American Indian Culture and Research Journal

”Men [and women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” After nearly a century-and-a-half, Marx’s statement still provides a most cogent affirmation of historicity against both a libertarian obliviousness to the burden of the past and a determinist denial of the possibility of human agency. But I begin with this statement for still another reason. While Marx’s own work lies at the origins of so much of present-day theorizing about society and history, against our theory-crazed times, when once again the logic of abstraction seems to take precedence over the evidence of the world, the statement is comfortingly common-sensical. Issues of historicity and common sense are both pertinent to the problem I take up in this discussion. The problem derives from a paradox in contemporary cultural criticism and politics. In academic circles engrossed with postmodernity / postcoloniality as conditions of the present, it is almost a matter of faith these days that nations are ”imagined,” traditions are “invented,” subjectivities are slippery (if they exist at all), and cultural identities are myths.