History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities

How is history lived "in person"--in everyday, subjectively experienced events and practices? How does it shape the identities of individual people? The ten essays in this book explore these questions within a framework of conflict or "struggle," demonstrating how subjects' intimate self-making is related to their participation in what the authors call "contentious local practice."

Individual lives play out against a background of enduring historical struggles, which may be as general as conflicts over competing forms of capitalism or as specific as years of civil war in Guatemala. But such broad, enduring struggles are seldom addressed directly in people's lives. Instead, they are lived as they concretely intrude into local social practice. Local struggles--over strip-searching in a Northern Ireland prison, the futures of Hutu exiles in Canada, the building of a light rail line through a New York neighborhood, the identities of repatriated Japanese Brazilians--are starting points from which the authors show how local practices mediate between complex sociopolitical-economic struggles and the historically fashioned identities-in-practice that they produce and by which they are in turn constituted.

Together these essays, firmly grounded in practice theory and usefully adopting a dialogic perspective, show how enduring struggles, mediated through local conflicts, become "history in person."