The Historian as Storyteller
On writing trade-list history books, and some takes and recommendations
This newsletter introduces two roundtables on The Historian as Storyteller on which I shall be participating at the American Historical Association Annual Conference next month. Also: a sneaky hack for boosting winter energy, and some speculative fiction and classical music recommendations.
What’s Happening: conference news
In January I head to Philadelphia, PA, for the American Historical Association Annual Meeting. I’ll be participating (masked) in The Historian as Storyteller, two roundtables I co-organized with Tamara J. Walker, an Africana Studies and colonial Latin American Studies scholar at Barnard College, on trade-list history writing. I had the honour of reading, in draft form, Tamara’s marvellous forthcoming book, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown: Penguin Random House, 2023).
All eight participants have either published trade-list books, have trade-list books coming out in 2023, or recently finished a draft of a trade-list book under contract: Leah Redmond Chang, Kendra T. Field, Carrie Gibson, Martha S. Jones, Caroline Dodds Pennock, Amy B. Stanley, Tamara J. Walker, and me.
Our roundtables start from the premise that historians are both writers and storytellers, and that it is possible to combine original argumentation and erudition with vivid narration and beautiful prose that does not make the reader want to poke forks in their eyes. Give general readers enough of an on-ramp, and you can bring them to the freshest, most dynamic of current scholarly conversations.
That’s not to say that every academic book could in theory be a trade-list book - far from it. Someone reading history for fun after a full day doesn’t need an entire book on people on maps in skirts (my Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters): they need two paragraphs (I exaggerate, but you get the picture).
Yet there’s a difference between how much of a topic a reader beyond one’s field colleagues might want or need (time is finite), and whether or not there is a way to talk about the topic that would engage a wide public. After all, students are in-betweens who create a continuum from general reader to researcher. They start (as we all do) as generalists, and some become researchers.
Roundtable 1 (Saturday Jan. 8, 10:30am) features Kendra T. Field, Carrie Gibson, Amy B. Stanley, and Tamara J. Walker (with me chairing). The abstract, co-authored by Tamara and me elaborating on prompts from our panellists, follows:
The historian as storyteller needs to unsettle academic orthodoxies, not only to connect with broader audiences but also to access a wider range of truths. In this first session, speakers will reflect on pervasive (popular) myths about history and history-writing, and discuss how creative nonfiction helps to dismantle these myths. It allows scholars both access to new forms and genres of storytelling as well as insights and sources typically excluded by the profession, such as those of personal experience and memory.
Questions asked will include: how do imagined audiences shape the imperatives that guide our work, and inform decisions about additional glossing needed concerning people and subjects that have not traditionally been deemed to merit coverage in historical works? How can we effectively balance general audiences’ points of departure with the need to introduce them to new kinds of historical actors, perspectives, and arguments? When writing about marginalized figures and themes, how might scholars balance giving audiences what they currently expect or want to read about with what they need but may not consider to be important or relevant to understanding the past? What role can creative nonfiction play in shifting public norms about fixed boulders of history - about what counts as important events, and whose lives are deemed to constitute history?
Roundtable 2 (Saturday Jan. 8, 1:30pm) features Leah Redmond Chang, Martha S. Jones, Caroline Dodds Pennock, and me (with Tamara chairing). The abstract, co-authored by Tamara and me following elaborating on prompts from our panellists, follows:
Disciplinary training instills in scholars approaches and rubrics concerning the structure, voice, and argumentation of historical writing, as well as what counts as evidence and as robust modes of engaging it. Yet disciplines have problematic genealogies stretching into centuries in which fewer people counted as thinkers or even as human. While there has been much critical and methodological innovation in recent decades, communicating these findings and changes to readers beyond the academy has fallen behind. The historian as storyteller needs to unsettle academic orthodoxies, not only to connect with broader audiences but also to access a wider range of truths. What might historical narrative look like - in form and style - untethered from conventions and centered on recuperating experiences and narratives whose traces are orthogonal to forms of evidence typically considered in academic scholarship?
Panelists discuss how attention to the art of the craft can help bridge this gap. Techniques discussed will include narrative structure, content choice, and ethics (selecting and organizing material; questions of empathy; recovering voices whose words don't survive in unmediated forms). The speakers reflect on how creative nonfiction is not merely accessible to non-specialists, but also allows scholars reveal to types of truth typically excluded by the profession, such as personal experience and memory. Put another way, the narrative and stylistic freedoms afforded by creative nonfiction enable scholars to put historical participants, evidence, and narrative effectiveness first, and to build a more inclusive historical toolbox.
If you’re attending the AHA Meeting and would like to hear more, please add these roundtables to your calendar!
Takes and recs: books and music
Prologue
Last weekend saw an achievement unlocked: an extinction-level event on the dust bunny front. The energy for this I magicked out of nowhere by hiding from signs of nature’s seasons. Shorter days are murder for anyone for whom seeing the setting sun is akin to pushing the sleep button.
The run-up to Project Dust Bunny had been days of turning into a sunset pumpkin at four and falling into bed at eight, only to bounce out again, brighter than a rooster, at 4am. Something had to be done.
“Get Away From The Window!” I screamed silently to myself one afternoon as the orange orb appeared from behind a building, all set to set in my face. Fleeing in search of bright lights I entered the kitchen, reassuringly far from Those Windows. Throwing things - anything - in the oven, I missed sunset entirely, ears tuned to podcasts and hands submerged in vegetables.
If it’s winter where you are, here are a few of the books and music/documentary options that transport me into other worlds and help keep me awake on dark days.
Books
The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead (Anchor/Granta, 1999).
“It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.”
Thus begins Whitehead’s speculative fiction detective novel, set in an is-it-New York sort of place. In this world, a 1920s-style, gangster-filled city, the urban landscape has been transformed by elevators. There are two rival philosophical approaches to these whirring, almost mystical machines: Empiricism and Intuitionism. Following the plummeting of an elevator, Lila Mae Watson, the last person to inspect the machine and the first Black woman elevator inspector ever, attempts to figure out how the impossible happened - and to exonerate herself.
With a backdrop of union electioneering, racial and gender politics, and vivid details - elevator inspectors had a cult haircut, called a Safety - prose and story linger in the mind. Like the trailers that play as involuntary soundtracks in the mind of the movie trailer producer in the 2006 movie The Holiday, an elevatorland commentary may accompany your day for a while, each time you put down the book.
I happened to start this novel a few days after I started inhaling Gotham on Netflix. The two worlds became fused in my mind: The Intuitionist plays out in Gotham - a pleasing consequence, since both the novel and the series are set in a parallel version of New York City.
When you’ve finished The Intuitionist, the rest of Whitehead’s oeuvre awaits.
Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf: Penguin Random House, 2022).
Time travel and space travel; lyrical prose that flows straight into your brain; ethical quandaries about what you should and should not do if you travel to the past. What’s not to like? Sea of Tranquility shares with Whitehead’s The Intuitionist a speculative approach to the office novel meets detective story. The characters we follow include a professional time traveller sent out to solve the ultimate existential question.
While this novel stands on its own, you might read St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel beforehand, and perhaps also Station 11, since Sea of Tranquility intersects on occasion with characters in the former, and alludes to the sorts of happenings in the latter.
Music
Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall
A subscription to this storied orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall provides access not only to concerts past and present, but also to numerous interviews and documentaries featuring soloists, orchestral musicians, composers, and conductors: Korean composer Unsuk Chin, who fuses Western and Asian musical styles; Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who recorded concertos with the Philharmonic; Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel in conversation with his compatriot Edicson Ruiz, the double bass player; the American composer John Adams, composer-in-residence in the 2016-17 season; and Simon Rattle’s sixteen-year stint as principal conductor.
Check out Thomas Grube’s 2008 documentary Trip to Asia, chronicling the Philharmonic’s 2005 tour. In addition to a behind-the-scenes window on the giganto-task that is an international tour, it documents life in a creative, itinerant, precarious profession requiring the highest levels of dedication and skill. Some of the musicians were in their probationary year - a harrowing situation in a workplace in which your colleagues vote you in or out (as they do when selecting a conductor). On a more cheerful note, if you’ve ever performed at a classical music recital, you’ll appreciate the Philharmonic’s reception from music lovers in Taipei.
That’s it for 2022. Thank you for joining me on this anarchic writing adventure; see you on the other side of the year!
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).