"Here," Tanaki-san points, "behind this boulder is where Chiang Kai-Shek in his pajamas hid from Communist troops; history changed when they found him." And the Japanese businessman on holiday tells me of when his country invaded China and of how Mao and his defeated army conducted their Long March in retreat. He keeps on, story after story, as we continue through the verdant southern Chinese countryside. Before the day ends he asks a simple question: Is modern Asian history taught to American schoolchildren? I tell him "no" and, from this point on, begin to question how history is perceived and learned as it relates my life experience.
Paulo Friere in his discussion with Donaldo Macedo speaks about combating oppression by creating pedagogical structures to allow the oppressed to retake what has been denied them through their ability to think critically and the option to act on their world as subjects of history and not objects. This pedagogical approach relates to my personal anecdote and is the same strategy employed by the African American artists Fred Wilson and Renee Green who both skewer the traditional civility that Henry Giroux referred to as the antiseptic Westernized concept of museum. Both in their work ask the question, "Who determines history?" Or in the case of my example, can a personal event, an autobiographical moment, affecting or relating to a certain group of people be regarded as history with a capital "H"? It might, if historicized within a textual and/or museological context is the point. Wilson and Green utilize installation as museum site to invert the meaning of stereotyped readings of objects, events or images, usually outside the context of what is considered art or history. Ironically, these staid institutions commission either artist to draw from their actual collections to reposition and revise another way of seeing the relationships of what the museum as a whole represents sociopolitically and multiculturally by juxtaposing the different objets d’art into an oppositional meaning. Wilson, for instance, will question the authenticity of such cultural plundering by mixing antique pewter ware with iron shackles of a slave or an actual KKK hood in an antique baby carriage. This reinvention of meaning of how the relationship of what is seen to each other changes its historical context and calls into question larger questions of who controls how the dominant versus the "other" culture is dominated. What is called into question then centers on the politicization of perceived identity as historical record. Hal Foster in his book about the current trends in American art, The Return of the Real, notes that contemporary postmodern artists such as Renee Green and Fred Wilson incorporate anthropology in their work as a critical means to impugn an "ideological patronage" for the cultural "other". The artist as ethnographer--- in this case, someone else hired to "record" your image--- exposes the irony of a "subjectified" subject being objectified. Other questions also being asked in both of these works include "who controls or determines how this type of history is portrayed?" as well as "Is what one sees on view of historical importance or value because of its context, presented under glass?"
These questions pertain abstractly to identity and the outside (cultural, political, and historical) forces that shape perception. "What happened before?" is just as relevant a question to ask as is "why am I?" The definition of one’s self pertains not only to the psychological and the philosophical, but very much to the historical.