This may be a good time for me to awkwardly describe Leopold von Ranke's theories, which I'm not really that familiar with -- so hopefully someone can correct me if I go astray. Ranke was confident that competent historians who engaged all the relevant sources empirically could produce an objective, reliable history. The role of the historian was to stand back as an omniscient narrator whose voice would essentially be absent and whose personal position (race, class, nation, and so on) would be irrelevant.

In many ways, the Rankean philosophy of history remains powerful today -- particularly within popular understandings of history -- although obviously historians have engaged with a whole series of modern and postmodern claims on narrative, ways of knowing, and positionality since Ranke's time. But the notion that historians are collectively engaged in producing a single consensus history that can stand for all time really doesn't capture the work that most historians actually do. Maybe the people that are most closely engaged in producing sweeping national pr global histories that everyone (theoretically) agrees with, it's textbook authors -- and that can be quite a different process.

Professional historians do produce big, global histories with sweeping narratives and do actively attempt to work beyond national borders and across cultures. I myself work very hard to produce historical work that can be responsive and useful to the non-Western communities with which I work, and always try to think through ways in which my position and the sources I rely on may be leading me to frame stories in biased or skewed ways. I write about empire, and I'm constantly bombarded with claims that originated as subtle justifications of colonial rule, so it's important to me not to inadvertently reinforce those claims. I also don't imagine that my work will supplant indigenous histories. My work is intended to be complementary to those histories, and to serve a different function.

Central to all of this, I think, is the need to recognize that who we are impacts the way that we research and the way that we write. That doesn't mean that only Japanese historians are able to write about Japan, or even that a Chinese or a Korean historian would necessarily produce scholarship that was substantially different from what this hypothetical Japanese scholar produced. It just means that historians need to ask themselves questions. Am I valorizing these American missionaries because they remind me of myself? Am I interested in this topic because it's important, relevant, and useful, or because by some quirk of my own personality or experience I happen to find it entertaining? If the latter, is that problematic, am I safe to press ahead, or should I tweak my research questions?

But because historians work with sources, we can't go too far in the direction of Derrida -- or at least I don't think we can. There may not be many historians walking around trumpeting their work as the one true history for all people now and forever, but we still imagine that our work is the best and most reliable output of which we are capable at the time of production. That feels like a bit of a ramble, but I hope it helps.