This week, our
Managing History class read multiple works relating to Oral History. I found
these works particularly helpful and relevant to my own work. For the past year
and a half, I have been fortunate enough to interview numerous American
activists who supported the Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and even
travelled to Central America to assist with public works projects designed to support
the country’s fledging socialist state during the 1980s. Growing up in the Bay
Area, a center for this strain of activism, many of these activists happen to
be people I’ve known throughout my life in circumstances far removed from
historical research. My subjects are not only activists, but also former
professors, family friends, and the parents of close friends. I feel very
fortunate to have close connections to my research, but this also, in my mind,
creates a series of ethical conundrums. As a historian, I have to be critical
about the topics and people I research, and occasionally this means shedding
light on the movement’s shortcomings and depicting activists in a sometimes
unfavorable lens. Unlike archival research, Oral History involves the cultivation
of relationships and, in my mind, relies on a certain amount of trust. It’s
difficult to balance the trust that your subjects place within you with the
desire of crafting important, useful historical narratives and arguments. Yet,
it’s important to do so. You need to be fair to your subjects. But, I struggle
with exactly how to do that. This week’s readings made the process a little
more clear.
In Barbara
Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan’s The Oral
History Manual, they argue that an important part of the interview process
is respect. This, in turn, creates trust. In an Oral History, Interviewers are
expected to be sensitive to diversity of opinions that narrators might offer.
This means not becoming visibly offended or arguing with narrators if they raise
a point that might seem offensive to the interviewer.[1]
Furthermore, a good Oral History project makes sure its narrators are
comfortable. Sometimes, this level of comfort means pairing a subject with an
interviewer that more closely resembles their own ethnic or community
background. In arguing for this point, The authors evoke the example of the WPA
interviews conducted with former slaves during the 1930s. In these interviews,
elderly black southerners gave answers that catered to their white interviewers’
sensibilities, often glossing over the brutal realities and dehumanization
involved in the institution. In these interviews, trust between narrators and
interviewers remained severely lacking and the project undoubtedly suffered.[2]
Yet, sometimes,
trust also means excluding important information from your final product that
might reflect a damaging portrayal of a subject. In Sherrie Tucker’s article
“When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” she struggles with the question of writing
about the queer relationships of 1940s female jazz musicians when her subjects
do not explicitly expose their sexual orientations. While Tucker wanted
sexuality to be a key component of her project, her subjects felt differently. Reflecting
a pre-gay 1960s/1970s liberation attitude towards lesbian identities, these
women often discussed sexuality in a secretive manner and often asked Tucker to
not disclose the sexual status of friends. Ultimately, these women wanted to be
portrayed as musicians, not lesbians.[3]
Ultimately, while Tucker arguably had information to historicize all-female
jazz scenes as environments that allowed for the flourishing of lesbian
identities - an argument she wanted to make – she shied away from such a
telling because it would have violated her subjects’ trust and portrayed them
in a way that they did not perceive themselves.[4]
For me, this story shows that history does not simply involve events in the
past, but effects peoples’ lives in the present as well. Historians have a lot
of power over peoples’ lives in this sense. We should be aware of that.
[1]
Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan, The
Oral History Manual (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2009), 26.
[2]
Ibid, 64.
[3]
Sherrie Tucker, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller, et
al. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 295-6.
[4] Tucker,
308.
No comments:
Post a Comment