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The Fascist Seduction of Narrative: Walter Benjamin’s Historical Materialism Beyond Counter-Narrative

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Abstract

This essay introduces Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism to illuminate how history teachers may invoke a critique of the past and present through democratizing the production of knowledge in the classroom. Historical materialism gives students access to the means of knowledge production and entrusts them with the task of generating a critique of politics though encounters with historical objects. The rise of the alt-right, alternative facts, and fake news sites necessitates social studies methods that intervene into the fascist seductions of narrative in history. A Benjaminian pedagogy emphasizes reading practices that acknowledge the political layers of history inscribed within the objects. This generates space for forms of pessimism and dialectic critiques of barbarism that students may experience with history beyond the teacher’s capacity for understanding. In the name of democracy over fascism, the article adds a political critique to students’ historical and critical thinking skills.

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Notes

  1. Other scholars, such as Popper (1957/2002), critiqued historicism for its fascist tendencies as well.

  2. This article builds on Freedman’s (2007) prior assertion of the need to train students to analyze causes of social inequalities as increasing democratic practices within social justice education.

  3. Benjamin (1936/2002d) explained that because “transformation of the superstructure proceeds far more slowly than that of the base, it has taken more than half a century for the change in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture…The dialectic of these conditions of production is evident in the superstructure, no less than in the economy” (pp. 251–252).

  4. Leonardo’s (2003) article on Paul Ricoeur’s work covers similar theoretical moves as Walter Benjamin here, on a broader educational level.

  5. Adorno (1958/2000) wrote of the need to see beyond the intentional identity that dominates the possible meaning of the object, and to be able to see all of the non-identity, all of the other things that object might mean, beyond a rigid eternal narrated meaning of the object.

  6. Volosinov’s (1986) concept of the accents of signs helps to see history as the struggle over forces producing accents of meaning, privileging the dominant class’s reading of historical objects while obscuring all other readings.

  7. In Benjamin’s (1934/2002a) “Author as Producer”, the author is understood as a producer of meaning, who must break with the bourgeoisie’s ritualization and specialization of knowledge production (Benjamin, 1934/2002a, p. 775). Historical materialism transforms the political relations of meaning production.

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Dozono, T. The Fascist Seduction of Narrative: Walter Benjamin’s Historical Materialism Beyond Counter-Narrative. Stud Philos Educ 37, 513–527 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9612-9

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