Abstract
Social historians confront a paradox. Working within a framework of modernist-inspired, empirical-analytical history, they conceive their narratives arising from objective evidence. But the narrative choices they make with respect to content (i.e. facts, concepts, context) and form (i.e. metaphors, emplotment, focalization) reveal their general commitment to emancipation and the liberation of minority groups and women from oppression and subjugation. Unquestionably a noble ideal, emancipation is also an ethical value which compounds the paradox of social history. According to the moral philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, ethics reside in the face-to-face encounter with the other and the choices these evoke, and access to these encounters in the past are found in what he called traces, unverifiable marks of the other. Social historians have no shortage of traces from which to choose in composing their narratives. But modernist-inspired history's insistence on verification and its preference for abstraction (i.e. to represent the singular, unique, face-to-face encounter as an example of a concept), runs contrary to the idea of emancipation by virtue of the tendency to silence the voice of the other. Using the example of racism in apartheid and post-apartheid South African sport, I argue that social historians should step beyond the logic and reason of modernist-inspired history into the realm of narratives which engage face-to-face encounters with the other and which foster thinking about witnessing and responsibility.