Historiographical LinEAGE

I take the critique of dark tourism by Tiya Miles seriously; however, my work reframes the stakes of ghosts as epistemological method. This is what David Glassberg calls our sense of history, a comparison of what should be present (based on known patterns of the past) with what is missing. We experience that disjuncture as an uncanny disturbance in the presentation of the past. My work draws from Avery Gordon, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Carolyn Steedman, and Hayden White. I weave questions from psychology, philosophy, and trauma studies through traditional archival research and lyrical memoir, revealing the poetry of place and the meaning of ghosts to the study of the past.

Numerous recent scholars have begun asking what forms historical knowledge can take in response to the limitations exposed by critique. Saidiya Hartman works beyond archival critique to invent a narrative practice -- critical fabulation – that remains accountable to archival absence. Oral historians like Alessandro Portelli explore beyond critique of fact/truth in historical records through oral history interviews. Oral sources matter, Portelli contends, not because they fill factual gaps but because their subjectivity (and even their "errors") are themselves evidence. They aren’t just filling a new archive; Portelli argues that orality itself changes the epistemology of the source. Standing at a crossroads between realist recovery (the past is present with us) and total construction (critique’s dead end), Ethan Kleinberg builds a third way: history as revenant – a sudden and unwanted houseguest we are obliged to entertain as it returns. In the dearth of meaning after critique, affective theory, as practiced by Kathleen Stewart, builds on Silvan Tomkins and Walter Benjamin to relocate analysis from meaning to intensity.