ABSTRACT
How ‘we’ do history is a political act and a decision about politics. It is through
doing history that ‘we’ constitute ourselves as subjects and as communities. For the
purposes of the present discussion of how ‘history’ is related to the formation of the
‘subject’ and how this relationship is manifest in the particular context of processes
of reconciliation, I employ the concept of ‘history’ with an understanding of it as
a modality – with spatial and temporal dimensions – through which we constitute
ourselves as subjects. The spatial and temporal dimensions of history both determine
and reflect our self-understanding as subjects and communities of subjects. For
instance, a linear, teleological spatial and temporal conception of history lends itself
to, or supports, the idea of the subject as a work in progress that develops over
time, eventually reaching its fully developed state as a civilized being. Thus, the
political act involved in how we ‘do history’ is a decision about how we understand
the relationship between what has happened in the past – and more specifically, the
very shape that our understanding of the ‘past’ takes – and contemporary social and
political realities. In other words, the decisions about how we come to make sense
of things, or give meaning to events, is the means through which we accomplish an
understanding of how we come to be who ‘we’ are, as individuals and as communities.
History can thus be understood as one of the primary means through which the ‘we’
