‘This isn't usual, Mr. Pendleton, this is history’: Spielberg's Lincoln and the production of historical knowledge

Abstract

This brief essay considers the ways that Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln produces historical knowledge. As many scholars have pointed out, there are details in the film that are not borne out by the historical record. A much more important critique, persuasively articulated by historian Kate Masur, takes issue not with isolated facts, but with overall interpretation. She argues that the film erases the work African Americans did to fight for their own freedom. The goal here is not to champion the film, but rather to use the space to examine the film's narrative and stylistic strategies, including affective engagement, for producing a certain kind of historical knowledge, and also to consider the political ramifications of this kind of knowledge. More specifically, this essay asserts that the film is written and structured in such a way as to register, in a completely unsentimental way, African American demands for equality and the stakes of those demands. Finally, by insisting that the fundamental goal of democracy is equality, the film brings into relief some of Jacques Rancière's contemporary ideas about what constitutes the political.

Keywords::

• Lincoln
• affective engagement
• Jacques Rancière
• historical knowledge
• equality
• African Americans

Notes

^1. See also Thavolia Glymph, ‘Untellable Human Suffering,’ Chronicle of Higher Education 7 December 2012. http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/author/tglymph/ and Corey Robin, ‘Steven Spielberg's White Men of Democracy,’ Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made 25 November 2012. http://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/25/steven-spielbergs-white-men-of-democracy/

^2. See, for instance, Douglas Kellner, ‘Lincoln in contemporary U.S. culture and politics’ and Kate Masur, ‘ Filmmaker's Imagination, and a Historian's,’ Chronicle of Higher Education November 30, 2012. http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2012/11/30/a-filmmakers-imagination-and-a-historians/

^3. Corey Robbins, for example, writes, ‘the film studiously keeps black people in the audience – literally in the gallery, in one of the closing scenes, or in the bedroom or in the foyer, waiting, watching, attending.’ See Corey Robin, ‘Steven Spielberg's White Men of Democracy,’ Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made 25 November 2012. http://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/25/steven-spielbergs-white-men-of-democracy/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Landsberg

Alison Landsberg is Associate Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She has a joint appointment in the History and Art History Department and the Cultural Studies Ph.D Program.