Could anyone write any history?

 (If you are a white nationalist reading this and think that I somehow justifies your criticism of ”woke”: this has very little to do with your beliefs)

A couple of days ago I finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. This book basically deals with a white struggling author who comes across an Asian, much more successful writers manuscript and steals it whilst the Asian writer dies from a accident. The only ”problem” is that this manuscript deals with a historical event revolving around Chinese persons, leading to the publication being labelled as cultural appropriation.

Kuangs book actually opens for a lot of interesting discussions, such as those of race, gender and authencity (the writer who steals also edits the book). But what struck me as particularly interesting is the question of who owns history and from my point of view, Kuang committed a mistake with placing the stolen manuscript in the history genre.

Starting with a classical philosophical dilemma, history might in itself be a colonial practice across time. For instance Neil Price have highlighted that we often utilise historical settings as a place which we colonise with people acting according to modern logics. The vikings as we know them are basically modern humans placed in a different temporal setting. 

The question then becomes if one can write outside of their own cultural sphere. Can we really understand the life world of a person living in the 17th century, or is it impossible to do them justice? I personally believe that whilst certain parts of life (death, parenthood and love) is universal themes, other parts of life (marriage, relationships and so forth) is an entirely different ball game. This is since they are not culturally encoded, but also dependent on both medical, biological and political understandings of what being a human really is. Thereby, history is already from the outset a form of appropriation and none the least when it comes to fiction.

This does, however, not mean that historians should have total freedom in how they write. Instead it highlights the need to always ask oneself, ”where does I come from”, ”What do I believe in” and ”can this hurt people’s feeling or reenforce negative power-structures”. This is an aspect that I think will be of more and more importance if history actually will have a future as a subject. 

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