This book represents an attempt to think through the ways that historical knowledge is being produced in the contemporary, mass-mediated, public sphere. The project of history in these formats inevitably looks and feels different from conventional history on the printed page. And yet, as I hope I have shown, it is possible for even these mass-mediated and digital historical representations both to foster in viewers the kind of historical thinking that academic historians have prized and to evoke the complexity and messiness of the past with which historians themselves grapple. I have also attempted to theorize the experiential in an age of mass mediation. Experiences, whether they are mediated or not, are felt and interpreted by the body, and they feel real. But just because these experiences of engagement with the past are meaningful does not mean that they are understood to be identical to the experiences of those who lived through them. In fact, what I have tried to make visible are the range of ways in which the mediated nature of those experiences are made visible for the viewer by the frame narrative, by the modes of address of different television genres, and so on. Understanding this mode of engagement is crucial to understanding how history works in the contemporary mediated public sphere.
It should also be clear by now that this book is far from a blanket endorsement of the mass media’s engagement with the past. Much of what is produced in the name of history tends to oversimplify the past, to render it too accessible, and to create the illusion that one can actually move seamlessly into it. But there are countervailing trends, too, and they are the ones that I have taken up here. By no means am I suggesting that academic history is on the decline or somehow irrelevant in the face of the proliferation of history in the mass-mediated public sphere; the mass-cultural texts and sites I have taken up do not replace academic history. But they have a broader reach. And yet I do hope to have called attention to the way in which the best cases share some of the convictions of academic history despite their radically different mode of address. In fact, many of the criteria I have used to articulate the concept of historical knowledge grow out of academic historians’ theorizations.
As I have argued, the main way in which contemporary, mass-mediated historical production differs from academic history is in its emphasis on the mobilization of affect. Many of the conventions of academic history have worked deliberately against the elicitation of affect, opting instead for a detached, clinical gaze at the past. This stance is meant in part to suggest that the history produced is objective rather than subjective, reasoned rather than emotional or biased. Although it is certainly the case that academic historians intend their work to be evenhanded and understand themselves to be producing sound historical knowledge, they also understand that their work is not in any strict sense “objective”; they advance specific interpretations based on their own analysis of data. But what I hope to have at least gestured toward in this book is the complicated way that affect works in the historical representations here considered. Although affect can be deployed to foster simplistic, facile identification with a character onscreen, that model of engagement is actually an impediment to historical thinking. But affect does not have to work that way, as the texts I have analyzed have shown. In fact, affect can be used quite effectively in negative ways—for instance, to force the viewer out of the text or to make him or her feel uncomfortable rather than complacent. Affect does not necessarily work to draw the viewer in; it has the potential instead to leave a scar, to make the event or situation of the past meaningful, to touch the viewer in a lasting way.
In such cases, affect functions in a confrontational manner; by fostering moments of critical encounter, the texts I have considered highlight the relays between affect and meaning-making, processing, and analysis. When viewers engage in this processing, they do so as themselves, not as the characters on screen. In the model of affective engagement that I have elaborated, the viewer maintains a sense of his or her self while being brought into proximity with something foreign; this awareness of mediation is fostered by the formal properties of the representation—both stylistic and narrative. In this way, the sense of mediation is foregrounded, as it is in Collingwood’s account of historical thinking. The viewer is aware that he or she is engaging with the past.
Another important difference between these mass-cultural representations of the past and more academic versions of history has to do with goals. Although viewers approach history-conscious television or history films or history websites expecting some degree of fidelity to what is known about the past, they also know that such texts have license to be imaginative. They understand that certain characters are created, but created in a way that is faithful to what is known about the period or socioeconomic milieu. I have described this play of the imagination within clearly defined historical constraints as akin to a social history experiment, where what is really made visible and palpable are the conditions of existence for a particular group of people at a particular historical moment in a particular place—not the historical narrative of a specific important historical event. Unlike academic history, popular representations of the past are not concerned primarily with the discovery of new archives, nor are they intended to speak to the body of scholarship already existing on the subject. Rather, they are specific cases or episodes from the past that have ramifications for or applications in the present. This approach often takes the form of demythologizing the past, of challenging those enduring national myths that undergird or justify hierarchies and oppressions in the present. These representations thus have the potential to politicize their audiences or at least to awaken political consciousness. And this takes us back to Walter Benjamin, who understood history to offer a glimmer of hope for redemption in a barbarous world. The representations that I have here described, then, might be understood in Benjamin’s words as an attempt “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” rendering the history figured in these unconventional formats as vital and important as ever.