'History Makes Its Demands': Identity politics, slavery scholarship and the narrative of Robert Starobin

• Published in: Rethinking history Vol. 6; no. 2; pp. 151 - 174
• Main Author: McMillian, John
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 01.06.2002
• Subjects: Black Power-INTELLECTUAL History; Robert Starobin; Slavery-HISTORIOGRAPHY New Left-HISTORIANS
• ISSN: 1364-2529; 1470-1154
• DOI: 10.1080/13642520210145617

Robert Starobin was a promising historian and social activist who earned his PhD in American history from Berkeley in 1968, and committed suicide in 1971. His main scholarly accomplishment was his 1970 monograph, Industrial Slavery in the Old South . However, his career remains of interest today because it addressed, in microcosm, an array of issues that continue to spark discussion and debate among historians, including the promise and pitfalls of social history, the intellectual authority of white scholars in Black studies, and the sometimes disharmonious relationship between radical scholarship and social change. Although this paper in no way attempts to account for Starobin's suicide, it does explore the ways these dynamics shaped his scholarship during the late 1960s. More specifically, a careful examination of the interplay between Starobin's historical work and the cultural politics that surrounded it suggests that the enormous advances in the historiography of slavery during the 1960s and 1970s may have also yielded some distortions that have yet to be attended to. However much the intellectual heritage of the Black Power Movement has to recommend it, its aftershocks have discouraged new approaches or conceptualizations to contentious issues in slavery scholarship, overemphasizing 'accomplishment' and 'agency' and leaving almost no theoretical room for scholars to discuss 'damage' or 'accommodation'.