Sounds and images of histories of present and immediate time: identities and subject conceptions, memories and subjectivities in (de)construction in History's daily practice

Abstract

The aim of this article is, in the nowadays context of modification or lack of sense of theories and concepts in Human Sciences, to affirm the concrete possibility of historians to produce knowledge about recent or present events. We search for reflection about the possibility of historians to produce critical historical registers as subjects of such events, even if they take a direct part in the processes. This became viable since new theorical perspectives put historical making in a new degree in the 20th century, with new concepts production and meanings that favor it. The work of some historians of new generation and, specially, the ideas of Michel Foucault work about the place of the intelectual as a diagnostician of the present has favored the construction of history for the present time. This conception changed the traditional place of the historian because the history practice in present time needs to hold the idea of a not ended history, in constant movement, that (dis)construct the happenings that comes on in front of us, in an endless renovation. Starting from this perspective, the history of present time emerged from the immediate history conception, elaborated to designate works written during the events happening by the authors, that started to proliferate since the second half of the 20th century, making the editions grow and be vulgarized in the 1960s. Historians see themselves in a context where the national and international situation asks for clearings starting to show a symmetry between history production and social demand.