Hello Blog!
For this response, I wanted to respond to Justin’s previous post about Jameson.
Justin, your ideas 100% make sense! I too have been thinking about periodizing hypotheses. I actually highlighted the quote, “One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference, and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable “chronological” metamorphoses and punctuation marks),” (Jameson 409). For this topic, Justin pulled an example and spoke about how we generalize our grandparent’s experience and define them by the Great Depression and World War II. We define them by these big, catastrophic events and don’t get to learn about everything in between because, as Justin said, “we love for history to be linear” . This is why our history books are so white-washed and usually only told from the perspective of the white experience in the United States or Europe. It is why people are pushing to ban Critical Race Theory from being taught in schools; they are scared of children seeing concepts taught in a way that encompasses the viewpoint of BIPOC because if they are taught this, then they will see that the linear, white-washed view of history is not true. Jameson also asserts this idea that periodizing hypotheses “obliterates difference.” If you teach everyone to think and generalize a topic in the same way, they will be easier to control as a whole. This is terrifying to think about, but it has happened multiple times in history, especially with genocides. Whether it be the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, or the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the United States, the perpetrators of each genocide are taught to “other” the oppressed groups and do not even consider the other’s point of view. I feel like that was a very long winded explanation, but it helped to make the idea of periodizing hypotheses more clear in my brain.
That’s all for now,
Aveyourfaveblogger
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