| Progress report for week 8 | |
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BEFORE CLASS For this week please read the introduction to Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon. As befits this course, we will examine the piece not in terms of content, but technique. How do we narrate history? How do we convey how history happens? How do we choose a chronological frame for causation and agency? What do we assign causation (how things changed), and agency (who changed things)? 1a. So, what does Nixon say about causation and agency? 1b. What does Nixon say about historical narrative — i.e., how we tell the story of history — i.e., what could be and/or should be included in that story? I.e., what is the hard work of history? 2. Last week I asked you to bring in your favorite (so far in your research) primary-source nugget with you to class — a particularly fabulous short excerpt of a primary source, which you already plan to feature in some way somewhere in your research paper. This week you will use it as a building block for a presentation of your research. The key now is not simply to share a nugget, but to make that nugget come to life, and to have it convey the heart of your story. This entails some serious decisions. What is, at this point in your research, the heart of your story? What are the highest stakes, and the biggest themes? What mattered for people in the past? Why should it matter for your audience in the present? You can re-examine your secondary sources for potential models of how to do this — how to turn a human-focused nugget into a stepping stone to your biggest themes. Nixon does it in his first paragraph; Ogle and Weld did it in the first couple of paragraphs; Postel delayed it slightly. Any really strong book you’ve read in the past likely does it well, via some technique of turning the micro into the macro — the human into the thematic. So, as practice toward perfection, prepare to present a nugget and the heart of your story (so far) to your peers in the class, following the three-minute rule (i.e., no more than three minutes). Low pressure: This is not the last word; this is practice. |