Research has shown that there is a strong link between our ability to remember past events and imagine future ones. Brain scans have shown that similar parts of our brain are activated when we are asked to remember and when we imagine, and individuals who have experienced brain damage and amnesia often find it challenging to imagine their personal futures.16
Schacter and his colleague put forward the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis in 2007, which suggests our brains will combine elements of past experiences to predict the future and make decisions accordingly.8 For example, imagine you are planning a beach vacation. Instead of recalling a specific past vacation, you will combine aspects from multiple different events, which can provide you with insight into where you want to go.
Emilie Rose Jones at The Decision Lab. Constructive Memory
This is a really good 'explainer' about constructive memory theory. The connection between remembering past events and imagining future ones is helpful for understanding our curiosity about the past.
I'm certain that historians have a great deal of curiosity about the past, but their rigorous methods in gathering evidence about the past are different from how people use remembering. Particularly so when we are using our stories of the past to imagine futures. Academic standards about evidence are very important. But those standards aren't the same as ordinary people wondering "I wonder what it was like to be in those shoes?"
Adolph Reed and Kenneth Warren have a new book Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce this Time. Reed and Warren argue against the "interpretive turn" in Black Studies. They're arguments are so important. And the arguments are far broader than simply opposing Saidiya Hartman. But I find it difficult to know where I stand in this general debate.
Here is an interview with Adolph Reed and Kenneth Warren in The Pittsburgh Review of Books. And here an interview with Saidiya Hartman in The White Review.
It's odd, I have great affection for diametrically opposed perspectives. Wrestling with with the project of remembering so as to imagine better futures is no easy matter.
