>From the introduction to _The Rhetoric of Empire_, by David Spurr (Duke, 1993).
(Here is an initial difficulty: I have no idea if Spurr would consider his work
"historicist" or not. It seems to fit common descriptions I've read, though.)
"...Within the field of literary study alone, scholars have experienced a major
paradigm shift in which literary works once studied primarily as expressions of
traditionally Western ideals are now also read as evidence of the manner in
which such ideals have served in the historical process of colonization. The
particular languages which belong to this process, enabling it while
simultaneously being generated by it, are collectively known as colonial
discourse." p. 1
This seems sort of historical. We're reading texts as evidence. We want to
look at how ideals have served (but served what?, or to do what?) in a
historical process.
Also there's an interesting proposition: a historical process can have
languages which belong to it, and such languages collectively are discourse.
But,
"...I propose to identify the basic rhetorical features of this discourse and
to study the way in which it has been deployed, both in the modern period of
European colonialism (roughly 1870-1960), as well as in the more recent period
of decolonization. My study, which draws its examples primarily from British,
French, and American writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offers
a general introduction to modern European colonial discourse, rather than
focusing on a more narrowly defined historical moment or geographical area; it
emphasizes rhetorical analysis rather than historical narrative..." p.1
Now we don't seem very historical at all, abjuring temporal and geographical
specificity and time-organized analysis.
Nonetheless there are again some propositions of potential interest to
historians: that there is a unity to the whole period of colonialism from 1870
to 1960 plus some unspecified period possibly up to the 1990s; that there is a
unity among Franco-Anglophone colonialisms in discourse.
further,
"My exploration of these questions involves two basic procedures: (a) a
*mapping* of the discourse, which identifies a series of basic tropes which
emerge from the Western colonial experience, and (b) a *genealogy*, in which
the repetitions and variations of these tropes are seen to operate across a
range of nineteenth- and twentieth- century contexts. ..." p.3
Again, not very historical. We are apparently mapping tropes across rather
than _in_ contexts, as historians would. I think this is an important
distinction, since Spurr frames his study against the problem of how colonial
discourse "has served in the historical process of colonization."
To my mind, to actually deal with historical process, one would have to examine
how the unities of language related to _changes over time_ in technology, in
social relations, institutions, practices etc. (by which I mean more than
variations). Also one would need to pay attention to variations and arguments
among the languages within the discourse, and to discursive change resulting
therefrom. But his aims are explicitly the opposite: "given the obvious
differences, I have instead tried to identify the unexpected parallels and the
common genealogies that unite these apparently disparate occasions of
discourse." p. 4.
I don't mean to trash Spurr or his project. Claims for such larger unities are
quite interesting. It might push historians of modern Africa to think about
how our periods fit into broader sweeps of time. But there were substantial,
maybe even profound changes of discourse about colonialism in his period. His
uninterest in them, in pursuit of other valuable ends, makes the work
unhistorical. As he says, "I have written a rhetorical study rather than a
history..." p.8.
A concern is whether much thinking about "new historicism" shares his clear
awareness. I worry that some regard work with similar features to his as
"historicist" (in the sense of interpreting literature with reference to
contexts), and then go on to confuse such historicism with historical thinking.
Some students in my classes make this mistake; I think I see such confusions in
some public claims about cultural studies.
To the extent that literary and cultural studies are returning to methods
interpreting texts in contexts, historians will need to be engaged in
discussions of the different ways of doing that, and what the implications of
the differences are. This is needed not only to draw disciplinary boundaries,
but also in the interest of rigorous and self-aware interdisciplinarity.