It's hard to write a good paper about a bad topic. That's why ... - English

Texts In Conversation Rhetoric 105
Note: Keep in mind that your aim in this exercise is not to arrive at your opinion of the
sources, but to construct the conversation that you think the author of one might have
with the author of another. How might the author of number 1 recast the ideas of the
author’s of either number 2 or 3?
* * *
1) If I write “The history of the United States begins with the Mayflower,” a
statement many readers may find simplistic and controversial, there will be little doubt
that I am suggesting that the first significant event in the process that eventuated in what
we now call the United States is the land of the Mayflower. Consider now a sentence
grammatically identical to the proceeding one and perhaps as controversial: “The history
of the United States is a history of migration.” The reader may choose to understand both
uses of the word history as emphasizing a sociohistorical process. Then, the sentence
seems to suggest that the fact of migration is the central element in the evolution of the
United States. But an equally valid interpretation of that sentence is that the best
narrative about the United States is a story of migration. That interpretation becomes
privileged if I add a few qualifiers: “The true history of the United States is a history of
migrations. That history remains to be written.”
2) The literature on slavery in the Americas and on the Holocaust suggests that there
may be structural similarities in global silences, or at the very least, that erasure and
banalization are not unique to the Haitian Revolution. At the level of generalities, some
narratives cancel what happened through direct erasure of facts or their relevance. “It”
did not really happen; it was not that bad, or that important. Frontal challenges to the fact
of the Holocaust or to the relevance of Afro-American slavery belong to this type: The
Germans did not really build gas chambers; slavery also happened to non-blacks.
3) I prefer to say that Columbus “stumbled on the Bahamas,” or “discovered the
Antilles,” and I prefer “conquest” over “discovery” to describe what happened after the
landing. Such phrasings are awkward and may raise some eyebrows. They may even
annoy some readers. But both the awkwardness and the fact that the entire issue can be
dismissed as trivial quibbling suggests that it is not easy to subvert the very language
describing the facts of the matter. For the power to decide what is trivial—and
annoying—is also part of the power to decide how “what happened” becomes “that
which is said to have happened.”