Volume 56
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Franz L. Fillafer, “A World Connecting? From the Unity of History to Global History," History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 3-37.
Global history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill-reflected. My paper seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the “world” has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific practice of world-making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the “world-historical process," a cognitive framework that co-emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article traces how this process-template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. I discuss the Enlightenment version of the interconnected planetary past and analyze its conceptual refurbishment by nineteenth-century historicism. I go on to flesh out what conceptual legacy this historicist mode of inquiry bequeathed to current global history: I show that it remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to “connectivity."
Ritwik Ranjan, “Postcoloniality and the Two Sites of Historicity," History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 38-53.
This essay examines the two sites of historicity, namely history-writing and historical agency, and their interrelationship. I borrow the idea of “sites of historicity” from historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). For the purpose of analyzing how the relationship between the two sites changes with time and context, using Trouillot’s theoretical lens, I examine the philosophies of history of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. By citing instances from these two philosophers, I claim that with the rise of nineteenth-century colonialism, the two sites of historicity became discursively related in a specific way, whereby historical agency came to be predicated on history-writing. Hence, in contrast to Kant’s work, in Hegel’s philosophy of history the relationship between the two sites of historicity acquired a decidedly colonialist form. As a result of this predication of historical agency on history-writing, the alleged lack of historiography of certain cultures began to be considered as a token of their lack of political ability. The essay ends with the suggestion that the postcolonial thinkers and commentators who deal with historiography should challenge the foregoing predication, as it continues to inform contemporary thought concerning historiography.
FORUM: ON AZFAR MOIN’S THE MILLENNIAL SOVEREIGN
Neilesh Bose, “India in a World: Dilemmas of Sovereignty," History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 54-60.Azfar Moin’s The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam prompts a consideration not only of the histories of Islam and early modern connected histories of Central and South Asia, but also of current debates about local and global history-writing. Moin’s work intersects with a strand of comparative world history—following Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels—but also engages strands of historical anthropology, bringing to light a range of compelling stakes for global historians, historians of South Asia, and scholars of nationalism alike. Though Moin’s work pushes the boundaries of connected histories centered on South Asia, his focus on a trans-regional millennial science avoids questions of the local within new global histories.
Hussein Fancy, “Of Sovereigns, Sacred Kings, and Polemics," History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 61-70.In its emphasis on ritual and sacred kingship, Azfar Moin’s The Millennial Sovereign bears the imprint of anthropological theory, but Moin addresses this inheritance only obliquely. This essay seeks to draw out that tradition and to place theories of sovereignty and sacred kingship in their intellectual and historical context. Ultimately, it questions the value of these theories to the study of political authority.
Anne M. Blackburn, “Buddhist Technologies of Statecraft and Millennial Moments," History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 71-79.There are striking family resemblances between models and modes of kingship in the Safavid and Mughal worlds discussed by Azfar Moin and those that characterized Buddhist kingship in the premodern Indian Ocean arena, which encompassed polities including Poḷonnāruva, Dambadeṇiya, Koṭṭē, Bagan, Sukhothai, and Chiang Mai. In courtly contexts, Buddhists—operating at the intersection of intellectual traditions in Pali and Sanskrit languages—depended upon protective technologies including astrology and interpreted threats and prospects according to millennial science. Working comparatively, across the premodern Indian Ocean and Indo-Persian worlds, can help historians of Buddhism and Islam to understand more clearly the intellectual histories and repertoires of royal practice according to which kings and strongmen within each sphere sought to gain and retain the throne.
David Gilmartin, “Imperial Sovereignty in Mughal and British Forms," History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 80-88.Azfar Moin’s recent work on millennial sovereignty in Mughal India prompts a consideration of the evolution of sovereignty in modern South Asia more broadly. Although the sovereign principles of the Mughals differed from those of the British Indian empire, which ultimately succeeded it, these empires shared important similarities in their linking of sovereign authority to visions of a cosmos in immanent interaction with human affairs. This article explores these similarities and differences and speculatively considers their implications for both similarities and differences in Mughal and British principles of statecraft. These similarities and differences provide an important backdrop for thinking about the meanings attached to popular sovereignty in modern India as well.
A. Azfar Moin, “Millennial Sovereignty, Total Religion, and Total Politics," History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 89-97.Discussions of kingship and sovereignty in early modern India have struggled to fully comprehend and assess the work and life of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the celebrated and most famous ruler of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal emperor’s incomparable energy and imagination had lit up, like never before in the history of Islam, the vast networks and institutions of knowledge and practice that could be deployed in the service of sacred kingship. Rather than demonstrate a local history of Indic kingship, Akbar’s intersections with networks and institutions show a history that stretched back centuries and linked South Asia to post-Mongol Iran and Central Asia, and were the crucibles in which a “millennial science” was cultivated. The implications for studying “millennial science” extend beyond the early modern world and into a consideration of sovereignty in modern South Asia.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Dominick LaCapra on L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste pour les sciences sociales by Ivan Jablonka, History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 98-113.
David D. Roberts on The “Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences by Simon Susen, History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 114-126.
Joshua A. Fogel on Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China, and Beyond by Vera Schwarcz, History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 127-137.
Adam Dodd on The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 138-145.
Ines G. Županov on Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain by Katrina B. Olds, History and Theory 56, no. 1 (2017), 146-159.
ARTICLES
William Gallois, "History Goes Walkabout," History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 165-194.
Could the methods of history—and not just its objects of study—be decolonized? This essay explores analogous areas of cultural production, such as painting, to determine how historians might begin to produce work that lies outside the Western, Euro-Christian imaginary. It focuses on the case of Australia and the means by which Aboriginal artists have reanimated and recalibrated traditional forms of knowledge, offering new bases for thinking about the history and temporalities of Australia. The work of the painter Tim Johnson is then presented as an example for history in his demonstration of the ways in which indigenous methods and ways of seeing the world can be deployed by Others. The ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges that accompany such work are detailed, alongside a historiographical account of the way in which these discussions mesh with seminal debates in postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and settler colonialism as they relate to historical theory. Drawing on recent work in History and Theory, the article asks what might be the consequences for history were it not to develop a meaningful “global turn,” arguing that a critical moment has been reached in which modes of understanding the world that come from outside the West need to be incorporated into historians’ repertoires for thinking and making.
Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze, "The Allure of Dark Times: Max Weber, Politics, and the Crisis of Historicism," History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 195-213.
This article argues that realist invocations of Weber rely on an unrealistic reading of Weber’s realism. In order to escape the allure of Weber’s dramatic posture of crisis, we place his seminal lecture on “Politics as a Vocation” (1919) in its historical and philosophical context of a revolutionary conjuncture of dramatic proportions, compounded by a broader crisis of historicism. Weber’s rhetoric, we argue, carries with it not only the emotion of crisis but is also the expression of a deeper intellectual impasse. The fatalistic despair of his position had already been detected by some of his closest contemporaries for whom Weber did not appear as a door-opener to a historically situated theory of political action but as a telling and intriguing impasse. Although the disastrous history of interwar Europe seems to confirm Weber’s bleakest predictions, it would be perverse to elevate contingent failure to the level of retrospective vindication.
Dimitri Ginev, "Bernard Groethuysen’s Way of Coping with the ‘Problem of Historicism,’" History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 214-238.
This article argues that Groethuysen’s creation of a new historiographical genre—the anonymous history of the formation of worldviews—was a response to the “problem of historicism” conceived of as a task of working out a concept of historicity beyond the relativism–objectivism dilemma. In scrutinizing Groethuysen’s implementation of phenomenology to study how basic historical phenomena have been experienced, the article draws a parallel with Heidegger’s response to historical relativism. In the main argument, Groethuysen’s combination of a new approach to the history of ideas and a historicized philosophical anthropology reveals the possibility of avoiding the depressing dilemma between metahistorical objectivism and historicist relativism by means of a double hermeneutics. In this regard, special attention is paid to Groethuysen’s phenomenological conception of narrative time.
REVIEW ARTICLES
Suman Seth, "The Politics of Despair and the Calling of History," History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 239-255.
What happens to history as a set of practices and intellectual protocols when the assumed subject of our historical narratives is not a product of the European Enlightenment? Such has been the question motivating much of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work for almost thirty years. This essay offers a largely chronological account of Chakrabarty’s major works. It begins with his first book, published in 1989, which provided a culturalist account of working-class history in Bengal. It then tracks his movement in the early 1990s toward a position positing radical disjuncture and even incommensurability between the worlds of Indian subalterns and Western moderns, and his subsequent attempts to soften and blur precisely this kind of disjuncture. Meditating on the problems posed by the experiences of subjects who did not live within the time of history led him to answer in the affirmative the question of whether there are experiences of the past that history could not capture. Soon thereafter, however, he drew back from the most extensive articulation of this claim, suggesting that the experiences of the non-Enlightenment subject could function as a positive resource and not merely as the source of a profound and destabilizing critique. I argue here that this solution to the problem of incommensurability is not entirely satisfactory, for it relies implicitly on precisely the kinds of argumentative asymmetries of which his earlier analysis taught us to be wary. Chakrabarty himself, meanwhile, has continued to step further away from the radicalism of the early 1990s; his most recent book may be read as a defense of rationalist history in the face of contemporary threats posed by the rise of a politics of identity in India.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Berel Lang on Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner, History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 256-264.
Ewa Domańska on The Historical Animal, edited by Susan Nance, History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 265-285.
Allan Megill and Jaeyoon Park on Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber, History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 286-304.
David Carr on Historical Teleologies in the Modern World, edited by Henning Trüper, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 305-315.
Jeffrey Andrew Barash on On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History by Manuel Cruz, History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017), 316-328.
ARTICLES
Serge Grigoriev, "Hypotheses, Generalizations, and Convergence: Some Peircean Themes in the Study of History,” History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 339-361.
This essay examines the relationship among some key elements of Charles Sanders Peirce’s general theory of scientific inquiry (such as final causality, real possibility, methodological convergence, abductive reasoning, hypothesis formation, and diagrammatic idealization) and some prominent issues discussed in the current philosophy of history, especially those pertaining to the role of generalizations in historical explanation. The claim is that, appropriately construed, Peirce’s recommendations with respect to rational inquiry in general can provide a reasonable basis for formulating a productive critical method for a responsible philosophy of history. The essay further seeks to reduce the tension between Peirce’s interest in epistemic convergence and the arguments that champion the value of historical distance and perspectival pluralism. On the account offered, the kind of methodological convergence envisioned by Peirce need not conflict necessarily with a responsibly construed historical pluralism. On the other hand, the critical perspective of an epistemically disciplined philosophical inquiry may prove indispensable in weeding out wishful but unrealistic ideological perspectives from the writing of history. Hence, the resulting proposal envisions the critique of historical imagination as one potentially viable modality for the pragmatist philosophy of history.
FORUM: CARL SCHMITT IN HISTORY AND THEORY
Federico Finchelstein, "Carl Schmitt between History and Myth,” History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 362-369.
Carl Schmitt’s work defines the history and theory of political myth. But analyzing it represents a challenge to historians and theorists alike. For many historians, Schmitt should be analyzed in his own context, whereas theorists study his writings without enough consideration of the specific context in which he conceived his texts. In this essay, I argue that Schmitt not only contributed to the fascist glorification of the mythical and its novel enactment as the driving force of fascism, but he also represents one of the most intriguing and influential interpreters of the political theory of myth, challenging in turn theories of democracy and the role of reason and secularism in historiography.
Enzo Traverso, "Confronting Defeat: Carl Schmitt between the Victors and the Vanquished,” History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 370-378.
Quoting a text on Tocqueville written by Carl Schmitt in 1946, Reinhart Koselleck hypothesized about the epistemological advantage of being vanquished in writing history. This essay analyzes Schmitt’s intellectual and political positions in reaction to three successive defeats: the collapse of the German Empire in 1918; the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933; and the overthrow of the Third Reich in 1945. Schmitt was a German nationalist and, at least until Hitler’s rise to power, an anti-Nazi conservative, but he easily adapted to both the Weimar Republic in 1919 and National Socialism in 1933, two political turns that coincided with significant improvements in his academic career. He felt vanquished only in 1945, after his double imprisonment, the Nuremberg trial, and finally his retirement to Plettenberg. 1945 was a watershed that he symbolized through two metaphorical figures: the reactionary thinker of Spanish Absolutism Juan Donoso Cortés and Melville’s literary character Benito Cereno. Thus, the case of Carl Schmitt does not confirm Koselleck’s hypothesis, insofar as the most productive and creative part of his intellectual life does not fit into an awareness of being vanquished. Koselleck’s statement deals with the gaze of the ruled, whereas Schmitt belonged to a different tradition of political thinkers interested in building domination and smashing revolution (Hobbes, Maistre, Donoso Cortés). He was a thinker of action, not of mourning. Defeat did not inspire, but rather paralyzed his thought.
María Pía Lara, "Carl Schmitt’s Contribution to a Theory of Political Myth,” History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 379-388.
My goal in this essay is to show that myths have played a larger role than we might think in politics and in political theory and that myths are essential to politics. For this purpose I will use Schmitt’s theory of myth, since he elaborated his theory with strong interpretations of two different myths: Hobbes’s Leviathan and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I will compare Schmitt’s interpretations of Hamlet with my own, as doing so will provide a critical view of Schmitt’s conclusions, and it will enable me to develop my own conception of myth and its relations to political theory and history.
Benjamin Claude Brower, "Partisans and Populations: The Place of Civilians in War, Algeria (1954–62),” History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 389-397.
Carl Schmitt’s influential text The Theory of the Partisan (1963) serves in this article to read the history of civilians in modern warfare, examining the case of Algeria (1954–62). Schmitt’s argument that the partisan leads to a dangerous conceptual blurring in war, confusing soldier and civilian, friend and enemy, reveals important questions about the war, questions that are otherwise invisible in conventional readings of the archives. Notably it places in relief the figure of the “population,” a way that the French military conceptualized Algerian civilians and their place on the battlefield. The article argues that the population, as constituted in military theory, needs to be understood as the partisan’s partner in contributing to the normlessness of violence. This offers both a new reading of the war in Algeria and the violence suffered by civilians, as well as a correction to Schmitt’s politically one-sided explanation of the problem of normlessness and modern warfare. Whereas Schmitt’s revolutionary partisan is a figure of the left, the notion of the population originated among counter-revolutionary French officers who rethought war in an effort to stop decolonization and reshape their own society along military lines. For them Algerian civilians served as a primary weapon against the National Liberation Front (FLN) by breaking up the nationalists’ claim to lead a single, undivided, and sovereign Algerian people. In effect, the notion of the population made Algerian civilians appear as potential enemies to the FLN, blurring the nationalists’ own understanding of the political configuration of the war, directly exposing civilians to its violence.
Matthew Specter, "PGrossraum and Geopolitics: Resituating Schmitt in an Atlantic Context,” History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 398-406.
Contemporary theorists of international relations and historians of empire have found utility in the spatial theory of “Grossraum, “ or “great space,” that Carl Schmitt developed in the 1930s and 40s. This article asks whether Schmitt’s concept of Grossraum can be fully disentangled from its German history—from the Nazi pursuit of Lebensraum in which it eventually culminated, but with which it is not identical either. I argue that Schmitt’s Grossraum theory is neither merely a symptomatic reflection of the Third Reich’s objectives, nor a free-floating theory with strong potential for critiquing imperialism, but is best approached as an important moment in the transatlantic conversation among empires that unfolded between 1890 and 1945 about the sources, methods, and prerogatives of global power. It compares Schmitt with other figures in German geopolitics such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer in order to establish a genealogy of the distinction between land and sea powers, arguing that Schmitt’s writings on Grossraum modernize and transmit to the twentieth century the most influential theories of political geography and geopolitics developed in the Atlantic world between 1890 and 1930.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Hans Ruin on The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas Laqueur, History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 407-417.
Richard J. Bernstein on Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory by Martin Jay, History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 407-417.
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft on Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 407-417.
Richard Eldridge on Rage and Denials: Collectivist Philosophy, Politics, and Art Historiography, 1890–1947 by Branko Mitrović, History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 442-451.
Dale A. Wilkerson on Time and Freedom by Christophe Bouton, History and Theory 56, no. 3 (2017), 452-465.
Theorizing Histories of Violence
Philip Dwyer and Joy Damousi, “Theorizing Histories of Violence," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 3-6.
Philip Dwyer, “Violence and its Histories: Meanings, Methods, Problems," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 7-22.
Violence has evolved over the past few decades into one of the leading interpretive concepts in history. And yet there few critiques of it to speak of, and no clear-cut methodology on how to do the history of violence. This article takes a more critical view of violence as a field of historical research by questioning some of the approaches and methods adopted until now. It examines some meanings of violence and the difficulties involved in defining it, discusses some of the trends that have emerged from the history of violence, and offers some suggestions about how to approach the topic from a different perspective. It argues for a cultural, constructed interpretation of violence that not only involves understanding behaviors, but also narratives and discourses of violence that help both define and shape people’s attitudes.
Stuart Carroll, “Thinking with Violence," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 23-43.
This article addresses the assumptions that have underpinned historical writing about violence. It identifies a growing disconnect between mainstream historical practice and a new form of “comfort history” written for a popular audience largely by nonhistorians. It explores the reasons for this disconnect by looking at history’s engagement with four other disciplines: psychology, historical sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology. It concludes by showing what the possibilities are for a more open dialogue between historians and social scientists and scientists.
Morten Oxenbøll, “Epistemologies of Violence: Medieval Japanese War Tales," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 44-59.
Although violence is one of the most primitive means of communication, appropriate aggression is nevertheless something that needs to be learned. But even though scholars of various disciplines agree that violence is deeply embedded in cultural structures, there has been a remarkable lack in scholarship on how the conscious differentiation between appropriate and inappropriate violence is learned through mediated representations of violence. By applying media theories and works on social learning to premodern Japanese material, I argue that mediated violence can create a “safe space” where different forms of violence can be experienced without the physical consequences of real violence. Mediated violence thus serves crucial functions as learning spaces where societal rules and norms can be temporarily suspended, reconfigured, and often reinforced through active experimentation without the danger of bodily harm. Brutal and graphic depictions of violence thus go beyond mere entertainment. By aestheticizing and staging good and bad violence, mediated violence invites its audiences to reflect on and learn from violent episodes. Violent representations reduce the complexities of real-world conflicts, thereby facilitating a process where audiences can make sense of—and create order out of—chaos. Through the use of epistemological theories, I argue that such simplifications are necessary for human cognitive systems to be able to relate to and learn from violence, and that this learning process takes place within a social and collaborative context.
Penny Roberts, “French Historians and Collective Violence," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 60-75.
French historians and French history have dominated the study of early modern violence. This essay addresses why this is so and what has characterized French historians’ approaches to collective violence in particular, whether in the form of popular revolt, confessional division, or revolutionary violence. It posits that historians are essentially uncomfortable in defending and explaining popular violence in the past, that they ought to address this issue more directly and not to establish too much cultural distance from their subjects in doing so. It concludes with some reflections on approaches to violence in the past and the present, how historians and others talk about and engage with violence, and how its treatment today should inform how historians address the challenges of writing the history of violence in the future.
Dan Edelstein, “Red Leviathan: Authority and Violence in Revolutionary Political Culture," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 76-96.
As Mao euphemistically remarked, revolutions are not dinner parties. Violence is to be expected when political regimes are overturned. But the violence that accompanied modern revolutions is remarkable for the fact that it targeted fellow revolutionaries almost as often as declared opponents. Why is this? In this essay, I suggest that the reason has to do with a specific feature of revolutions that abandon constitutional forms of political legitimacy. These revolutions, following the precedent of the French “revolutionary government” (1793–94) and Marx’s model of a “revolution in permanence,” tend to base the authority of their governments on the fulfillment of revolutionary expectations. This creates a political culture in which authority derives from the power to define what these expectations are, and what “revolution” means (much like Hobbes’s sovereign had the power to set the meaning of words). But revolutionary culture does not leave room for Rawlsian pluralism. “There can be no solution to the social problem but mine,” proclaims the revolutionary ideologue in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, expressing the law of the Red Leviathan. Such a system does not allow for loyal opposition. Accordingly, the specter of counterrevolution always hovers above disagreements between fellow revolutionaries. The purge thus becomes the necessary method for settling ideological differences.
Enzo Traverso, “Totalitarianism between History and Theory," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 97-118.
Born in Italy at the beginning of the 1920s, the concept of totalitarianism experienced an uninterrupted succession of metamorphoses and changes throughout the twentieth century, until its last rebirth after September 11, 2001, when it was remobilized in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. It is an astonishingly plastic, resilient, and inevitably ambiguous concept, insofar as it merges both politics and scholarship, and belongs, with a different meaning, to almost all currents of thought. Born in the political struggle, it shifted successfully to political theory in which, beyond their discrepancies, most of its interpreters defined it as a new form of power that exceeds the classical categories of political theory running from Aristotle to Max Weber—despotism, tyranny, dictatorship—and grounded in a combination of ideology and terror. The migration of this concept to the field of historical studies, however, was much more controversial. Useful in defining the nature and forms of political regimes, and eventually to establish their typology, “totalitarianism” becomes a problematic, limited, not to say useless concept for analyzing their origins, developments, and fall. On the one hand, it favors a selective historical comparison between different political regimes; on the other hand, it simply juxtaposes them, stressing some analogies but neglecting other fundamental dimensions of historical investigation (origins, duration, ideologies, and social basis). This article is a plea for critical use of this category, which implies both a rejection of its recurrent ideological uses and its integration with the achievements of social and cultural history.
Joy Damousi, “Mothers in War: ‘Responsible Mothering,' Children, and the Prevention of Violence in Twentieth-Century War," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 119-134.
The key concern of this article is to explore how the history of twentieth-century violence forces us to reflect on how we interpret the acts of those who find themselves attempting to prevent violence, as mothers have done in relation to their children, in the context of violence and atrocity. A focus on mothers and maternity redirects our analysis to gendered aspects of a history of violence and war that do not concentrate solely on bodily violent acts or physical inflictions upon women—crucial as these remain to histories of violence—but shifts the attention to examining women and violence within another aspect: that of women as active agents negotiating violent contexts. It builds on the considerable scholarship that argues that mothers in war have invariably been represented only as victims or spectators in war, and yet they have also demonstrated agency both individually and collectively. This is significant because to ignore this dimension of scholarly endeavor misses an opportunity to write women into histories of violence in ways that complicate their role in war and make them central to the story. To marginalize mothers in the broader canvas of war and violence, as scholarship often does, is also to narrow our focus of understandings of agency and the negotiation of violence itself. I explore these wider questions by focusing on the cataclysmic events of war, in the first instance in the context of a total war in the early twentieth century, the First World War, and in the second—the Greek Civil War—a civil war that took place in mid-century. Although these are vastly different conflicts, they both illuminate the decisions of mothers to attempt to prevent further violence in war, especially in relation to their children, and to highlight the contested notion of “responsible motherhood” in war.
Joanna Bourke, “Theorizing Ballistics: Ethics, Emotions, and Weapons Scientists," History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (2017), 135-151.
What is violence? This article explores conceptions of violence from the perspective of scientists engaged in weapons research. Ballistics scientists are routinely excluded from the “violent” label on grounds of class, status, education, and emotional comportment. The article analyzes the science of ballistics through the lenses of ethics and emotions. How do scientists justify experiments in ballistics, or the science of designing weapons and other technologies aimed at destroying environments and inflicting wounds (often fatal) and other forms of injury on people and nonhuman animals? In stark contrast to those who analyze weapons development as an objective science and who impart violent agency to autonomous technologies, I situate wound ballistics as a branch of applied moral philosophy. Its practice always involves an “ought.” Although the central job of ballistics scientists is the “effective production of wounds,” this is not regarded as violent, except by their victims, of course. In part, this lacuna is due to an ideological relationship forged between “violence” and particular emotional states. It is also part of a political project defining “the human.”
Cover image: Aerial view of the Gulf of Mexico, by NASA (26 December 2015)
