Writing History “Against the Grain” of History: Walter Benjamin and Jose Clemente Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization

I will discuss my current work on Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization, a historical fresco cycle at Dartmouth College painted from 1932-34. I interpret Orozco’s mural through the lens of German critic Walter Benjamin’s political philosophy, in particular his critique of historicism and the alternative theory of “historical materialism” he described in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (completed in 1940, published in 1950). In so doing I bring together two roughly contemporaneous figures separated by both geography and discipline. There is no evidence that Orozco knew Benjamin’s work. My argument is not, therefore, causal, but motivated by an affinity I find between the concerns of each. This affinity is often suggested, but rarely worked through conceptually or historically.

While I argue that Orozco and Benjamin’s concerns coincide because of historical circumstances and experiences that were parallel, the project begs questions about how we motivate our choices when writing history? What authorizes this theoretical lens and how can political philosophy inform the practice of writing history? This last question is vexed given Benjamin’s quarrel with historicism and the temporally and conceptually challenging alternative he sketched in his aphoristic “Theses.” Any historical project that purports to use Benjamin’s work as an interpretive lens must necessarily grapple with not only how to bring his ideas to bear on the work of another, but also how to interpret his ideas in the first place. This recursive problem stages one of his central insights about the allegorical nature of language. I will explore the problematic of writing history without an objectivist theory of art, language, or history and discuss the ways it informs and challenges my work.