Abstract
Will current trends in hypertext and hypermedia technology influence the way we study the past? This essay builds on recent hypertext scholarship and African-American historiography to address this question. As scholars investigate the ramifications of hypertext upon contemporary epistemology, historians of African-American history are exploring how black Americans constructed notions of time, the past and identity. The two fields of study converge on the issue of print culture and its ability to structure knowledge in a linear manner. Current ideas of history continue to privilege printed text over orality, thereby marginalizing oral-based cultures and societies. This has been especially challenging for scholars of African-American history, who study people whose personal histories through the mid-twentieth century were predominantly based on oral tradition. Only when transcribed for readers did these oral narratives assume a measure of authority as documentary evidence. However, the advent of hypertext technology allows acoustical cultures to tell their 'histories' alongside those based on print. In the process, a new approach to narrating history has emerged, potentially emancipating us from using terms such as marginal and dominant as numerous stories share the stage of history. The implications of hypertext history, then, is to alter the linear and teleological study of the past by reviving a traditional acoustical approach in which history is the story of 'a society of conversations in which no one conversation, no one discipline or ideology, dominates that of the other'.