Contextualizing History-as-Adaptation: An Interdisciplinary Comparison of Historical Revisionism

Abstract

Abstract The return to history in the humanities during the 1980s prompted literary and film scholars to question historiography’s empirical scientific status, as they instead argued that history shared more in common with fiction while their own fields of study provided means of democratizing the historical record. The concept of history-as-adaptation, recently introduced by Laurence Raw and Defne Ersin Tutan, and further developed by Tom Leitch, draws upon several of the same goals as these earlier revisionist critiques. This article contextualizes how external revision of history has been used by disciplines as a means of solidifying their own identities, despite the fact that history departments have not responded to such criticism. Through a cross-disciplinary analysis of the postmodern interrogation of historical claims, I seek to not only contextualize the adaptive turn but also demonstrate how the field’s comparative identity provides a means of transcending oppositional discourse. Drawing on the work of Robert Berkhofer, I establish a supplemental interpretation of history-as-adaptation, demonstrating the advantages of applying adaptive strategies to the documentary framework at the heart of historical methodology.