Historical Narrative and the Question of Collective Identity

DANIEL BRAUER

Congreso; Place and Displacement: The Spacing of History; 2018

Within the framework of the ongoing globalization process, an erosion and simultaneously redefinition of collective identities takes place in the context of which individuals traditionally reflectively understand the meaning of their own lives. The voluntary or involuntary belonging to certain social or national institutions is defined by criteria that go from the place of birth to the partisan taking of position in front of certain values with which the subjects identify themselves. Although these criteria of ascription can be a source of conflicts insofar as they are not only established from the perspective of the first person, but also by institutional parameters and also from the perspective of the others. But in all these cases, identities are established in the context of stories about a past that individuals consider their own.This paper explores the way in which a series of new forms of historical writing - ranging from microhistory to global history, or such as contemporary history, women's history or ecohistory - have transformed the paradigms of the Rankean historiographic canon and they question official histories and the manipulation of collective memory, particularly since the Nation-State Axis has ceased to be the central issue of historical reconstructions and a source of legitimation of societies' past, at least from an ethnocentric perspective. At the same time, it tries to answer the question about the role of historiography in the discussion about the possible modes of a post-national identity in a new historical-global context.