Historical Discourse Analysis
Historical discourse analysis is a poststructuralist approach to reading and writing history; a mode of conceptualizing history through a theorized lens of critique. Historical discourse analysis works against the objectivist fallacy of traditional positivist historical methods in decentering the authority of the historian as a neutral recorder of facts and the claim of historical writings as objective reconstructions of past events.
The task of the historian is, from this perspective, to uncover and critique the technologies of power that have come to legitimate certain ideas as truths. Historical discourse analysis is a mode of critical social analysis.
The Concept of Discourse
Historical discourse analysis is founded on a poststructuralist conception of discourse: an antiessentialist perspective on language, identity, society, and social practices. From this perspective, language and discourse are viewed not as impartial tools that describe reality, but as constitutive modes of power that construct reality in unequal ways, demarcating the center from the periphery, truth from opinion, and reality from interpretation.
Discourses are understood as central modes and components of the production, maintenance, and conversely, resistance to systems of power and inequality; no usage of language is considered a neutral, impartial, or apolitical act.
The Role of the Historian
The positivist view of history, which presupposes the historian as an unencumbered subject who stands outside of discourse, is according to Derrida the original fallacy at the heart of Western metaphysics.
Working against the disciplinary assumptions of traditional history (scientific historiography or historical realism), historical discourse analysis contests the ideal of the historian as an objective observer or recorder of facts, an author who stands outside the texts she or he reads and writes.
Uses of Historical Discourse Analysis
Historical discourse analysis is used generally to trace the ways in which the particular discursive devices found in examined texts or discourses functioned to construct certain normative ideas and views of events and people. Such analyses tend to examine both formal and informal practices of a given period through the examination of the social, political, legal, and disciplinary codes and their discourses to see how a particular category of subject (e.g., the child, the immigrant, the insane, the criminal, the dependent, the homosexual, etc.) and subject categories (e.g., race, culture, gender, age, sexuality, etc.) become constructed.
Thus, to paraphrase cultural studies critic Stuart Hall, the hallmark of historical discourse analysis is the study of discourses as systems of representations.
Because historical discourse analysis is an approach to history rather than a set methodology as such, the specific analytical method for the examination of texts or discourses can vary. Methods of close reading, such as Derridean deconstruction, or the many techniques of discourse analysis in general can be applied to historical texts as ways of analyzing texts or discourses as the means of understanding linguistic practices as social practices.