Current Issue

CAN HISTORY ABSOLVE? CAN HISTORY JUDGE?

Martin Jay

Appealing to history, rather than to God, to provide an ultimate judgment about human actions can have a justificatory or consolatory function. The former grants proleptic absolution for acts that may be morally dubious because of their benign consequences, while the latter enables victims in the present to gain a measure of relief by imagining they will be honored by posterity. In both cases, problematic assumptions about “history” and “judgment” call into question the belief that future generations will vindicate present-day struggles. . . . Read more →

“STRANDED ON THE SHORES OF HISTORY”?: MONUMENTS AND (ART-)HISTORICAL AWARENESS

Jakub Stejskal

Can past agents deliberately influence our historical awareness by designing objects’ appearances and sending them to us down the stream of time? We know they have certainly tried to do so by raising monuments. But according to an influential narrative, the efforts of the “monumentalists” are destined to fail: no monument can keep a legacy alive in perpetuity. In this article, I argue that this narrative misrepresents the nature of the monumentalists’ mission, and I set out to show that monumentality should be understood as a means of addressing what I term “art-historical awareness.” This mode of historical awareness attends to artifacts’ appearances in search of visual manifestations of relevance that can survive the loss of context. . . . Read more →

Forum: Translation, Migration, Narrative

[1.] Editors’ Introduction: Translation, Migration, Narrative

Christoph Rass and Julie M. Weise

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[2.] Travelers in Translation: Of “Liminal Spaces” and “Literary Contact Zones”

Laura A. Zander

Despite the global visibility of the migrant as a key figure in discussions of human rights, the contours of the migrant as a subject of rights still remain unspecified. However, global human rights fictions, which are often rooted in autobiographical and biographical accounts, offer alternative subjectivities by producing narrative forms that contrast with dominant “migration literatures.” Literature emerges as a contact zone where migrant voices engage with host cultures, facilitating dialogues that challenge stereotypes and reshape cultural imaginaries. . . . Read more →

[3.] Producing Integration: The Translation of Non/belonging in Germany and the United States

Catherine S. Ramírez and Christoph Rass

This essay examines how the concept of integration has been produced, translated, and institutionalized in Germany and the United States as a key element of policy frameworks that migranticize some people and, thus, translate them as outsiders. By combining conceptual history and translation theory, we analyze how the meaning of integration has evolved within academic and political discourse, tracing its emergence as a key category in migration governance. . . . Read more →

[4.] From Secrecy to the Public Sphere: Translating Chinese Sworn Brotherhood Practices for Western Audiences

Albert Manke and Fredy González

This essay reflects on how changing practices and knowledge repertoires of Chinese migrant associations in the Americas shaped translocal collective spheres in the asymmetric setting known as the Exclusion Era. In order to achieve this, we highlight certain aspects and layers of what Homi K. Bhabha has called “cultural translation,” which, in our case, was advanced through the agency, ideas, and practices of individuals who organized in Chinese sworn brotherhoods, a type of mutual aid association that prioritized secrecy and actively managing knowledge dissemination. . . . Read more →

[5.] Migration, Mobility, and Being in Translation

Peter Schneck and Julie M. Weise

Drawing on an expanded concept of translation as process and practice, this contribution to the “Translation, Migration, Narrative” forum explores how migrants, as described by scholars such as Paul F. Bandia, embody “translated beings” who are marked both by agency and by constraint. We argue that translation serves as a literal and metaphorical framework for analyzing archives of migration by illuminating the interplay between migrants’ identities, their larger social networks, and the legal, cultural, and linguistic translations they enact and endure. . . . Read more →

[6.] First Person Singular? North Indian Migrant Narratives from the Era of Indenture

Anand A. Yang

Between the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, over one million people from India served as indentured laborers in European-dominated colonies scattered across the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean. To understand this mass migration at the individual and micro-level, scholars have recently turned their attention to the autobiographies of two “translated” people, Totaram Sanadhya and Munshi Rahman Khan, because their texts offer firsthand accounts of indenture from within that system. . . . Read more →

[7.] List, Assemblage, Interruption:Migrant Literature Against Story

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Building on the centrality of translation theory in literary studies, this essay makes the case for the utility of literature in understanding the experience of migration. Rather than assuming that this means narrative fiction or nonfiction, it explores arguments against narrative. Using frameworks developed by Maria Mäkelä, Hanna Meretoja, and Andrew Abbott, it argues that a story-critical, nonnarrative approach can better illuminate momentary experience and slow down the reader's rush to consume and oversimplify story features. Examples drawn from recent work by US Chicano poet-artist Juan Felipe Herrera illustrate some tactics that interrupt the flow of narrative, including the list, the assemblage, and the concrete space of the page. Read more →

ALL THAT GLITTERS: THE MANY OBJECTS OF ROME'S MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATIONS

Arielle Xena Alterwaite

Review article on Rome's Museum of Civilizations (Museo delle Civiltà)

This review article examines the various methodologies practiced by Rome's Museum of Civilizations (Museo delle Civiltà) to discuss the contemporary curatorial approaches of traditional ethnographic museums. It adopts a historical and comparative perspective to situate the diverse collections within ongoing debates about art restitution. In emphasizing the unique work of the curators along with that of contemporary artists, this review article demonstrates how their use of history destabilizes rather than solidifies the permanence of museum collections. . . . Read more →

ON DECOLONIZING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Jacob Collins

Review article on George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press, 2023)

This review article discusses George Steinmetz's The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, a history of the French social sciences and their colonial entanglements. Surveying a vast array of objects, including institutions, texts, journals, thinkers, and concepts, Steinmetz demonstrates how central the colonial relation was to the production of social knowledge in France. This formation, he argues, has been actively repressed in historical accounts of sociology, and in an effort to decolonize the discipline, Steinmetz brings these connections out of the shadows and uses them to compose an alternative (colonial) history of the field. While acknowledging Steinmetz's major accomplishments, not least among them the consideration of unjustly neglected colonial thinkers, I challenge some of the book's basic narratives around the history and politics of decolonization. . . . Read more →

HISTORICAL NEURODIVERSITY STUDIES: A NEW PARADIGM OF EXPERIENCE

Bradley J. Irish

Review essay on Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

In Emotion, Sense, Experience (2020), Rob Boddice and Mark Smith put forth a paradigm-shifting argument for how we might employ experience as a master category of historical analysis—one that sees matters of cognition, emotion, and sensation as crucially embraided in human subjectivity. Building on their foundation, this review essay imagines the possibilities of a historical neurodiversity studies, an outlook that sees human neurological diversity as vital to understanding experience. The history of experience, I suggest, is the history of neurodiversity, and the history of neurodiversity is the history of human experience. Read more →

ENTANGLING KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE

Vera Keller

Review essay on Alain Corbin, Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, translated by Susan Pickford (Polity, 2021)

This review essays situates Alain Corbin's Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries within current discussions of knowledge and ignorance related to intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of knowledge. These varying approaches have drawn the borderland between knowledge and ignorance divergently. After a brief critique of the Corbin's positivist approach in Terra Incognita, I sketch some well-known ground in the history of science over the past two generations. I then point to how recent discussions of the relationships between intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of knowledge have tended to sidestep that history. I conclude by suggesting how indigenous studies and Corbin's own previous work might serve to better entangle knowledge and ignorance in ways that might draw on the strengths of all three fields. Read more →

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