Writing Emotionally Difficult Histories: a conversation with Claire Aubin and Ruth Lawlor

November 10th 2021

“For the forgotten and disremembered, the important question is this: how can we recall the past in a way that does justice to the forgotten, the excluded, the oppressed, the dead, the ghosts? This question is central to the ethics of recalling others. It assumes both the injustice of forgetting others and the justice of remembering others.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen

This extract from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 study Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was shared by Dr. Ruth Lawlor during our discussion on writing emotionally demanding histories. This work, and the event, drew together a broad range of topics regarding the realities of writing histories of gendered state violence. When we first devised the “historical perspectives on gendered state violence” project, the newscycle was dominated by the murders of Sarah Everard in the UK and Breonna Taylor in the US, both at the hands of serving police officers. The reverberations of past injustices in the present call our attention to both the importance of historical research and the impact it can have on the researcher.

To study the history of gendered state violence is to become all too familiar with - to continue Nguyen’s metaphor - the haunting nature of the past. As scholars from Black, queer, disabled and other marginalised communities remind us, this haunting is particularly acute when the researcher shares experiences of oppression with those they study. In these conversations, we kept returning to questions of a researcher’s own positionality when studying these historical phenomena, as well as the ethical complexities of approaching these critically important, yet fraught histories.

To explore these matters further, we were honored to be joined by two researchers who are leading these conversations: Claire Aubin, co-founder of the Edinburgh Emotionally Demanding Histories Group and a historian with expertise in Holocaust perpetrators and their experiences of post-war US immigration; and Dr. Ruth Lawlor, whose research focuses on gender, race, and sexual assault during World War II, who published an excellent essay on her own emotional responses to the archive entitled “Working With Death.”

To tell the history of gendered state violence, historians are often said to be reading primary or archival material “against the grain”; to prioritise those voices often diminished in their own time; and to interrogate the silences in the composition of these archival collections. Often, we turn to legal archives, which present particular challenges for researchers. In legal and other state-created archives, stories of violence and violation are sanitized, articulated in ways that are devoid of emotion and divorced from the effects they had on communities. Ruth commented particularly on her work with military courts-martial and the ‘numbing’ feeling these records often inspired. Conducting this type of archival research also presents practical challenges. In the historical discipline, we rely primarily on solitary trips to the archive. This model poses additional challenges to those accessing emotionally demanding material all day, without a support network to turn to when that material ‘haunts’ us; for women in particular, feelings of fear and insecurity invoked by difficult documents can make archive trips uncomfortable and upsetting. A recent Modern American History roundtable commented on how gender can impact a historian’s experiences of field work. Both Claire and Ruth, and many of our attendees, remarked upon the need for institutional support for researchers, including professional mental health support and peer support networks.

When writing histories of gendered state violence, researchers grapple with the quandaries of, firstly, which stories should we tell and, secondly, how might we tell those stories. When expressing the breadth and depth of violence, scholars need to be mindful of sharing the truth, while avoiding voyeurism and gratuitous recapitulation. Indeed, Claire and Ruth spoke about how words and language are imperfect tools to represent the complex, emotive, messy, tragic, unimaginable, and unknowable nature of these histories. As part of this search for new ways of writing such histories, scholars like Saidiya Hartman have forged innovative and captivating methodologies such as “critical fabulation”, which move beyond the traditional confines of academic prose and sources in order to present a narrative that is, in many ways, closer to the truth.

Our conversations also traversed the need to support our students and one another when conducting this work. Stress and burnout are widespread in academia, especially amongst the postgraduate community, and these might be experienced in particular valences by scholars whose research touches upon emotive and potentially harrowing topics. Indeed, attendees linked the need to offer this support to the broader effort to decolonise the university and move away from traditional models of the detached, objective, solitary researcher. Many of these emotionally demanding histories are being conducted within emergent fields of study, whose concerns are driven by the new priorities of a more diverse academy. In addition to the work done by groups like Claire’s EDHG in Edinburgh, students might benefit from mentorship and pastoral support, as well as learning from our colleagues in other disciplines--such as sociology, anthropology, and archives--who have been having these conversations for a long time.

Organisations doing work in this area:

Edinburgh Emotionally Demanding Histories Group

Traumatic History Network, convened by Catriona Byers (King’s College London)