Current Issue

THE TIME OF POLITICS, THE POLITICS OF TIME, AND POLITICIZED TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO CHRONOPOLITICS

FERNANDO ESPOSITO & TOBIAS BECKER

Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing futures in the present or preventing them from materializing. Consequently, the relationship between politics and time encompasses a broad spectrum of phenomena and processes that cry out for historicization. In our introduction to this History and Theory theme issue on chronopolitics, we argue that the concept of chronopolitics makes it possible to do this and, in the process, to move the operation of rethinking historical temporalities from the periphery toward the center of historiographical attention as well as to engage in a dialogue with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. . . . Read more →

PEASANTS, BRIGANDS, AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF THE NEW LEVIATHAN IN THE MEZZOGIORNO

FERNANDO ESPOSITO

The image of a backward, archaic South whose barbarian population had remained at a low tier of civilization was a child of Italian unification. Not unlike the Orientalist East, the South that meridionalist discourse brought forth was a “chronotopos”—that is, a time-space that had supposedly remained in the past. The war against brigandage in the Mezzogiorno demonstrates the workings of the “politics of historicism.” This article first sheds some light on the grande brigantaggio and on the descriptions of the South that it generated among both contemporaries and later historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm. . . . Read more →

1989: THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF REVOLUTION

MARCUS COLLA & ADÉLA GJURIČOVÁ

A failed effort at “reform from above” or a dramatic reassertion of “people power”? Almost thirty-five years on, studies of the Revolutions of 1989 continue to be framed by these two polarities. However, this historiographical focus has meant that scholars have often overlooked the actual content and character of protest itself. This article argues that one way of reinjecting agency and ideas back into our historical understanding of 1989 is through examining the chronopolitics of revolution: that is to say, by addressing how the control and interpretation of time became a political battlefield, a site of contention and negotiation, between Communist regimes, on the one hand, and political activists and society, on the other. . . . Read more →

“WHAT HAS POSTERITY EVER DONE FOR ME?”: FUTURE GENERATIONS, INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE, AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF DISTANT FUTURES

BENJAMIN MÖCKEL

“Future generations” play a key role in current political debates. In the context of the climate crisis especially, political controversies are often framed as moral problems of “intergenerational justice.” This article aims to historicize the use of the concept of “future generations” in modern political discourse and to uncover its long—and often ambivalent—history. . . . Read more →

THE MANIFESTO, THE TIMELINE, AND THE MEMORY SITE: THE 22 JULY 2011 ATTACKS IN NORWAY AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF GENRE

HELGE JORDHEIM

In addition to being heinous crimes, acts of terrorism are complex chronopolitical events. Perpetrators, victims, survivors, families, and authorities manage their relationship to the events by engaging with and giving shape to time, or, rather, to a plurality of times. To perform this time work, they avail themselves of different genres, which serve as chronopolitical tools. This article discusses three such genres: the manifesto, the timeline, and the memorial site. . . . Read more →

DECONSTRUCTING HISTORICIST TIME, OR TIME'S SCRIBE

ETHAN KLEINBERG

This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that “historicism” is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of “historicism” that is derived from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, which I call Historicism B. . . . Read more →

CHRONOCENOSIS: HOW TO IMAGINE THE MULTIPLICITY OF TEMPORALITIES WITHOUT LOSING THE EMPHASIS ON POWER AND CONFLICTS

MARGRIT PERNAU

Review of Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History, edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley

The twentieth century witnessed the historicization of the categories of time and space. Instead of functioning as a universal category, moving from the past to the present and from the present to the future, time has multiplied into temporalities, and historians have looked for adequate metaphors to describe this multiplicity, its many ways of moving forward and backward, its acceleration and decelerations, its entanglements, and its conflicts and struggles for hegemony. The editors of Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History offer a thought-provoking concept by translating biocenosis, the coexistence of different species in the same environment, to time studies and thus using the term “chronocenosis” to refer to different temporalities sharing the same embattled space. . . . Read more →

HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE

APARNA VAIDIK

Review of Time's Monster: How History Makes History, by Priya Satia

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. . . . Read more →

MEDIEVALISMS AND MEDIEVAL TIMES: CONFRONTING CHRONOPOLITICS WITH MEDIEVAL TEXTURES OF TIME

HANNAH SKODA

Review of Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America, by Nadia R. Altschul

This review essay examines Nadia R. Altschul's discussion of medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South America in Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America. She explores a chronopolitics whereby the notion that late medieval Iberia lagged developmentally behind the rest of Europe sustained the claim that parts of South America were still medieval, even while capitalist modernity was established elsewhere. Her exploration of the instrumentalization of this trope for neocolonial and neoliberal purposes provokes my own exploration here of medieval ideas about time. . . . Read more →

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