La voz del historiador. El ‘yo’ en los relatos historiográficos (1980-2023)

Modern Western historiography was founded under the paradigm of scientism and objectivity. As a result, the discipline adopted the narrative strategy of the omniscient or extradiegetic narrator, or the use of the plural "we" in the Hispanic context, a practice which supposedly prevented historians' subjectivities from leaking into accounts of the past. However, since the 1980s, new narrative strategies have emerged that have challenged this model from both a formal and epistemological standpoint. This emergence of the "self" in the field of historiography has been defined by Enzo Traverso as “subjective writing”. The article analyses this "autobiographical turn" in Western historiography, paying particular attention to its manifestations in its two main epicentres - the academic world in the United States and France - along with other pioneering works from Australia, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

The article presents two levels of analysis. On the one hand, it establishes a classification system which divides subjective writing within contemporary historiography into four categories: autobiographies, ego-histoire, autobiographical or family “windows”, and ethnographic field diaries. The first two categories are explicitly memoir-like texts, while the latter two consist of works considered by interpretive communities of experts as historical research. On the other hand, it asks whether historians have used these formats in an attempt to be transparent with readers about the role of their subjectivities in the construction of knowledge, or if these formats have merely been used in functional and/or stylistic ways. In cases where self-reflection occurs, a distinction is made between texts with a passive focus (whose reflections are related to previous research in which the author can no longer intervene), and active (when reflections are conducted in parallel with the author's own research and, therefore, can impact the construction of knowledge).