Current Issue

THE PHILOLOGY OF RACE IN LATE QING CHINA

Peter Yuanxi Chen

This article rethinks the problem of race from the late nineteenth century onward by examining how the concept of race configured an impasse in the relationship between history and nature in late Qing China. By analyzing the debate about race and history within late Qing philological discourse, it offers new readings of early foundational texts from China's long revolutionary twentieth century that address questions surrounding race, nation, and state. . . . Read more→

PERIODIZING GEOLOGICALLY OUTWITH (AND WITHOUT?) THE ANTHROPOCENE: PASTS, AGENCIES, AND THE TERRESTRIAL

Gwenffrewi J. Morgan

As a periodization that is generally understood to refer to an era of Terrestrial relationships that developed with modernization and nuclearization, the Anthropocene cannot be applied simply to premodern histories and texts. However, it has introduced historians to geological periodization as a mode of describing periods of changed Terrestrial relationships in time. This article suggests that, in thinking about how historicizing texts conceptualized environments, geological (“-ocene”) periodization provides a useful model and grammar by which to observe and describe how authors understood their environmental pasts, the agencies involved in reshaping Terrestrial regimes, and the role of environments in periodization. This article uses two genres of historicizing texts from Western Britain in the twelfth century to develop an approach to reading geological periods out of such texts . . . Read more→

FORUM – Nancy K. Florida's History as Prophecy: A Historiographical Legacy

This forum contains contributions by Nancy Florida, Karen Strassler, Ismail Fajrie Alatas, Daniel Andrew Birchok, Tony Day, and Els Bogaerts. Read more →

REENCHANTMENT, INEFFABILITY, AND “THE DIALECTIC OF NOMINALISM”

Elías J. Palti

Review of Martin Jay, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph

Martin Jay's newest book, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph, aims to reveal the presence of a third current of thought in modern thinking. This current, which he calls “magical nominalism,” does not fit the traditional dichotomies (voluntarism–determinism, subjectivism–realism, and so on) around which the field's prevailing narratives are organized. . . . Read more →

TWO ACCOUNTS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE: HISTORIOGRAPHIC REASONING AND NARRATIVE ACCORDING TO AVIEZER TUCKER AND CHIEL VAN DEN AKKER

Eugen Zeleňák

Review of Aviezer Tucker, Historiographic Reasoning and Chiel van den Akker, Knowledge and Narrative

This review essay examines a recurring distinction in the philosophy of history between the phase of establishing historical facts or knowledge claims and the phase of interpreting them. Focusing on two recent books by Aviezer Tucker and Chiel van den Akker, it analyzes how each author conceptualizes historical knowledge by emphasizing one of these phases. Tucker locates the core of historical practice in evidential reasoning and the production of knowledge claims about past events, which he regards as the basis for consensus among historians. In contrast, van den Akker concentrates on the construction and understanding of narrative theses and argues that historical narratives are not direct descriptions of evidence but unique interpretations. This review essay argues that, although the distinction between research and interpretation can be somewhat useful, an attempt to synthesize Tucker's and van den Akker's accounts into a single and more comprehensive theory of historical knowledge would be problematic . . . Read more →

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