Escaping the Sovereignty Trap

History Against the Grain

If a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is the only item on the menu, and you know a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is not going to do you any good, what are your options? Do you just keep pretending that this is the best of all possible meals? Or do you dress it up with lots of tasty add-ons, like maybe some pepperoni and curry? Or, and here’s what we are thinking, maybe you create a new menu entirely, one that addresses our nutritional needs and culinary tastes.

So it is with history. We’ve been chewing on the same history menu for too long, a history sandwiched around the claims of sovereignty and flavored with the condiments of power. No matter how much we try to improve it, make it spicier or more exotic, more diverse or more inclusive, it still has us justifying the same old systems of power and privilege. We call it the sovereignty trap - and we cannot chew our way out of the problems it has made for us by sticking to the same narrative menu. In other words, we shouldn’t expect a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to be something it was never designed to be. We need a new menu. We need a new basis for history. We need new stories to tell.