Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Past As Present, Present As Past: Freedom To Read The Self And The World, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Historical inquiry of the sort that seeks, in its different but necessarily naive ways, merely to "establish the facts," or merely to "defend the race," or "my people," or "my religion/denomination," or "our position," simply to accuse the other as source of current problems, needs to be identified for what it is and renounced. Such "history" is problematic, not so much because it has no insights or tells no truths, but because it cannot generally even adequately, or critically, problematize the "facts" and "truths" it discovers and engages. Put another way, this type of history seems unable to address the …