By Ethan Chan:
In my upper-year seminar course, HIST 400 Topics in the World: History in the World, one of the assigned readings was an article called “Who gets to tell other people’s stories?” The authors, Anna Holmes and James Parker explore the theme of empathy within writing. What I found particularly interesting was the concept of empathy in writing, specifically in writing histories. The more I thought about including empathy in histories, the more I questioned the very premise of the idea.
Holmes defines empathy as the ability to respect and understand another person’s perspective, which in turn, can reveal larger truths about ourselves and others. Empathy is about self-awareness and deepening connections. In my own reflection, I applied Holmes’ perspective of empathy onto the methodology of the historical process. I concluded with two different viewpoints. Firstly, would empathy seek to narrativize a discipline that is already entirely dependent on the biases and political stances of the historian? Or secondly, can empathy seek to improve the historical process by revealing new perspectives?
One of the biggest debates within the postmodern discussion of the historical process discusses whether historians can write without imposing their own biases on their histories. Hayden White, and Arthur Marwick. R. G. Collingwood believed that history is written by a constructed imagination, or a “what must have been the case.” To elaborate, by writing with empathy, the historian includes not only their own constructed imagination but also other perspectives. These perspectives influence and shape the way a historian portrays history essentially becoming a narrative.
Nonetheless, James Parker states that to write empathy, you need to “open your heart to somebody, feel the weight of his individuality, expose yourself to his predicament...,” and without doing that, you cannot understand him. His quote serves the historian as well. To completely understand the traditions of the historical event, the historian must empathize with the subject, fully immersing themselves into the perspective of which they are writing. By examining the historian’s biases through a critical lens of empathy, it enables the historian to provide voices to a value-free history that may have never been given the chance to be explored. I believe that these perspectives do not narrativize history, but instead they give a richer, more nuanced history that encapsulates more than just the elitist methodologies of traditional historians. Thus, as historians, we have to carefully research, and respectfully deconstruct what we are told or what we discover.