wcaleb’s avatarwcaleb’s Twitter Archive—№ 9,909

                1. 1. James McBride's novel _The Good Lord Bird_ can be read partly as an allegory about the perils of "big history," especially re: slavery.
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                2. The novel (hereafter GLB) is a tragicomic take on the oft-told story of John Brown, told by the narrator Henry Shackleford.
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              3. McBride's John Brown, as in most tellings, has a single-minded focus on the overarching drama of emancipation, in which he stars.
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            4. Brown has bird's eye, macro historical view: "I have studied the successful warfare of the Circassian chief Schamyl against the Russians"
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          5. But the central irony driving the novel is that he fails to see the true identity of Henry, the enslaved individual whom he "knows" best.
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        6. In the opening scenes of GRB, Brown mistakenly hears Henry's name as "Henrietta" and remains convinced Henry is a girl.
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      7. This leaves Henry/Henrietta alone to make sense of his/her experience, which Brown never truly sees b/c of focus on slavery writ large.
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    8. Historians face the same challenge: to see the larger story of slavery w/o looking past/thru the individual Henry/Henrietta before us.
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      9. This is partly ex. of tension b/w macro, microhistory: what Lepore calls preference for landscape or portrait dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-2-wonder-woman-history-of-feminism-jill-lepore
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        10. But the tension deepened for historians of slavery b/c slavery, white supremacism refuse to see that individual #BlackLivesMatter.
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          11. As narrator puts it in Good Lord Bird, reflecting on being black in white supremacist society, "Nobody sees the real you."
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            12. To avoid the well-intentioned Brown's unwitting ignorance of Henry's life in GRB, we have to balance micro- & macro-historical methods.
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              13. That's one reason I enjoyed @arothmanhistory book so much. But even in the best microhistories, the allure of extrapolation remains.
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                14. And Good Lord Bird raises the question of what costs in understanding are always incurred by generalizing, as both Brown & Henry do.
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