Frente a la historia nacional

• Main Author: Frida Gorbach
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2008-01-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: history; temporality; repetition; progress; experience
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/13952

It seems we all know the meaning of the term “national history”, but in practice this concept of is easily confused with that of “national culture”, and also with the memory of the past. Moreover, to this confusion we should add another one which arises from a double condition: at the same time, “national history” belongs to a collective and to an individual domain; it constitutes a narrative of individual identity insofar it makes us confronts our own history, and also represents a narration of a collective identity, to the degree it fixes a set of values in time. This work is an attempt to think over the concept of “national history” from the perspective of a single focus and seeking for a more intimate way of inhabiting that historiographic structure. I am convinced that looking at history from a singular perspective, repeating it from within oneself, and appropriating it while allowing one’s writings to be affected by doubts, memories and experiences, constitutes a way to lightened the burden of myth, destabilizing thus the fixedness of national narratives, to figure out, thereafter, a different future.