THE PROBLEM WITH ‘ANTI-REVISIONISM’

The textually reflexive turn brought by structuralist or ‘narrativist’ approaches has in many ways been extremely valuable within feminist historiography. By becoming more aware of how narrative techniques and linguistic conventions shape the kinds of stories we tell about the past, we can become more critically aware of how these narratives work, and their effect on the reader in the present (Hemmings 2005; 2011). The reflexivist approach becomes more problematic, however, when it is presented as a self-sufficient alternative to revisionist projects and the quest for counter-narratives. This section will outline this argument with reference primarily to Clare Hemmings’ recent ‘anti-revisionist’ interventions into feminist storytelling (2005; 2007; 2011)64.

Hemmings’ textual analyses of hegemonic narratives of feminist history, (as referred to in the previous chapter), serve as an illuminating demonstration of the kinds of insights that the textually reflexive approach can bring to feminist historiography. She identifies several textual techniques that are consistently used within these hegemonic historical narratives, such as the ‘mobilisation of affect’ through the rhetorical tone of the narrative, which operates to create a certain affective state in the reader (Hemmings 2011:24). The celebratory tone of progress narratives, for example, achieved through the deployment of adjectives such as ‘interesting’, ‘exciting’, ‘far-reaching’, ‘generative’, and ‘creative’, provides ‘little room for dissent’ (2001:20-1). Another textual technique is the use of the present or past tense to secure the temporal structure of the narrative, for instance, when black feminist ‘critiques’ are referred to in the past tense, in contrast to ‘poststructuralist’ approaches which tend to be described in the present tense. The effect, as discussed, is that black feminism is depicted as a ‘phase’ which has passed, and poststructuralism, in contrast, is portrayed as ‘linguistically

64 _{Using Hemmings’ texts in this way, as ‘representative’ of a certain philosophical position,} admittedly risks doing violence to the subtleties and singularities of Hemmings’ work, and of turning her into a ‘straw woman’. It is helpful in this instance, however, to unpack the philosophical logic that leads to the anti-revisionist attitude, to examine the steps that can lead from textual reflexivism to anti- revisionism, and to be clear about what is at stake in such a move.

alive and present’ (2011:46). Hemmings’ semantic analysis thus offers some highly useful insights into how and why the hegemonic narratives work so effectively, which can help us recognise when we are deploying such textual techniques to tell our own stories, and to identify such techniques at work in the writings of others. Her argument, however, is not simply that a focus on language and ‘the technology of Western feminist story telling’ should lead the feminist theorist and historian to an increased self-reflexivity. She argues, further, for an anti-revisionism, which she presents as an unavoidable outcome of an anti-objectivist, textually reflexive approach.

Hemmings’ case against revisionism is premised upon an anti-objectivist epistemology, which recognises that there is no, and can be no, ultimate, complete, objective historical truth. ‘Since it is impossible to tell a full story about the past… accounts are always selective ones that do precise work in the present’ (2007:69). For Hemmings, this axiomatic anti-objectivist claim is implicitly disavowed by revisionist projects, which, she contends, are inherently aligned to a fantasy of historical objectivity and neutrality. When the revisionist asks ‘what really happened?’, Hemmings argues, she presents herself as innocent of what she might find out, thereby ‘prevent(ing) attention to the political investments that motivate the desire to know, and that generate a writer’s epistemological and methodological practices’ (Hemmings 2005:118). Accordingly, the newly revised story ‘erase s its own construction’ (2007:73). Her second argument is that the revisionist project is inherently wedded to a linear model of historical knowledge-building, where the story is corrected ‘in a linear fashion – that is from past to present’. Revisionism, she claims, thus ‘implicitly tends towards the construction of new master narratives—a consensus and synthesis of perspectives—which effects a closing down and fixing of the past’ (2007:72).

Given this revisionist ‘fantasy of objectivity’ and implicit tendency towards master narratives, Hemmings argues, we should resist a revisionist response, which would ‘go back to the archives’ to get at ‘what really happened’ in the recent feminist past, thereby ‘interven[ing] at the level of truth-telling’. Instead, she presents the ‘textually reflexive’ approach—based upon critical textual analysis, ‘methodology over content’, and ‘textual

strategies’—as an alternative to the revisionist approach (2007:72-4). In the first instance, Hemmings sees critical textual analysis as a transformative practice in itself, because it instigates a ‘temporary break in the monotony of the repeated’ (2011:189). And secondly, she suggests that by instigating such breaks and pauses, we can open ourselves up to different ways of telling and ‘re-narrating’ feminist stories: Textual strategies of ‘re-narration’, she writes:

… ‘start from textual and political absences in the stories we already participate in, explicitly folding these back into the narrative in order to refigure the political grammars of Western feminism. They offer ways of approaching feminist stories and politics over the temptation to produce a more correct account’ (2011:27).

Textual analysis and textual strategies such as ‘re-narration’ are therefore presented by Hemmings as an alternative to revising or telling a new story. The only way of remaining faithful to the acknowledgement that ‘all histories are motivated and selective histories’, she suggests, is to experiment with ‘how we might tell stories differently rather than telling different stories’ (ibid: 16). It is questionable, however, whether this reflexivist, textual approach alone could ever be enough to interrupt and overturn the hegemonic narratives of feminist history, narratives which—as Hemmings herself points out in such careful detail— have become so deeply entrenched. Indeed, a reflexivist strategy that ‘re-narrates’ narratives already in circulation risks securing the dominant stories even further (Torr 2007:65-6). This kind of problem can be viewed as part of a wider problem within feminist theory, which arises when textual analysis is treated as sufficient in itself as an oppositional methodology. Shumei Shih suggests that the textual or ‘deconstructive turn’ in feminist theory can be read as effectively a ‘displacement’ of the need to attend to the substantive complexities of nonhegemonic histories and lived experiences. ‘The deconstruction of Western universalist discourse’, she writes, ‘ends up exercising the muscles of Western universalist discourse… after all, if we want to study power and hegemony, we should study the West, right?’ (Shih 2002:96). Shih’s broader point here is applicable to our more specific problematic of

countering feminism’s ‘great hegemonic model’. That is, keeping the dominant narratives of feminism in the central analytic frame—to be formally analysed and ‘renarrated’—can be viewed as a ‘displacement’ of the more pressing need to generate counter-narratives. Attending to ‘the multiple erasures… of the present’ and ‘clearing conceptual space’ is certainly a fruitful starting point for reconsidering what kind of history might be necessary and useful (Hemmings 2007:73). Yet, open spaces in themselves are not generative, and intervening at the level of narrative form and technique alone arguably cannot provide enough impetus to the project to interrupt the hegemonic model of feminist history.

This strategic problem is, further, related to a problem of accountability. Hemmings’ reflexivist approach quite rightly forces us to revisit and interrogate ‘what we think has happened’ in western feminist theory in the recent past, through analysis of how these stories are produced and maintained (2011:133, emphasis added). This is certainly crucial. But if we follow Hemmings, we still do not need to ask—indeed we should resist asking—‘what has happened’ and tell new stories according to what we find. This is problematic because feminists need to be accountable for the content of the stories we tell, as well as for their form, and consider ways in which truth claims in the present about what ‘really’ happened in the past can be evaluated in addition to a textual analysis of their claims to authority. Without such a framework for evaluating truth-content, it is difficult to respond to charges of historical relativism, and give an adequate defence of why the hegemonic narratives of feminism are misrepresentative and wrong, and why different ones are required. ‘Keeping meaning open’, as Hemmings argues, is indeed a ‘primary responsibility of a feminist theorist’ (2007:74). But the responsibilities of the feminist historian—a role we all take on, even momentarily, when we tell stories about feminism—include being accountable for the content of those stories as well as their form. This imperative demands a commitment to questioning and tracing ‘what happened’, rather than stopping short at interrogating our ‘technologies of the presumed’, and ‘re-narrating’ a story we have already been told second, third, even fourth-hand.

In short, then, textual strategies alone are not enough. In the first instance, we need to generate alternative narrative content as well as alternative narrative techniques in order to

disrupt the hegemonic narratives of feminist history. Further, we need to be accountable for the content of the stories we tell, as well as for the way in which we tell them. Reflexivism without revisionism thus constitutes a rather timid or partial response to the call for a radical challenge to feminism’s great hegemonic model. On the other hand, however, revisionism without reflexivism a ‘naïve’ revisionism does indeed, as Hemmings claims, risk presenting the feminist historian or historiographer as an ‘innocent’ observer or investigator, and further, risks creating a new master narrative that simply ‘corrects’ the previous in a linear fashion and ‘closes down the past’. As such, I propose, feminist historiography needs both revisionism and reflexivism. To challenge the idea that they are mutually exclusive, then, I need to demonstrate that reflexive attention to linguistic conventions and techniques does not (as Hemmings suggests) preclude a revisionist approach which seeks out alternative knowledges and narratives through undertaking new archival research. Moreover, I need to show that revisionist projects need not be aligned to a ‘fantasy of objectivity’, nor need they result in master narratives and thereby ‘close down’ the past.

The rest of the chapter, therefore, is devoted to demonstrating the compatibility of reflexivism and revisionism, at both a theoretical and a practical level. The first task is to challenge the move that narrativist historiographers make from anti-objectivism to ‘anti- realism’, which underpins the refusal of revisionism. Accordingly, the next section will revisit and problematise the case against historical realism as found in the influential historiographical writings of Roland Barthes and Hayden White (whom Hemmings cites as a key influence). The problem, as we shall see, lies with the impoverished understanding of historical ‘reality’ that accompanies the ‘anti-realist’ position.

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