“What kind of history do I want to write?” is a constant question I’ve asked since day zero of my graduate studies in the US, knowing that I would turn my intellectual gear from policy analysis to history. It’s an inquiry about method and form, about questions I want to answer, all the things about time and temporality that puzzle me. And I’ve been blessed (or cursed, depending on how you want to read it) with great patience of detouring to many themes and subjects, while at the same time holding on to the core of wanting to know the formation and configuration of ideas. The subject may change gradually but the core remains intact; it’s a drive that makes me excited about my work. “I’m in a perpetual pursuit to understand better” is the principle that moves me.

But “better” means I get to fail, to be wrong, make false inferences and revise them. A case in point: I once tried narrative history because I like storytelling. I thought narration with plot can help readers to follow events and understand why and how historical actors did the things they did. Also, I get to learn the technical matters of writing prose through the triad of place-person-event. I once even argued on the function of speculation in writing a narrative history of marginalized individuals, when the primary sources are limited. Yet the more I study, read, and live a life, I decided to depart away from my proposal and interest in narrative history because it doesn’t suit my research project. I kept wondering what does narrative history do and not do?

I still think narrative form can be generative to tell history and evoke general interests to the past. (I have my favorite works of narrative history.) Yet the feature of narrative history, which locates on historians’ craft of characters and plot, put me into a disagreement towards the practice of representing people’s lives in the past as a singular transparent plot that others (readers) can follow and see through. I want to understand the past, not plotting it. (Also, I kind of despise half-joking murmur that a historian is a failed novelist. I prefer a failed novelist to keep writing literary prose, in case they become successful novelist, and a historian to not try writing a novel.)

Academic historians say, that’s the purpose of enrolling in graduate school: to dig your teeth into serious matters of doing research, train yourself as a thinker, make wrongs and fix them and do the right thing. But the industry of professoriate and academic institutions, and the force of white imperialism, makes me walking on a thin thread that I question myself for the past four years, whether I still want to be an academic historian. I know what I like and I want. I like battling with both empirical and theoretical texts and being complicated because past life is complicated and not needlessly. I want to write and teach history that invites students to think about continuity and resonance amidst changes and breaks. I want to study history not based on my vibes but the ones that examine the structure of vibes. I want to write a history that keeps its readers to stay curious and wanting to know things. I like to become a historian who writes history through the sustenance of figuring out the world. And I don’t know if all this passion and want is enough to get me a permanent job; is it enough to like what I do and want better things. I’m not secured, little chance to be tenured.

My musing about being a not-enough-historian makes me revisiting “#TheoryRevolt: Theses on Theory and History” a manifesto by Wild on Collective (Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Scott, Gary Wilder), published in 2018 in History and Theory Journal. The manifesto starts with the limits of disciplinary history:

Academic history has never managed to transcend its eighteenth century origins as an empiricist enterprise.

The current obsession with “methodology” is premised on this ‘workman like’ approach; the odos or path to historical knowledge is assumed to be singular and those who stray from it are considered lost.

History, as a field, encourages a system of discipline or punish.

History’s normal (and normalizing) approach to doctoral training reveals (and reinforces) its anti-theoretical and unreflexive orientation.

I didn’t read this manifesto during the time of its publication. I only read it a few years later when I was preparing my comprehensive exams and read theory books about translations and political thought. I was introduced to Joan Scott’s essay about “gender” during my predoctoral year, but the rest of it is me trying to find out the direction of my intellectual project. I’m lucky to have an adviser who is very much apt in talking about theories; and we often nerd out about theories of history, language, and translation. But I’m quite aware about the general attitude among tenured historians and how they perceive a kind of history that doesn’t quite match up with their idea of “good” history. I know that some historians dislike my dissertation project for not being a “history” and more like a “literary study” (which I take as an indirect compliment because what I do is indeed an intellectual history about care ideas that were mediated by printed materials and literary texts). I know that hostile disagreements among historians are sometimes not really about the contents but about each other’s intellectual styles. The manifesto, in other words, reflects my experience and concern as a graduate student.

As a small note, I don’t fully agree with the Wild on Collective’s gesture that seemingly renders critical history as the solution to the empirical studies, rather than its refinement. I do agree that history is undertheorized, and critical history, as they claim, is theorized history. I also do agree about the practice of “recognizing all ‘facts’ as always already mediated, categories as social, and concepts as historical.” The main reason I do intellectual history is because it gives me a chance to learn metahistory, and trying to understand what is history as a field. For me, the dialectical moves between empirical and theoretical work are productive–and the strongest history do both.

But the manifesto is not just about proposing critical history but to exposing the core problem of history field: historians often don’t recognize that they are politically implicated in their objects of study. And this is where I think the Collective is accurate and their manifesto important. Historians’ criticism to the works of history that they think are not history/historical (re: good) enough are not as objective as they think it is. Their reluctance to understand theorized history, what it’s doing and to what epistemological and political ends, make them hiding behind intellectual neutrality, turning empirical work in history as a weapon to shoot down history thinkers than as a tool to cultivate them. Furthermore, the Collective’s criticism on American Historical Association, as a powerful gatekeeping institution, is on point and remains relevant. At worse, the Association refuses to support protestors against genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, denying the majority voice of its members to keep “history field” on its line. History field in the heart of empire is not doing shit than a harmful blabbering on what is enough history.

The manifesto is thus one of the things that keeps my chin up. Amidst my insecurity about the future, I’m not despairing. I’m trying not to be. “I don’t cut my breast off to be a brown obedient subject of academic institutions,” that’s what I said to colleagues as we were complaining about academic whiteness. And as I’m writing this, I don’t know yet which academic institution I will work at. What I know is I will go to Indonesia, hanging out with closed ones. I know I can still do stuffs even when it’s never enough to satisfy the institutional standard of being a scholar. Thanks to my research, I already meet good people and make new friends–and I will keep continue to do so. For now, this is enough for me. What’s not enough? History.