Volume 54
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Harry Jansen, “Time, Narrative, and Fiction: The Uneasy Relationship between Ricoeur and a Heterogeneous Temporality," History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 1-24.
In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur confirms the relationship between time experience and how it is epitomized in a narrative by investigating historiography and fiction. Regarding fiction, he explores temporality in three “novels of time” [Zeitromane]: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Ricoeur perceives the temporalities as homogeneous; however, in my view, the novels contain at least three different temporalities. Mann seeks a new temporality by ironizing a romantic time of rise and fall and Woolf configures a time we can call the simultaneity of the dissimultaneous. In his analysis of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Ricoeur explicitly dismisses a Bergsonian approach to temporality. In my opinion, Bergson defends a heterogeneous time that is apparent in Proust’s novel.
Matthew Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After," History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 25-44.
Emerging from the work of Foucault and Bourdieu in particular, a powerful theoretical critique of prevailing notions of censorship and its opposite, free speech, emerged in the waning decades of the last century. The principal theoretical contribution, I will argue, of this “New Censorship Theory” has been not to overthrow the dominant liberal conception of censorship, but rather to bracket this conception as a separate and ultimately subordinate species of censorship. In this article I reexamine the development of New Censorship Theory, especially its antecedents in the Marxist critique of bourgeois civil society. In place of an exclusive focus upon state actions, newer conceptions of censorship have enshrined self-censorship as the paradigm and have seen traditional forms of censorship as secondary to impersonal, structural forms like the market. I argue that historians’ qualms about New Censorship Theory stem from concerns over this erasure of the specificity of state repressive force. Rather than simply accepting the division of censorship into a dichotomy of repressive/authoritative and productive/structural, this article argues that no strict distinction ought to be drawn. Instead, investigations of censorship in the traditional sense must incorporate the insights of newer theories to understand state censors as actors internal to communication networks, and not as external, accidental features. By investigating the intellectual trajectory of New Censorship Theory, I posit a way forward for historians to incorporate its insights while addressing their concerns.
James Cracraft, “History as Philosophy," History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 45-68.
Historians have taken a beating in recent times from an array of critics troubled by our persistent unwillingness to properly theorize our work. This essay contends that their criticisms have generally failed to make headway among mainstream historians owing to a little noticed cognitive byproduct of our work that I call history as philosophy. In so doing I offer a novel defense of professional history as it has been understood and practiced in the Anglophone world over the last half-century or so while suggesting, in conclusion, that historians could not do other than they do without serious psychic and societal loss.
Guido Vanheeswijck, “Does History Matter? Charles Taylor on the Transcendental Validity of Social Imaginaries," History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 69-85.
Since its appearance in 2007, Charles Taylor’s monumental book A Secular Age has received much attention. One of the central issues in the discussions around Taylor’s book is the role of history in philosophical argumentation, in particular with regard to normative positions on ultimate affairs. Many critics observe a methodological flaw in using history in philosophical argumentation in that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor’s historical approach, on the one hand, and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence, on the other. Since his “faith-based history” is unwittingly apologetic, it is not only “hard to judge in strictly historical terms,” but it also proves that “when it comes to the most ultimate affairs history may not matter at all.” This paper challenges this verdict by exposing the misunderstanding underlying this interpretation of the role of history in Taylor’s narrative. In order to disambiguate the relation between history and philosophy in Taylor’s approach, I will raise three questions. First, what is the precise relation between history and ontology, taking into account the ontological validity of what Taylor calls social imaginaries? Second, why does “fullness” get a universal status in his historical narrative? Third, is Taylor’s position tenable that the contemporary experience of living within “an immanent frame” allows for an openness to transcendence? In order to answer these questions, I will first compare Peter Gordon’s interpretation of the status of social imaginaries with Taylor’s position and, on the basis of that comparison, distinguish two definitions of ontology (sections I and II). Subsequently, I try to make it clear that precisely Taylor’s emphasis on the historical character of social imaginaries and on their “relaxed” ontological anchorage allows for his claim that “fullness” might have a trans-historical character (section III). Finally, I would like to show that Taylor’s defense of the possibility of an “openness to transcendence”—as a specific mode of fullness—is not couched in “onto-theological” terms, as suggested by his critics, but that it is the very outcome of taking into account the current historical situation (section IV).
REVIEW ESSAYS
Margrit Pernau on Fear across the Disciplines by Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier and Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective by Michael Laffan and Max Weiss, History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 86-95.
Harry Harootunian on The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange by Kojin Karatani and Michael Bourdaghs, History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 96-105.
Jörn Rüsen on Zukunft der Geschichte: Geschichtsphilosophie und Zukunftsethik. (Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Sonderband 31) by Johannes Rohbeck, History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 106-115.
Stephen Leach on History as Thought and Action: the Philosophies of Croce, Gentile, de Ruggiero and Collingwood by Rik Peters, History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 116-125.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam on Global Intellectual History by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 126-137.
Jürgen Osterhammel on Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire by Kris Manjapra, History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015), 138-147.
ARTICLES
FORUM: AFTER NARRATIVISM
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, "Introduction: Assessing Narrativism," History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 153-161.In this introductory essay we briefly discuss three issues. First, we take stock of and pay tribute to the main achievements of narrativism, on the one hand. On the other hand, we also note its weariness as a scholarly project and argue that the philosophy of history is gradually moving toward a broadly understood postnarrativist stage and a period of renewed theoretical innovation. Next, as a part of this shift, we briefly introduce the forum contributions and discuss how they relate to narrativism. Finally, in place of a conclusion we offer some thoughts on where the philosophy of history might be heading after narrativism has ceased to be the integrative framework of diverging theoretical enterprises.
Anton Froeyman, "Never the Twain Shall Meet? How Narrativism and Experience Can Be Reconciled by Dialogical Ethics," History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 162-177.In this article, I question the unspoken assumption in historical theory that there is a trade-off between language or narrative, on the one hand, and experience or presence, on the other. Both critics and proponents of historical experience seem to presuppose that this is indeed the case. I argue that this is not necessarily true, and I analyze how the opposition between language and experience in historical theory can be overcome. More specifically, I identify the necessary conditions for a philosophy of language that can be the basis for this. Second, I will also suggest and present one specific instance of such a solution. I argue that the existential philosophies of language of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas can be exactly the kind of theory we need. For Buber and Levinas, language is not a means for accessing reality, but rather a medium of encounters between human beings. I present Levinas’s and Buber’s arguments, discuss how their views could be applied to the writing of history, and assess what the resulting picture of the writing of history could look like.
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, "The Expression of Historical Experience," History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 178-194.The theory and philosophy of history (just like philosophy in general) has established a dogmatic dilemma regarding the issue of language and experience: either you have an immediate experience separated from language, or you have language without any experiential basis. In other words, either you have an immediate experience that is and must remain mute and ineffable, or you have language and linguistic conceptualization that precedes experience, provides the condition of possibility of it, and thus, in a certain sense, produces it. Either you join forces with the few and opt for such mute experiences, or you go with the flow of narrative philosophy of history and the impossibility of immediacy. Either way, you end up postulating a mutual hostility between the nonlinguistic and language, and, more important, you remain unable to account for new insights and change. Contrary to this and in relation to history, I am going to talk about something nonlinguistic—historical experience—and about how such historical experience could productively interact with language in giving birth to novel historical representations. I am going to suggest that, under a theory of expression, a more friendly relationship can be established between experience and language: a relationship in which they are not hostile to but rather desperately need each other. To explain the occurrence of new insights and historiographical change, I will talk about a process of expression as sense-formation and meaning-constitution in history, and condense the theory into a struck-through “of,” as the expression of historical experience.
Martin Nosál, "The Gadamerian Approach to the Relation between Experience and Language," History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 195-208.Narrativism as a theory of historical depiction intuitively opens the question: what is left of reality when it is poured through the filter of language structures? And, extended a little bit further, questions arise: What is responsible for the final shape of a historical depiction? Is it experience or language? What is affecting what? Narrativism typically accuses language units of transforming experience in a specific way. However, even in asking these questions, the problem of the separation of experience from language and language from experience remains. In this article, I address this issue using Gadamer’s hermeneutical frame. Wherever philosophical tradition insists on the separation of certain positions, Gadamer tries to show their ontological connections. For Gadamer, understanding is a basic ontological structure, within which both sides of a dialogue affect and constitute each other. In Gadamerian hermeneutical ontology, there is no “starting point” or first responsible position. In the understanding, dialogue has the permanently moving character of a play, where separate positions are erased. This Gadamerian view can also be applied to the question of language and experience and their mutual connection in depicting any experience via language. In Gadamer’s example of the work of art, the original subject matter (Urbild) is articulated through its depiction. The subject matter dictates possible ways of depicting, which in turn dictate the final shape of depiction. In this article, I discuss Gadamer’s term “articulation of the world,” by which he means a function of language. Articulation is simply a transformation of shapeless matter into a shape, and in our case it is a transformation of an experience into a language depiction. I show that the Gadamerian approach to language and experience can offer an interesting perspective on the issues discussed in reaction to narrativist philosophy of history.
Eugen Zeleňák, "Two Versions of a Constructivist View of Historical Work," History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 209-225.Narrativist philosophy of history popularized a constructivist view arguing that historical works are not simple depictions of the past but rather are complicated constructions. According to narrativists, historians engage in a creative activity of proposing points of view, interpretations, or theses on the past that do not straightforwardly reflect past events. Although this is a broad constructivist view behind the theorizing of a number of authors, it is possible to distinguish within this line of thinking at least two general proposals about how to understand historical works. The first, defended for instance by Frank Ankersmit, maintains that historical works are representations of the past. Nevertheless, these representations are not descriptions of past events—they represent in a special way that could be characterized via a certain complexity, indirectness, holism, and a retrospective approach. The second proposal, presented in the work of Paul Roth and Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, discards the epistemic framework of representation and understands historical works as the outcome of specific practices. In this article, I focus on these two constructivist versions, which could be called representationalism and non-representationalism. I analyze their crucial features, discuss their differences, and dispute the accusation that the latter view formulates an extreme theory of history. I argue that non-representationalism does not erase the notion of the past from its account of history; it merely attributes to the past a function different from the one it has within the representationalist paradigm.
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, "Why We Need to Move from Truth-functionality to Performativity in Historiography," History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 226-243.The central challenge of the philosophy of history and historiography is to find a principled way to rank different interpretations of the past without assuming their truth in terms of correspondence. The narrativist insight of the narrative philosophy of historiography was to correctly question historical realism. It analyzed texts and showed that they cannot reflect the past as it is. However, the rejection of the truth-functional evaluation threatens to lead to an “anything goes” approach in terms of cognitive evaluation of historiography. In any case, no adequate theory of evaluation has so far been developed, although clearly not all historiographical interpretations are acceptable. Postnarrativist philosophy of historiography suggests that any history book includes a content-synthesizing unit, but that it is problematic to think that it is “narrative” that structures texts. It is better to think of historiography texts as presenting reasoning for views and theses about the past. Arguments for these theses should be considered not as being true but as more or less appropriate, fitting, or warranted. The historian aims to produce as highly rationally warranted and compelling a thesis of the past as possible; its rational appropriateness depends on three dimensions of cognitive evaluation: the epistemic, the rhetorical, and the discursive.
Jaume Aurell, " Making History by Contextualizing Oneself: Autobiography as Historiographical Intervention," History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 244-268.
This essay argues that, in their reflection of theoretical positions, autobiographies by historians may become valid historical writings (that is, both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations) and, as a consequence and simultaneously, privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, following the model established by Carolyn Steedman, historians such as Geoff Eley, Natalie Z. Davis, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Dominick LaCapra, Gerda Lerner, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sheila Fitzpatrick, and John Elliott created a new form of academic life-writing that has challenged established literary and historiographical conventions and resisted generic classification. This article aims to examine this new historical-autobiographical genre—including the subgenre of the “autobiographical paper”—and highlights its ability to function as both history (as a retrospective account of the author’s own past) and theory (as a speculative approach to historiographical questions). I propose to call these writings interventional in the sense that these historians use their autobiographies, with a more or less deliberate authorial intention, to participate, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of their own intellectual and academic trajectory as the source of historiography. Traditional historians’ autobiographies, including ego-historical essays, have provided us with substantial information about the history of historiography; these new performative autobiographies help us to better understand historiography and the development of the historical discipline. Interventional historians seek not only to understand their lives but also to engage in a more complex theoretical project.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Isaac Ariail Reed on Bourdieu and Historical Analysis by Philip S. Gorski, History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 269-276.
Peter Fenves on Nietzsche's Philosophy of History by Anthony K. Jensen, History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 277-286.
David D. Roberts on Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti: Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero, ottava appendice: Storia e politica by Giuseppe Galasso, History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 287-305.
ARTICLES
Branko Mitrović, "Historical Understanding and Historical Interpretation as Contextualization,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 311-332.
This article discusses the theoretical problems pertaining to the relationship between historical contextualization and historical understanding and interpretation. On the one hand, there is the view that documents need to be understood in relation to their historical context; on the other, it is not clear how a historian can get out of his or her own historical context in order to be able to engage with the conceptual frameworks, beliefs, or ways of reasoning that are radically different from his or her own. The paper proposes a resolution to this dilemma; its upshot is that historical understanding is constituted by contextualization.
Berber Bevernage, "The Past Is Evil/Evil Is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 333-352.
One of the most remarkable phenomena in current international politics is the increasing attention paid to “historical injustice.” Opinions on this phenomenon strongly differ. For some it stands for a new and noble type of politics based on raised moral standards and helping the cause of peace and democracy. Others are more critical and claim that retrospective politics comes at the cost of present- or future-oriented politics and tends to be anti-utopian. The warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing politics directed at contemporary injustices, or strivings for a more just future, should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of a politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. We should refuse to choose between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future. Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present- and future-directed politics. I argue that retrospective politics can indeed have negative effects. Most notably it can lead to a “temporal Manichaeism” that not only posits that the past is evil, but also tends to treat evil as anachronistic or as belonging to the past. Yet I claim that ethical Manichaeism and anti-utopianism and are not inherent features of all retrospective politics but rather result from an underlying philosophy of history that treats the relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding “transtemporal” injustices and responsibilities. In order to pinpoint the problem of certain types of retrospective politics and point toward some alternatives, I start out from a criticism formulated by the German philosopher Odo Marquard and originally directed primarily at progressivist philosophies of history.
Peter Baehr, "Stalinism in Retrospect: Hannah Arendt,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 353-366.
Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Among students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her as the premier thinker on its topic. It is also that totalitarianism, as she understood it, ribbons through all of her subsequent books, from the discussion of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958) to the analysis of thinking in the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). How ready was she to adapt or to change entirely arguments she had first formulated as early as the mid-to-late 1940s? “Stalinism in Retrospect,” her contribution to Columbia University’s Seminar on Communism series, offers a rare opportunity to answer, at least partially, this question. Arendt’s foil was the publication of recent books on Stalin and the Stalin era by three Russian witnesses: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Arendt, the books meshed with her own theoretical conception of Bolshevism while changing the “whole taste” of the period: they contained new insights into the nature of totalitarian criminality and evil. “Stalinism in Retrospect” documents Arendt’s arguments and challenges to them by a number of the seminar’s participants. Of particular note is the exchange between her and Zbigniew Brzezinski, an expert on the Soviet Union, a major interpreter of totalitarianism in his own right, and soon to be President Carter’s National Security Adviser (January 1977–January 1981). Notes by the editor, Peter Baehr, offer a critical context for understanding Arendt’s argument.
FORUM: FOUCAULT AND NEOLIBERALISM
Matthew Specter, "Introduction,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 367-371.
Michael C. Behrent, "Can the Critique of Capitalism Be Antihumanist?” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 372-388.
This essay argues that to understand Foucault’s attraction to neoliberalism, we must understand the elective theoretical affinities that he perceived between this current in economic thought and one of the central elements of his own philosophical project: the critique of humanism or “anthropologism” (that is, the tendency in modern thought to sift all knowledge through human knowledge). Specifically, the essay examines moments in Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 lectures when Foucault clearly refers to the arguments of his earlier work, The Order of Things, the locus classicus of his philosophical antihumanism. In particular, Foucault claimed that economists of the Chicago School developed a theory of labor that escaped the limitations of the “anthropological” theory of labor associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. He also interpreted the notion of homo oeconomicus and Smith’s idea of the market’s “invisible hand” as critiques of the characteristically modern attempt to make transcendental claims on the basis of human nature. The essay concludes by asking if Foucault’s philosophical antihumanism provides an adequate vantage point from which to critique contemporary capitalism.
Mitchell Dean, "Foucault Must Not Be Defended,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 389-403.
This paper responds to and comments on many of the themes of the book under consideration concerning Foucault and neoliberalism. In doing so, it offers reflections on the relation between the habitus of the intellectual and the political contexts of action and engagement in the case of Foucault, and the strengths and weaknesses of his characterization of his work in terms of an “experimental” ethos. It argues that it is possible to identify his distinctive views on neoliberalism as a programmatic ideal, as a language of critique of the postwar welfare state, and as an element within actual political forces such as the French “Second Left” of the 1970s. It examines the legacy of Foucault in “governmentality studies” and argues for attentiveness to the different intellectual positions, and their potentially divergent political consequences, within this school of thought. It concludes by suggesting that the discussion currently taking place, and in part inaugurated by this book, might signal a change of his status in the humanities and social sciences today from “unsurpassable horizon” of critical thought to acknowledged classical thinker, with strengths and limitations, and a series of problems that might not be our own.
Serge Audier, "Neoliberalism through Foucault’s Eyes,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 404-418.
Michael Foucault’s 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on the birth of biopolitics are increasingly read as the most lucid introduction to neoliberal policies. This article invites us to be cautious about such claims by exploring one rather obvious point: these lectures also—and perhaps most important—reflect Foucault’s very distinctive and contemporary preoccupations. In 1978, Foucault wrote about and reflected on three topics that were, in his view, crucial: the idea of “critique” and the influence of Kant; Foucault’s project for an “analytical philosophy of politics”; and the crisis of disciplinary society, notably as it related to sexuality. This paper shows that these preoccupations had a profound impact on Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism. As a result, the interpretation of the neoliberal revolution proposed in these brilliant lectures is, if not idiosyncratic, at the very least highly partial.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Jan E. Goldstein on Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past by Michael S. Roth, History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 419-428.
Vera Schwarcz on Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination by Otto Dov Kulka and Ralph Mandel and Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony by Thomas Trezise, History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 429-440.
William Johnston on The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano, History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 441-454.
David P. Jordan on Bonaparte, 1769–1802 by Patrice Gueniffey and Steven Rendall and Napoleon, A Life by Andrew Roberts, History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 455-470.
History and Theory in a Global Frame
Ethan Kleinberg and William R. Pinch, “History and Theory in a Global Frame," History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 1-4.
Nils Riecken, “History, Time, and Temporality in a Global Frame: Abdallah Laroui’s Historical Epistemology of History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 5-26.
In this essay I discuss key elements of an original and hitherto neglected contribution by the Moroccan historian, intellectual, and theorist Abdallah Laroui to historical theory in a global frame: his historical epistemology of history and his theory of time and temporalities. I argue that Laroui develops a relational and dialectical form of translation that allows for translating between multiple forms of representing history and time. His attention to temporal logics across different bodies of historical thought enables him to translate concepts of history and time across putatively given “cultural” differences of “Western,” “Islamic,” and “Muslim” forms of historical thought. By unraveling these representations of difference as situated representations of time, he usefully historicizes the very conditions of observing historical difference. Besides outlining Laroui’s approach, which I characterize as a situated universalism, I trace how his outlook on historical theory is shaped by his particular location in a postcolonial Muslim society and in a complex relation to “the modern West.” Laroui understands his own location in postcolonial Morocco in dialectical terms as characterized by the interdependence of the local and the global, the indigenous and the exogenous, and the particular and the universal. It is his confrontation with multiple bodies of historical thought that pushes him toward a concern with problems of location, positionality, conceptual translation, and self-reflexivity leading to his engagement with epistemic frames and situated temporalities. Crucially, his epistemology of history and his theory of time and temporalities constitute a powerful critique of the temporal presuppositions of centrist views of history and time as self-contained beyond the Moroccan context. Laroui’s situated universalism, I conclude, helps to rethink the problem of historical difference beyond the limits of centrist accounts and within a global frame.
Mark Thurner, “Historical Theory through a Peruvian Looking Glass," History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 27-45.
In this article for the theme issue on “Historical Theory in a Global Frame,” I argue that “Peru” is a “historical theory in a global frame.” The theory or, as I prefer, theoretical event, named Peru was born global in an early colonial “abyss of history” and elaborated in the writings of colonial and postcolonial Peruvian historians. I suggest that the looking glass held up by Peruvian historiography is of great potential significance for historical theory at large, since it is a two-way passageway between the ancient and the modern, the Old World and the New, the East and the West. This slippery passageway enabled some Peruvian historians to move stealthily along the bloody cutting-edge of global history, at times anticipating and at others debunking well-known developments in “European” historical theory. Today, a reconnaissance of Peruvian history’s inner recesses may pay dividends for a historical theory that would return to its colonial and global origins.
Xupeng Zhang, “In and Out of the West: On the Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Historical Theory," History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 46-63.
In ancient China, dissatisfaction with the official compilation of histories gave rise, in time, to reflections on what makes a good historian, as well as on such issues as the factuality and objectivity of history-writing, the relationship between rhetoric and reality, and the value of historians’ subjectivity. From these reflections arose a unique set of historiographical concepts. With the coming of modern times, the urgent task of building a nation-state forced Chinese historians to borrow heavily from Western historical theories in their effort to construct a new history compatible with modernity. A tension thus arose between Western theory and Chinese history. The newly founded People’s Republic embraced the materialist conception of history as the authoritative guideline for historical studies, which increased the tension. The decline of the materialist conception of history in the period since China’s reform and opening up in the late 1970s and, with this development, the increasing plurality of theories, have not exactly lessened Chinese historians’ keenly felt anxiety when they confront Western theories. For Chinese historians, the current state of affairs with respect to theory is not exactly an extension of Western theories, nor is it a regression to the particularity of Chinese history completely outside the Western compass. Rather, a certain hybridity with respect to theory provides to Chinese historians a way to move both in and out of the West, as well as an opportunity for them to make their own contributions to Western history on the basis of borrowed Western theories.
Dilip M. Menon, “Writing History in Colonial Times: Polemic and the Recovery of Self in Late Nineteenth-Century South India," History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 64-83.
This essay looks at two early texts by a Hindu religious figure, Chattampi Svamikal (1853–1924), from Kerala, the southwestern region of India. Kristumatachhedanam (1890) [A Refutation of Christianity] and Pracina Malayalam (1899) [The Ancient Malayalam Region] draw upon a variety of sources across space and time: the echoes of contemporary debates across India and Empire as much as the detritus of the Enlightenment contest between rationalism and religion in Europe. Does the location of the text in “colonial India” exhaust the space-time of its imagination? The essay argues for a porous rather than a hermetic understanding; the “text” was a supplement to the actual verbal confrontation on street corners and arguments in ephemeral print. The real question is how can historians write postnational histories of thinking? How should we engage with times other than the putatively regnant homogeneous, empty time of empire or nation? I argue that there is an immanent time in texts (arising from the conventions and protocols of the form, the predilections of the thinker, and imagined affinities with ideas coming from other times and places) that exceeds the historical time of the text.
Mateus Henrique de Faria Pereira, Pedro Afonso Cristovao Does Santos, and Thiago Lima Nicodemo, “Brazilian Historical Writing in Global Perspective: On the Emergence of the Concept of ‘Historiography,’" History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 84-104.
This article assesses the meanings of the term “historiography” in Brazilian historiography from the late nineteenth century to circa 1950, suggesting that its use plays an essential role in the process of the disciplinarization and legitimation of history as a discipline. The global-scale comparison, taking into consideration occurrences of the term in German, Spanish, and French, reveals that use of the term took place simultaneously worldwide. The term “historiography” underwent a significant change globally, having become independent from the modern concept of history, shifting away from the political and social dimensions of the writing of history in the nineteenth century and unfolding into a metacritical concept. Such a process enables historians to technically distinguish at least three semantic modulations of the term: 1. history as a living experience; 2. the writing or narration of history; and 3. the critical study of historical narratives. Based on the Brazilian experience, it is possible to think of the “historiography” category as an index of the transformations of the modern concept of history itself between the 1870s and 1940s, a period of intense modification of the experience and expectations of the writing of professional historical scholarship on a global scale.
Christopher Clements, “Between Affect and History: Sovereignty and Ordinary Life at Akwesasne, 1929–1942," History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 105-124.
This essay seeks to recover the ordinary and its analytical and decolonial potential within the extraordinary conditions created by settler colonialism. To do so, it investigates moments when Mohawks at Akwesasne, a community that straddles the US–Canada border, refused to acknowledge settler authority, paying particular attention to the relationship between their refusals and the condition of ordinary life. This article also considers the historical challenge of how to preserve moments of experience and their complex meanings without enveloping them in broader narratives dominated, in this case, by questions of sovereignty. How do theories of sovereignty affect the production of history, and what constraints do they place on our ability to narrate Indigenous experiences? What if we cast away the two narratives that dominate tellings of Indigenous histories: that of a settler crisis over control and that of an age-old struggle for sovereignty? Is it possible, or useful, to differentiate between acts focused primarily on maintaining the contours of ordinary, everyday life—expressions of lateral agency less about the “long haul” than about the here-and-now—and deliberate acts of political engagement, consciously aimed at the structural inequality undergirding a particular situation? Through a deep historical treatment of several moments within Akwesasne’s early twentieth-century history, this essay proposes and attempts to execute a methodology that draws together multiple theories of affect and sovereignty.
Ranjan Ghosh, “Rabindranath and Rabindranath Tagore: Home, World, History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 53 (2015), 125-148.
This article, through a close reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on history, tries to develop his theory of history and establish the character of his historical consciousness. Tagore’s philosophy of history is distinguished from Western models of historical thinking and is resistant to aligning with nationalist and revivalistic narratives that speak only of one culture, one nation, and one community. The article works out a theoretical premise based on Tagore’s engagement with time, historical distance, the everyday, history as life-view, historical fiction, historicality in literature, and the notion of the historical-now or presentism. Substantiated by the notion of a “poet-historian,” Tagore’s historical theory works at the limits of “global history,” which is now often misappropriated through the principles of unifocality and bounded rationality. The article develops Tagore’s sense of itihasa that frees history from the univocality of world history, creates its own “worlding,” its historicality, enriching and disturbing our notions of global history.
Cover image: Aerial view of Hong Kong, by Lok Yiu Cheung (11 March 2019)
