Volume 58
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Jeff Malpas, “Topologies of History," History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 3-22.
History, it is routinely assumed, belongs primarily to time and the temporal. Yet although routine, the assumption is nevertheless mistaken. It is place or topos, which encompasses both time and space (and that is intimately tied to the notion of bound or limit), that is primary here, and so history has to be understood as determined topologically, and not merely temporally. The exploration and elaboration of this claim involves rethinking the ideas of time, space, and place as well as of language and narrative. History appears in its adventual character, but its adventuality is itself seen as a happening of place.
Henning Trüper, “The Flatness of Historicity," History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 23-49.
This article pursues an explication of the meaning of “historicity.” This explication is in part theoretical and in part historical, passing by the German conceptual history of the term, a Romantic‐era fairy tale with bearings on the matter, and structuralist theories of history, especially Claude Lévi‐Strauss's and Louis Althusser's. The “flatness” of historicity, the article argues, emerges from the absence of layers of explanatory and semantic depth that would provide a foundation for the term. The closer the concept of historicity was tied to notions of human existence and phenomenal and aesthetic experience in the hermeneutic tradition, the more such layers appeared to emerge. The structuralist argument started out from the impulse to reject this tradition. Diverse variations of this argument rally around an understanding of the reality of the historical in both set‐theoretical and semiotic terms. They dismantle a variety of manners in which historicity can be tied to notions of the phenomenal subject and of intentionality and existence/Dasein. The article asserts that the structuralist argument, in spite of a tendency to develop its own layers of seeming profundity, has a considerable degree of rigor and establishes the plausibility of the flatness of historicity. I conclude by discussing some of the positive implications of this notion, which in particular affect the manner in which the historical and the political interlock.
Maren Lytje, “The Ghost of Darwin’s Animals: Presence and the Return of the Real," History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 50-66.
This essay takes its point of departure from the emergence of the concept of presence in the field of history and theory. The essay suggests that the emergence of presence is related to the events of September 11 and signals a weariness of the postmodern condition and a longing for the real. Advocates of presence, the essay argues, have stressed how the material traces of the past move us in the present, and in doing so have played down the problematic relationship between past experience and historical representation, which was a concern of the linguistic turn. The essay argues that this interest in the trace points to a shift away from the meaning‐making of symbolic practices and toward the moment when the master signifier enables (symbolic) meaning to occur. This indicates that there is a desire for the real at play in the move toward presence. Through an analysis of Eelco Runia's concept of presence, the essay argues that this desire for the real is related to a repression of Darwin's evolutionary framework, which has been considered bad taste in the social sciences and humanities since the end of the Second World War.
Harry Jansen, “Research, Narrative, and Representation: A Postnarrative Approach," History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 67-88.
Narrativism or representationalism is founded on the idea that historical narratives and representations are 1) true and indivisible wholes, whereof 2) the truth needs to be maintained, although a narrativist or representationalist whole cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed, and wherein 3) the past is represented in a figurative sense. These fundamental aspects of narrativism have had a positive impact on historiography, but they are also the three reasons why narrativism has neglected historical research and argumentation. To remedy these problems postnarrativism has been evoked. It opts for presentation instead of representation, cutting through all the links between the past and the historiographical product. The product is not a narrative or a representation but a thesis, a proposal to see the past in a special way. The only element postnarrativism wants to retain of narrativism is colligation because it has an argumentative structure based on epistemic values. Postnarrativism leads to knowledge, built on the practice of warranted assertions instead of truth. My postnarrativism chooses a middle course between a strong narrativism and what I would like to call a “weak,” presentational postnarrativism. I agree with postnarrativists that more attention must be paid to argumentation and research. Moreover, I consider time a neglected issue in narrativism. Nevertheless, I don't want to give up the three above‐mentioned fundamental aspects of it. In my view the assumption of truth with regard to (figurative) representation needs to be maintained, but in a pragmatic, provisional form: a historical narrative or representation can be considered as true as long as it has not been replaced by a better one. Retaining truth and holism, but wanting more room for investigation and argumentation, requires that narrativism's role in historical research and history‐writing be revised. This implies the replacement of the usual research phase by a preparation phase, wherein, next to research, space must be reserved for so‐called writing activities. Preparation means the conversion of a germinal narrative or representation into an accomplished whole. Holism occurs in two representational forms: a narrative and a representation. In both forms, research concepts and the associated temporalities become visible under the surface of the narrativist or representational superstructure.
Serge Grigoriev, “Postpositivism and the Logic of the Avant-Garde," History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 89-111.
The purpose of this article is to explore the conditions under which the postpositivist interest in rewriting or reinterpreting history could operate legitimately from a historical point of view. The first part of the article outlines and explains some of the key thematic elements of historical postpositivism. The second proceeds to investigate how these elements can be configured and related to each other within Arthur Danto's influential account of the development of contemporary art, and especially the avant‐garde. The intention is to acquire a sense of the working dynamics of postpositivist thought, so as to better understand its possible implications for the writing of history. In the concluding section an argument is proposed to the effect that, although the postpositivist interest in the rewriting of history can in principle be admitted as entirely legitimate, its legitimacy depends on introducing some substantive constraints on content, in addition to the formal considerations that postpositivist discourse generally tends to favor. It is further suggested that this constraint should take the form of a requirement on historical literacy whose meaning is, finally, elucidated by drawing a contrast with historical common sense.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Darrin M. McMahon on The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History by Siep Stuurmann, History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 112-125.
John D’Emilio on What Is Sexual History? by Jeffrey Weeks, History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 126-134.
Geoffrey C. Bowker on Science in the Archives: Past, Presents, Futures, edited with Introduction by Lorraine Daston, History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 135-147.
Ulrich Plass on Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso, History and Theory 58, no. 1 (2019), 148-164.
ARTICLES
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, "Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future," History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 171-184.
The posthuman has been looming large on the human horizon lately. Yet there is no shared understanding of what a posthuman future could possibly mean, and the tension between a technological‐scientific prospect of posthumanity and the critical posthumanist scholarship of the humanities is growing palpable. Whereas the former harbors a novel sense of historicity signaled by the expectation of an evental change to bring about the technological posthuman as a previously nonexistent and other‐than‐human central subject, the latter theorizes a postanthropocentric subjectivity of beings still human. In doing so, it extends the already familiar emancipatory concerns of the human world over the nonhuman, with special attention paid to the ecological other. Despite the occasional claims of critical posthumanism to bring humanities and technological‐scientific approaches to a shared platform, the prospect of technological beings of unparalleled power and the ecotopia of species equality do not fit together very well. In this article I argue that, in their present shape, technological posthumanity and critical posthumanism represent hardly reconcilable social imaginaries and two cultures of the posthuman future. My intervention is a plea for developing a more profound and mutual understanding of both. Instead of advocating particular agendas that nevertheless claim validity for the entirety of planetary life and the entire scholarly enterprise of knowledge‐production, we could invest more in efforts to come to grips with both social imaginaries and venture jointly into the creation of the conceptual tools of a new knowledge economy of understanding the rapidly changing world and our own (post)human prospects.
Ian Hunter, "The Contest over Context in Intellectual History," History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 185-209.
Recent articles critical of the use of context in contextual intellectual history have identified contextual method with the post‐1960s work of the “Cambridge School,” which is regarded as being grounded in a flawed theory of textual interpretation. Focusing on German cultural and political history, this article shows that a contextual historiography was already fully developed in seventeenth‐century ecclesiastical history, and a parallel version of this approach had developed in the field of constitutional history. The modern critique of context emerged only with the appearance of dialectical philosophical history in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The article argues that rather than representing a scholarly engagement with contextual historiography, the central plank of the dialectical critique of contextualism—the notion that contextual explication of thought is insufficient because context itself has transcendental conditions—is actually a cultural‐political attack on it launched on behalf of a hostile and incommensurable academic culture.
Paul Michael Kurtz, "How Nineteenth-Century German Classicists Wrote the Jews out of Ancient History," History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 210-232.
This essay considers why Jewish antiquity largely fell outside the purview of ancient historians in the Germanies for over half a century, between 1820 and 1880, and examines the nature of those portraits that did, in fact, arise. To do so, it interrogates discussions of Jewish antiquity in this half‐century against the background of those political and national values that were consolidating across the German states. Ultimately, the article claims that ancient Jewish history did not provide a compelling model for the dominant (Protestant) German scholars of the age, which then prompted the decline of antique Judaism as a field of interest. This investigation into the political and national dimensions of ancient history both supplements previous lines of inquiry and complicates accounts that assign too much explanatory power to a regnant anti‐Judaism or anti‐Semitism in the period and place. First, the analysis considers why so little attention was granted to Jewish history by ancient historians in the first place, as opposed to its relative prominence before ca. 1820. Second, the essay examines representations of ancient Judaism as fashioned by those historians who did consider the subject in this period. Surveying works composed not only for the upper echelons of scholarship but also for adolescents, women, and the laity, it scrutinizes a series of arguments advanced and assumptions embedded in universal histories, histories of the ancient world, textbooks of history, and histories dedicated to either Greece or Rome. Finally, the article asserts the Jewish past did not conform to the values of cultural ascendancy, political autonomy, national identity, and religious liberty increasingly hallowed across the Germanies of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and inscribed into the very enterprise of historiography, on the other. The perceived national and political failures of ancient Jews—alongside the ethnic or religious ones discerned by others—thus made antique Judaism an unattractive object of study in this period.
Tullio Viola, "From Vague Symbols to Contested Concepts: Peirce,W. B. Gallie, and History," History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 233-251.
This article explores Walter Bryce Gallie's notion of “essentially contested concepts” from a viewpoint that has hitherto been neglected, namely its relation to the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. As a matter of fact, Gallie was an authoritative reader of the American philosopher. All areas of his work are influenced by his attempt to take up and further articulate a major insight of Peirce's semiotics, namely the idea that symbols are inherently vague, and that their meaning is in a state of perpetual growth. At the same time, Gallie rejected another crucial tenet of Peirce's philosophy, that is, the idea that the growth of signs is regulated by the possibility of a final agreement among sign‐users. Examining this ambivalent relation between the two authors will help us shed light on a question that was of crucial importance for Gallie: to what extent should we let our appreciation of concepts or beliefs depend on a historical examination of their meaning?
Dawid Rogacz, "The Virtue of a Historian: A Dialogue between Herman Paul and Chinese Theorists of History," History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 252-267.
This article reflects on the role of scholarly virtues in the Chinese theory of history and compares it with the recent approach proposed by Herman Paul. The first three parts reconstruct what might be called a “Chinese virtue epistemology of history,” starting from Confucian views on sincerity in writing history and then turns to concepts of an “unbiased mind” and the “responsibility of a historian.” The latter ideas were developed by Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801), who introduced the concept of “the virtue of a historian (shide),” treating it as a sympathetic understanding toward the narrated characters. Interpretations of shide changed along with modern Chinese theorists of history, some of whom elaborated on it in the positivist manner. Thereafter, the article outlines Paul's view on the function of epistemic virtues in the formation of “historical persona.” In the summary, I will draw upon the main similarities and differences between Paul's position and the traditional Chinese view in order to point out the main directions for further research on this topic.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Marnie Hughes-Warrington on As If: Idealization and Ideals by Anthony Kwame Appiah; Making Things Up by Karen Bennett; The Russian Ending [artwork] by Tacita Dean; Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History by Richard J. Evans; and Telling it Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction by Catherine Gallagher, History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 268-283.
Nitzan Lebovic on Biopolitics by Catherine Mills; Life: A Critical User’s Manual by Didier Fassin; Beyond the Racial State, edited by Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard F. Wetzell, History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 284-292.
Herman Paul on Virtus Romana: Politics and Morality in the Roman Historians by Catalina Balmaceda, History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 293-301.
Jonas Grethlein on Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World by David Carr, History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 302-312.
Branko Mitrović on Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography by Tor Egil Førland, History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 313-324.
ARTICLES
Knox Peden, "Truth and Meaning in Historical Interpretation: A Davidsonian Approach,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 327-341.
This essay argues that Donald Davidson's work in philosophy sheds light on debates about truth, meaning, and context in historical interpretation. Drawing on distinctions between Davidson's project and that of his mentor, W. V. O. Quine, I aim to show that certain ambiguities that have arisen in the methodological reflections of Quentin Skinner and Frank Ankersmit, to take representatives of contrastive approaches to intellectual history, are clarified once we reckon with Davidson's ideas. This discussion leads to a case for the broader pertinence of Davidson's work to historical writing, which insists that his focus on the centrality of truth to disagreement bears salutary consequences for thinking about what constitutes compelling historical scholarship.
Adrian Blau, "Extended Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 342-359.
Many historians focus primarily on authors' “intended meanings.” Yet all textual interpreters, including historians, need a second kind of meaning. I call this idea “extended meaning,” a new name for an old idea: “P means Q” is the same as “P logically implies Q.” Extended and intended meaning involve different kinds of understanding: even if we grasp exactly what authors meant, we miss something important if we overlook their errors, for example. Crucially, extended and intended meaning are not alternatives: just as some parts of texts cannot be understood without historical analysis, so too some parts of texts cannot be understood without philosophical analysis. Indeed, some historians are adept at using extended meanings to recover intended meanings. But the failure to make this explicit has led many historians to undervalue philosophical analysis. This article thus applies the idea of extended meaning to three practical questions: whether we can deviate from authors' intended meanings, whether we can use anachronisms, and how we can use extended meanings to recover intended meanings. The idea of extended meaning thus strengthens our theoretical foundations and offers valuable practical tools.
Amir Zelinger, "Race and Animal-Breeding: A Hybridized Historiography,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 360-384.
Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.
Terence Holden, "Hartog, Koselleck, and Ricoeur: Historical Anthropology and the Crisis of the Present,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 385-405.
I enquire here into whether historical anthropology may serve to orient the critique of modes of temporalization under the conditions specific to what François Hartog designates as the contemporary regime of historicity. To this end, I bring Hartog into conversation with Paul Ricoeur: both arrive at a diagnosis of the crisis of the present on the basis of a parallel interiorization of the metahistorical categories of Reinhart Koselleck. Sharing a common interlocutor, the diagnoses at which they arrive are nevertheless quite different in nature, a result of the way in which these categories are inflected alternatively toward the anthropological perspective of fundamental temporalization and the semantic perspective of articulation at the level of “orders of time.” I suggest that the crisis of the present eludes the grasp of both and, with a view to gaining a more secure critical purchase over this crisis, propose a framework for bringing them into conversation.
Berber Bevernage, Gisele Iecker De Almeida, Broos Delanote, Anton Froeyman, Patty Huijbers, and Kenan Van De Mieroop, "Philosophy of History after 1945: A Bibliometric Study,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 406-436.
Much has been said about what philosophy of history should be. This bibliometric assessment of research in the philosophy of history examines what scholars in this field have actually produced. The study covers a dataset—a subsection of the bibliography of the International Network for Theory of History—of 13,953 books, articles, book chapters, dissertations, and other scholarly publications, encompassing materials written in seven different languages published between 1945 and 2014. This material was classified according to a multilayered system of taxonomy consisting of keywords representative of themes discussed in the field. Separate quantitative analyses were made to elucidate characteristics about the publication outputs in the field in the different language groups. Changes in paradigm, often referred to as “turns” or “trends,” have been mapped in this study, according to a quantitative analysis of the most recurrent keywords within a five‐year interval, which give an indication of the most debated themes in each period. ∗Religion/theology/secularization∗ is the most frequent keyword during the period 1945 to 1969, followed by ∗Marxism/historical‐materialism∗1 from 1970 to 1984, in what can be considered a second period of the field. Although many of the key publications of the linguistic turn were written within this second period, our dataset shows that it is not until the third period (1985–2014) that their writing goes on to influence other authors in the field.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Nancy Rose Hunt on Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times by Ann Laura Stoler, History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 437-450.
Achim Landwehr on An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present by Elías José Palti, History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 451-459.
Andrew Dunstall on Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present by Stefanos Geroulanos, History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 460-470.
Michael L. Morgan on History, Ethics, and the Recognition of the Other: A Levinasian View on the Writing of History by Anton Froeyman, History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 471-482.
Jonathan Gorman on How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories by Alexander Rosenberg, History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 483-495.
Islamic Pasts: Histories, Concepts, Interventions
EDITED BY SHAHZAD BASHIR
Shahzad Bashir, “Introduction," History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 3-6.
Ryan Thum, “What is Islamic History?" History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 7-19.
Efforts to define the concepts “Islam” and “history” have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of “Islamic history.” However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects’ self‐ascription as “Muslims” for definitions of “Muslim” and “Islamic” is far more than the empty or “nominal” approach that some critics have described. Rather, Islamic self‐ascription is historically entangled, both an artifact of historical processes and an evocation of them, even an integral element of the phenomenon it seeks to define. The essay begins with an evaluation of the “islams not Islam” approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self‐ascription—a common social‐science tool for category definition and boundary making—but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese‐language Islams that eschewed the words “Islam” and “Muslim.” After proposing a definition of “Islamic history,” one that is particularly open and expansive, the article outlines some common characteristics of Islamic history across its many forms, asking what makes it distinct and where it can contribute to a global comparative historiography. Finally, it argues that when we generalize about these traditions, describing the features most widely shared among them, we find an Islamic history that reflects and substantiates the centrality of self‐ascription in delineating the scope of Islam.
Judith Pfeiffer, “In the Folds of Time: Rashīd Al-Dīn on Theories of Historicity," History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 20-42.
By focusing on Rashīd al‐Dīn's (d. 718/1318) historiographical oeuvre and here in particular his “History of the World,” this article challenges the usual approach to his Jāmiʿ al‐tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles) and argues that his was a deeply pluralistic enterprise in a world with many centers, tremendous demographic change, high social mobility, and constantly shifting truth‐claims in an ever expanding cosmos, to which Rashīd al‐Dīn's method, language, and the shape of his history were perfectly adaptable. This article introduces the notion of “parallel pasts” to account for Rashīd al‐Dīn's method. By placing the Jāmiʿ al‐tawārīkh and its author in their historical and intellectual context, this article also argues that this method is not restricted to Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography: His historiographical work ought to be seen as part of his larger theological and philosophical oeuvre into which the author placed it consciously and explicitly, an oeuvre that is, like Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography, pluralist at heart, and that could be as easily classified as “theology” or “philosophy” as “historiography.”
Kaya Şahİn, “To Observe, to Record, to Depict: Memorializing the Circumcision of an Ottoman Prince, C. 1582–C. 1600," History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 43-67.
A circumcision celebration in the summer of 1582, organized by the Ottoman ruler Murād III (r. 1574–1595) for his son Meḥmed, is one of the most extensively recorded events in early modern Ottoman history. Contemporary and near‐contemporary testimonies include archival sources, odes, event‐based narratives, illustrated accounts, passages in regnal and universal histories, and several descriptions by European observers. The celebration occurred amid tensions fueled by ongoing warfare, rising prices, elite factionalism, and apocalyptic anxieties. It also coincided with a time of exceptional cultural productivity at the Ottoman palace and among the Ottoman literati. This article discusses the celebration's treatment in event‐based narratives, illustrated accounts, and regnal and universal histories from the period, to emphasize the multiplicity of approaches to the writing and recording of history. Ottoman works of a historical nature defy easy categorizations such as official history or court history; they also blur compartmentalized notions of history, art history, and literature that emerged in the nineteenth century. Ottoman historical writing, like any other historical tradition, was closer to a meeting ground, where authors and patrons gathered and competed, than a common ground where consent and hegemony were supposedly produced. Authorial agency was crucial in creating demand, fostering competition, and building reputation; moreover, authors and patrons had to negotiate a multiplicity of languages, linguistic registers, styles, and techniques, some of which had been bequeathed by past generations, whereas others had been invented or reinvented recently.
Dana Sajdi, “Reclaiming Damascus: Rescripting Islamic Time and Space in the Sixteenth Century," History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 68-85.
Disconnected from the original place and time of Islam and its own glorious early‐Islamic history, medieval Damascus felt like a temporally and spatially distant city. Through participating in newer hadith practices that facilitated the compression of time, Damascene scholars were able to diminish temporal distance to be closer to the Prophet. They also devised new spatial descriptions that enabled them to redefine space so that it could be easily occupied and revalued. Having inherited traditions of both the later hadith practices and the newer spatial discourses, the sixteenth‐century Damascene scholar, Shams al‐Din Ibn Tulun (d. 1546) combines them to provide chronotopic solutions to address personal and collective voids precipitated by Damascene distance, which were further intensified by the new Ottoman condition. Ibn Tulun locates the Prophet in the crevices of Damascus and allows himself and the Damascenes to be the exclusive cultivators and preservers of a local “iconographical” effort to conjure up the Prophet.
Nancy Florida, “Living in a Time of Madness: Last Days of Java’s Last Prophetic Poet," History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 86-106.
Shortly before his death in December 1873, the renowned Javanese court poet R. Ng. Ronggawarsita composed a short work of social criticism and Islamic ethics that is among the most celebrated of Javanese literary texts. Serat Kalatidha (The Time of Darkness) reflects upon the avenues that remain open to the ethical subject in what Ronggawarsita calls the “time of madness,” the time of darkness and error that marked his dismal present in high colonial Java. Most celebrated as a prophecy, the poem is, in part, a critical reworking of an early nineteenth‐century prophetic reflection on the Javanese past. My article explores the troubled context in which the author wrote this twelve‐stanza (108‐line) poem and how its text forms both a critical commentary on the state of the poet's current‐day society and a pensive reflection on the ethical imperatives of Islam. In the course of this exploration, I reveal how Ronggawarsita's poem forms a prophecy, not as a foretelling of an already determined future, but rather as a work that moves along prophetic time to provoke in his readers a productive intimacy with both pasts and futures.
Margrit Pernau, “Fluid Temporalities: Saiyid Ahmad Khan and the Concept of Modernity," History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 107-131.
This article investigates the language the great Indian Muslim reformer of the nineteenth century, Saiyid Ahmad Khan, uses to conceive of temporalities. The attention is directed toward the way he imagined the relationship between the present and the past, on the one hand, and the future, on the other hand, and toward the changes these configurations underwent in the course of his lifetime. The article will follow up these questions in three sections, focusing on three phases of Saiyid Ahmad Khan's life: first, his early years as a colonial officer and scholar (1840s–1860s); second, the period when the comparative gaze became crucial, leading to the establishment of a scientific society and to a voyage to London (1860–1871); and finally, the time when the Aligarh College occupied the center stage of his life (1871–1898). On one level this can be read as a straightforward history of concepts and temporalities. At another level, the article contributes to the ongoing debate about the past, which is simultaneously absent and hauntingly present. It follows Reinhart Koselleck to India where he never went and listens to the conversations between him and Saiyid Ahmad Khan, who died before Koselleck was born, thus blurring the lines not only between the past and the present, but also between the emic and the etic, and between historians and those they study. Like any meaningful encounter, it transforms its participants and the concepts with which they entered the dialogue.
Nils Riecken, “FHeterotemporality, the Islamic Tradition, and the Political: Laroui’s Concept of the Antinomy of History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (2019), 132-153.
If tradition has often figured as modernity's other, the Islamic tradition has long played the role of the modern constitutive other par excellence. Modern secularizing practices of timing and spacing feed this grounding of the political beyond the conceptual grip of tradition. The works by the Moroccan historian and philosopher Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) put forward a concept of heterotemporality that distances itself from secularizing practices of timing and spacing, and, importantly, also from theological ones. His critique enables us to understand each of these practices as viewing heterotemporality through one master temporality, a view that represents temporality as, in Laroui's words, “absolute” time. First, this privileged temporality is the homogeneous time of secular progress, and second, it is the homogeneous time of theological truth. Laroui unsettles both practices of timing and spacing by discussing heterotemporality as governed by what he calls the antinomy of the concept of history. For Laroui, this antinomy refers to a specific temporal dynamic that results from the tension between the fundamental discontinuity and incoherence of history, on the one hand, and the production of continuity and coherence through human observers, on the other. Laroui thus reveals that the claims about continuity and coherence that sustain groundings of the political within homogeneous time—either secular or theological—must always be understood in relation to their position within the temporal dynamic of the antinomy of the concept of history. In revealing the temporal dynamic of this antinomy within the Islamic tradition, Laroui reworks the architecture of difference that keeps the secular modern and the Islamic theological conceptually separated from each other.
Cover image: Aerial view of Lambert Glacier in Antarctica, by USGS (12 December 2019)
