? One gets the feeling from reading Sweet’s screed that he distinguishes the “dangerous” kind of presentism in much the same way the Supreme Court defined what constituted pornography: we know it when we see it. In practice, it’s no more than an attempt at scholarly gatekeeping; there’s a certain type of scholar who can be trusted—who is allowed—to “provide historical perspective on contemporary issues,” and the rest of us are simply presentists—a threat to “the very integrity of the discipline,” in Sweet’s words.

Sweet would no doubt retort that his argument has more nuance than I’m allowing for here. He’d point me to the first clause of his article’s last sentence: “When we foreshorten or shape history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions,” he says, that’s where the distinction lies. But “justify rather than inform,” is at best a muddy distinction, and certainly not something I’d want to hang my entire argument on if I was claiming my discipline faces an existential threat. I mean, Alito and Thomas would swear they were using (their hackneyed and kludged version of) history simply to inform; that it also justified their position was simply a happy byproduct of that process of informing. This begs the question: who gets to judge whether or not the past is “informing” or “justifying” our contemporary stances? It feels like James Sweet wants that job, and doesn’t think the rest of us are capable of doing it.

Look, it’s like this: all history is presentism. This was true when Lynn Hunt wrote the first iteration of “against presentism” a couple decades ago, and it remains true now. We are historians, in the present, who are selecting some (certainly not all) “historical facts” from the past in order to narrate, analyze, interpret, and contextualize. At best, we are mapping, or representing, the past; we are certainly not reproducing the past in any exact way. Thus, the very act of selecting a topic, arranging evidence (or, as Hayden White would have argued, emplotting it), and presenting one interpretation of all that as more legitimate than the others—this scholarly ritual is absolutely shaped by the concerns of our present. That it even exists is because of “the concerns of the present.” Some of us admit, and even embrace, these temporal and epistemological entanglements, and we are thus able to do our scholarly work in a way that recognizes both the possibilities and limitations of our position. Others deny those entanglements and are thus able to blithely and without any sense of irony do themselves what they decry in others’ work: use the past as a means to justify their particular present. And they most often do this by denying the epistemological and scholarly legitimacy of others’ pasts. In this sense, Sweet’s article does render at least one service to the profession: it reminds us that the strongest expression of “identity politics”—its platonic ideal, in fact—is a privileged white man condemning what he sees as everyone else’s obsession with “identity politics.” 

1. ^[1]Beware the writer (especially if said writer is a dude) who uses the term “idenitty politcs” pejoratively and expects their readers to react similarly↩