ABSTRACT
This chapter was prompted by two sets of questions. The first concerns the ways in which subordinated social groups and communities can develop and maintain a sense of their own history. How does this consciousness arise? What is the extent and form of its autonomy? How, and for what political purposes, can it be mobilized? The second set of questions has to do with the dominant and publicly instituted representations of the past. How is a particular version of the past produced, privileged, installed and maintained as a public and national ‘consensus’? How, above all, does this process bear upon the subordinated historical consciousness indicated in the first set of questions?
