H27A:
Text and Testimony
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| History has always been a contested field
in which differing testaments of the past have battled for supremacy.
These battles have had their >victors= and >losers= with the
>victors= being able to create dominant historical discourses with
their supporting hegemonic interpretations of historical time periods
and persons. By analysing the function and nature of the historical
text, as both a storehouse of memory and a forum for creating contemporary
reality, this course examines not only what the historian consciously
does as >history=, but seeks also to understand the conscious and
unconscious philosophies of thought that informs the textualising
of this >history=. Issues of objectivity, truth and meaning will
be critically assessed in order to discover the ways through which
the historian=s Text becomes transformed into a legitimated Testimony
of the past. In addition to the more traditional text based primary
and secon- dary historical sources, the course will also focus its
analysis on the built envi- ronment as well as contemporary print
and film media. It is hoped that by wid- ening the scope of the definition
of >text= a forum will be created for the inclu- sion of subaltern
voices especially those long silenced by the period of En- slavement
in the Caribbean.. |
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