Abstract
The concept of representation is at the heart of all postmodern thinking; indeed it could be suggested that is essentially what it is about, and everything that it has to say derives from the application and manipulation of this concept. The notorious phrase by Baudrillard that ‘the [first] Gulf War did not take place’ only makes sense on the presumption that all that could be known about the war was its televisual representations, and these, notoriously, were at the time manipulated to produce the outcome specified by the US alliance. In the past 200 years the representations available through visual images have multiplied exponentially, from the daguerreotype to the internet; nevertheless words, the text, remain the foundation of all representation — not only do they stand on their own as a form of representation, but without them visual images are drained of their meaning.
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Notes
Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London, 1997), p. 115.
Keith Jenkins, ‘A Postmodern Reply to Perez Zagorin’, History and Theory, vol. 39, no. 2 (May 2000), pp. 181–200.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), p. 126.
See Sebastian Conrad, ‘Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan 1945–2001’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 38, no. 1 (January 2003), pp. 85–100; Naoko Shimazu, ’Popular Representations of the Past: The Case of Postwar Japan’, ibid., pp. 101–16.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. edn (New York, 1999).
Joan Wallach Scott, Feminism and History (Oxford, 1996).
An early expression of this was the article by Tony Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Workshop Journal, no. 7 (Spring 1979), pp. 66–94.
Willie Thompson, What Happened to History? (London, 2000), p. 69.
Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983).
John Belchem and Neville Kirk, ‘Introduction’, Languages of Labour (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 2–3.
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© 2004 Willie Thompson
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Thompson, W. (2004). Problems of Representation. In: Postmodernism and History. Theory and History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62945-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62945-5_4
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