A Conversation With Matt Karp
I spoke with Karp about his recent Harper’s essay, “History as End,” and about the role of the politically engaged historian now. Here’s some of that conversation.
On the factual questions, you’re more or less on the side of the liberal historians who take issue with some of the claims in “1619.”
On certain concrete questions, my reading of the historiography — on, say, the role of slavery in the American revolution — I’m more persuaded by the interpretations of somebody like Christopher Brown in Moral Capital, who really doesn’t find that British antislavery was getting a lot done in the mid-1770s that would have pushed the American colonies to react to it.
But at the same time, you say that Jake Silverstein is on to something when he insists on the metaphoricity of “1619’s” framing. Should historians engaged with the public be talking more about what might be dubbed the “facts versus frames” debate in American historiography? Or is that a morass from which they would never emerge?
The thrust of the essay doesn’t want to contest the facts, it wants to contest the metaphor. In that sense, I do think that this is something historians should consider too. I don’t want to abandon our methodology — using sources to say, “The colonists didn’t think that Britain was about to abolish slavery in 1774.” That’s important. But, at the same time, I think to let the metaphorical questions simmer, to leave them entirely to people outside the profession, would be a mistake. These are important.
My problem is not with the facts in every case; it’s really with the metaphors.
You’re a historian on the left. There’s a sense that the default political affiliation of professional historians is sort of centrist liberal. How do you see yourself with respect to that tendency?
In this recent round of the history wars, the authority and respect which mainstream liberal politics accords historians derives from this intense interest in history. If you don’t have a deep faith in your ability to shape the future, you turn to hold the past responsible. You prosecute the past. This is Wendy Brown’s argument from the ’90s. For liberal discourse, this has been a way of reckoning with the impenetrable gridlock and hopelessness of our politics.
That means a lot of historians are on TV, in op-ed pages, and so on. For the most part their function has been, objectively, to defend mainstream liberalism, and to some extent the Democratic Party, against the right, which, as I talk about in the piece, has had its own kind of trajectory in talking about the past: from traditionalism to rank cynicism. In that fight — about school curriculum, about banning texts from classroom — I’m with the liberals. This is an important struggle, and liberals and leftists should be in the same boat.
But I do think there’s a danger in the dominant mode that the discourse has gone in, in “1619" but also in Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste. Liberal historians have volunteered to accept these originalist metaphors, which I think are troubling. The critique of origins is pretty old and distinguished — Marc Bloch in the ’50s wrote about the “idol of origins,” confusing ancestry with explanation. I think the discourse of original sin, and all of the biological and genetic metaphors that “1619" works with and that a lot of historians have adopted as well are mythical origin stories rather than historical beginning stories.
That’s an intellectual dead end because it doesn’t explain change, struggle, progress, and defeat. It’s also, to me, a fundamentally reactionary way of understanding the past. It has this sort of glacial conservatism about it, this kind of motionlessness, that I think is problematic on a lot of levels — not just intellectually but for any project that seeks to effect change.