ABSTRACT
History writing has, even among historians, largely come to be recognized as a cultural practice in its own right, not “merely” a representation or interpretation of the past. In this chapter, I examine the conditions under which historical representation may be seen to partake in the production and reformulation of cultural situatedness and historical understanding beyond its conventionally “historical” boundaries. Arguably, the past has remained pragmatically and experientially distant to many readers, even though both the “new” and “experimental” historians of recent decades have been more welcoming of contemporary literary devices as well as of contesting voices—and hence, to some extent, also of the interpretive uncertainty that the presentation of contradictory perspectives implies.
