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York U. Millennial Wisdom Symposium #3: Does History Prove We Never Learn? Winning Writer Ron Wright, Balkans Scholar T. Kaiser, York Historian M. Shore Weigh in
Wright's new novel, A Scientific Romance, (just out in paperback) envisions a future Britain overgrown with jungles and sparsely populated with a band of illiterate Scots who enact a version of Shakespeare's Macbeth as an annual fertility festival. Failure to learn from the past may be leading us to futures like this, says Wright, who adds that he wouldn't have written his millennial epic unless he felt there were still some possibility for Western culture to change its course.
Wright brings to this discussion a background as an archeologist, as an author of international best-sellers Stolen Continents and Time Among the Maya, as a writer whose travel and historical writing appears in The Washington Post, Equinox and Saturday Night, and, most recently, as the recipient of the David Higham Prize for A Scientific Romance (Knopf). Wright will discuss the implications for the future presented in this novel, in which civilization as we know it is lost and humankind appears isolated in the north. The novel follows David Lambert, a reluctant curator and specialist in Victorian machinery who finds himself time-travelling in an old H.G. Wells time machine to Britain in the year 2500. Wright, who was born in England, will also talk about what the study of the past has taught him personally, both as a writer and an archeologist.
York's archeological expert in Eastern Europe, Prof. Tim Kaiser, will draw from 20 years of research in his presentation, Archeology and Ideology in the Balkan Killing Fields. "Nowhere has it been made more horrifyingly clear that the past is a prize, a resource to covet and contest, than in the west Balkans today," said Kaiser, who is also a field associate in the Department of Western Art and Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum and an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto.
Kaiser will look at how archeologists' notions about the past are derived from current conditions in an area like the Balkans. He will also examine how archeological efforts are geared to serve contemporary political agendas and speculate about what this means for small nations in the future. "I have spent twenty years of research confronting various pasts, real and imagined, and observed how those pasts have been deployed for political purposes," said Kaiser.
The third speaker is Canadian historian and York University Prof. Marlene Shore, who is known for her forward-looking work on traditions in the writing of Canadian history. In her presentation, History of the future/the future of history, Shore will look at what is ahead for Canada in the next century and ponder the future of history itself in the new millennium. Shore, who runs York's graduate department in history, believes one of the most noticeable Canadian trends is the way Canadians now also identify themselves as North Americans, which is not the same thing as describing a Canadian as an American.
"How can History predict? How can historians foretell what future generations will do or what they will remember?" asks Shore, who is also co-organizer of an international conference at York April 13-15, 2000 called 'Historians and their Audiences.'
That questions of this nature are put to historians, often in the midst of political scandals, national debates and world crises, Shore notes, demonstrates that they are still regarded by some as spokespersons for "the nation." Many historians throughout the western world adopted that role in the late 19th century when, for example, those in French and English Canada put themselves forward as moral leaders of society whose understanding of the past, reconstructed into readable narratives, would provide their communities with the solid foundation on which to build the future.
"This view was shattered by World War II, and more particularly during the turbulent 1960s," said Shore. "What followed was a proliferation of historical writing about peoples and even ideas once relegated to the margins of the "national" past. The debate now is whether historians have abdicated their old role as national or moral leaders and seers -- a role taken up by political scientists and economists -- and whether they should re-engage themselves in the public debate, especially in view of today's enormous popularity of history and historical memory in fictionalized form -- in literature, on film, in much popular culture."
The York University Millennial Wisdom Symposium, sponsored by York's Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies in co-operation with the Royal Ontario Museum, is the brainchild of Susan Swan, award-winning novelist, York University professor and Robarts Millennial Scholar. Swan, who conceived of the symposium as the focus of her one-year appointment to the prestigious Roberts Centre Chair, assembled an impressive cast of luminaries to tackle social, political and literary questions during ten public events running from October 1999 through to April 2000. Making Up the Past: The Archeology of Fiction profiles prominent novelists, historians and archeologists who will talk about the way we re-create the past in popular culture through literature, archeology and history.
The first symposium event featured Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading, Dionne Brand, award-winning poet and author and ROM Near Eastern and Asian Civilizations expert Dr. Edward Keall. The next one, held on Nov. 25 at the ROM, focuses on "Excavating the Feminine Past: Do Women Make a Better World?", featuring US feminist thealogian and author Carol Christ, British historian and novelist Rosalind Miles, Toronto mystery writer Lyn Hamilton and Trent U. archeologist Susan Jamieson.
The public is invited to all the events, which are free. The York University events will be held in the York University Bookstore, which is located at the north end of York Lanes, except for the Nov. 25th event which will be held at the Vanier College Dining Hall and the March 21st Robarts lecture which will be held in York's Senate Chamber. For a complete agenda of events, please visit http://www.robarts.yorku.ca/ or contact the people below.
For further information, please contact:
Sine MacKinnon
Prof. Susan Swan |
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