Historical Discourse Analysis

Historical discourse analysis is a poststructuralist approach to reading and writing history; a mode of conceptualizing history through a theorized lens of critique. Historical discourse analysis works against the objectivist fallacy of traditional positivist historical methods in decentering the authority of the historian as a neutral recorder of facts and the claim of historical writings as objective reconstructions of past events. In line with its intent to disrupt taken-for-granted ways of conceptualizing history, the task of historical discourse analysis is not to find truths about past events or to identify the origins or causes of past events, but to expose history as a genre—contingent, ambiguous, and interpretive. Historical discourse analysis is, therefore, less a set methodology than a set of postmethodological methodologies.

Grounded in the works of poststructuralist (or post- modernist) theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean-François Lyotard, historical discourse analysis approaches history as discursively produced and, more important, understands discursive productions as always and already power-laden enterprises. The task of the historian is, from this perspective, to uncover and critique the technologies of power that have come to legitimate certain ideas as truths. Historical discourse analysis is a mode of critical social analysis.

All histories from this perspective are a subjective sampling of materials, selectively organized and presented. All histories are interpretations. Derrida's blurring of the boundaries between philosophy and literature, his insistence that philosophy is a kind of writing that employs the same kinds of discursive devices (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, etc.) as literature is applied here to history. History is too conceived as a kind of literature.

From this perspective, then, no full accounting of history is possible, and no true accounting of history is achievable. No discrete sampling of materials, no matter the criteria used to guide the selection, can be [Page 394]proffered as the definitive representation of a historical event. The aims of historical discourse analysis are at once more modest and more complex.