Volume 62
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Rodrigo Bonaldo and Ana Carolina Barbosa Pereira, "Potential History: Reading Artificial Intelligence from Indigenous Knowledges," History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023).
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, history, as a core concept of the political project of modernity, was highly concerned with the future. The many crimes, genocides, and wars perpetuated in the name of historical progress eventually caused unavoidable fractures in the way Western philosophies of history have understood change over time, leading to a depoliticization of the future and a greater emphasis on matters of the present. However, the main claim of the “Historical Futures” project is that the future has not completely disappeared from the focus of historical thinking, and some modalities of the future that have been brought to the attention of historical thought relate to a more-than-human reality. This article aims to confront the prospects of a technological singularity through the eyes of peoples who already live in a world of more-than-human agency. The aim of this confrontation is to create not just an alternative way to think about the future but a stance from which we can explore ways to inhabit and therefore repoliticize historical futures. This article contains a comparative study that has been designed to challenge our technologized imaginations of the future and, at the same time, to infuse the theoretical experiment with contingent historical experiences. Could we consider artificial intelligence as a new historical subject? What about as an agent in a “more-than-human” history? To what extent can we read this new condition through ancient Amerindian notions of time? Traditionally, the relationship between Western anthropocentrism and Amerindian anthropomorphism has been framed in terms of an opposition. We intend to prefigure a less hierarchical and more horizontal relation between systems of thought, one devoid of a fixed center or parameter of reference. Granting the same degree of intellectual dignity to the works of Google engineers and the views of Amazonian shamans, we nevertheless foster an intercultural dialogue (between these two “traditions of reasoning”) about a future in which history can become more-than-human. We introduce potential history as the framework not only to conceptualize Amerindian experiences of time but also to start building an intercultural dialogue that is designed to discuss AI as a historical subject.
ARTICLES
William M. Reddy, “To Fly the Plane: Language Games, Historical Narratives, and Emotions," History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023).
The common Western distinction between reason and emotion (which is not found outside Western-influenced traditions) tends to obscure an important distinction between two kinds of thinking: logical and mathematical reasoning, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what is sometimes called “situational awareness,” a kind of thinking that involves striving to take into account multiple simultaneously true descriptions of a situation. Emotion, as understood in appraisal theory (that is, as inherently cognitive and intentional), is one kind of thinking that contributes to—indeed, is crucial to—situational awareness in this sense. Intention also belongs to situational awareness. Whatever long-term goals we pursue, present action must be attuned to immediate circumstances. One is faced with an indefinite number of ways to describe what is going on at any moment, and this second kind of thinking involves striving to identify a crucial subset of these true descriptions that one can respond to via an intentional action, procedure, or plan. Maintaining situational awareness in this sense is the goal of “crew resource management” (CRM), a flight crew teamwork strategy and emotional regime aimed at ensuring airline safety. The philosophical works of Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Austin, Habermas, and Danto, among others, help explain the remarkable successes of crew resource management. This article tests this explanation's applicability to nonmodern contexts by briefly discussing the letters of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret between 1551 and 1562.
Adam Sutcliffe, “Hume, History, and the Uses of Sympathy,” History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023).
This article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754–1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others’ feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his readers’ emotional responses, inviting sympathy with figures of suffering—such as King Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots—while also, often almost simultaneously, stirring intense antipathy for those whose religious extremism he regards as socially dangerous and beyond comprehension. After first situating the emergence of Hume's theory of sympathy in its early eighteenth-century context, this article explores in detail the techniques of sentimental management that appear across the six volumes of the History of England. The elaborate deployment of emotions in Hume's historiography is shown to be in tension both with some aspects of his philosophy of natural human sympathy and with his brief reflections on the writing of history. Hume channeled his readers’ sympathies toward particular targets and against others. A careful analysis of this usefully sheds light on the management of sympathy in modern historiography, on which Hume has had an enduring influence.
Sor-hoon Tan, “Texts and Traditions in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy,” History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023).
This article considers Quentin Skinner's critique and methodology in his seminal essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” vis-à-vis the current methodological debates in Chinese and comparative philosophy. It surveys the different ways in which philosophers who work with ancient Chinese texts in those related fields deal with the tension between textual contexts and autonomy and how some of the errors criticized by Skinner under the mythology of coherence, mythology of doctrines, mythology of parochialism, and mythology of prolepsis might apply to those fields. It argues that Skinner's insistence that understanding a text requires recovering its author's intended meaning by studying its linguistic context has limited application to Chinese and comparative philosophy because those fields’ most important texts are not best understood as means of communication by specific historical authors with intended messages to convey to readers. These texts are instead the means by which Chinese traditions perpetuate their respective beliefs and practices. Instead of being circumscribed by authorial intent, the meanings of traditional texts are dynamic and co-created in the process of producing, reproducing, and consuming texts as well as in the evolution of practices that also constitute each tradition. The meanings received by the audience are never exactly what authors or transmitters intended but have been transformed by each audience's own concerns and interests, even if the audience attempts to grasp what the former intended. Using the Five Classics and the Analects as examples, this article illustrates how such texts’ purposes to teach and perpetuate the practices that constitute a way of life determine their meanings. Understanding is not merely cognitive but practical as well. The meanings of such texts are not static but dynamic as traditions evolve. The debates about methods of reading and interpreting ancient Chinese texts are also debates about the nature of Chinese traditions and struggles over their futures.
Sanjay Seth, “Reconceiving the Practice of History: From Representation to Translation,” History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023).
Arguing that history is not the application of a rigorous method to sources bequeathed to us from the past but rather a practice of coding that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this article seeks to delineate the key elements of this coding. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times. This time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. If, as argued here, “the past” does not exist independently of the means by which it is known and represented, then the many different modes of historicity that human beings developed and deployed before the modern form of history became dominant cannot be measured against “the” past in an effort to compare their accuracy or adequacy in representing it. The concluding section of this article asks what we are doing when we write the history of those who did not share the presumptions of the modern discipline but who had their own mode(s) of historicity. What, it asks, is the character and status of the knowledge produced when we write histories of premodern and non-Western pasts?
REVIEW ARTICLE
Karyn Ball, “With Splinters (or Stars) in Our Eyes: On Reading the Frankfurt School with Martin Jay,” History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023).
This mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection entitled Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations. Though it highlights details and insights from nearly every essay in the collection, the review devotes significant attention to chapter 4, which focuses on the relationship of the Frankfurt School's first-generation scholars with Sigmund Freud. The departure point for my engagement with Jay's fourth chapter is the translation of the German word Trieb (drive) as “instinct” throughout The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Although Jay's treatment of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Herbert Marcuse's recourses to Freudian psychoanalysis emphasizes their abiding commitment to Freud's theory of instinctual forces (over and against objections to his biologism), the question of whether a drive differs from an instinct does not arise. This question therefore offers an occasion to speculate on how distinguishing more firmly between instinct and drive might matter for the Frankfurt School's opposition between first and second nature. Though I praise Jay's decision to include a chapter on Miriam Hansen's Benjaminian revision of the public sphere, I also criticize his practice, in this volume at least, of consigning most scholarship authored by women to the endnotes rather than engaging with it in the main text.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Stefan Berger on Big and Little Histories: Sizing Up Ethics in Historiography by Marnie Hughes-Warrington with Anne Martin, History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Alexandra Lianeri, "Dēmokratia's Possible Disconnection: Untimely Antiquity, Temporal Outsideness, and Historical Futures of Politics," History and Theory 62, no. 2 (2023).
This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of dēmokratia. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, dēmokratia’s projected break with the present and presentism is grounded in transtemporal confrontations and routes of historical memory. These are engagements with antiquity that take hold of and refigure the relation among past, present, and future politics, as well as the inside and outside of democracy, at a horizon of Nachleben (afterlife) that sustains no fixed beginning or end. I discuss these temporalities as disconnective in a sense that differs from historical futures opened up by technoscientific or anthropocenic prospects. Dēmokratia challenges the self-narration of present democracy as a project of the future by positing modalities of outsideness, repotentialization of the past, and interweaving of times and political languages in non-narrative terms. The outcome is a form of futurity that opens up the possibility of imagining not only a novel political subject and community but also a logic of their emergence that enables both to be incessantly reconfigured. Dēmokratia's possible disconnection works against a sense of lost political futurity, but it needs to be recognized as grounded in a state of loss, insofar as political domination may also be built into future democratic principles. For this reason, it invites a reflexive problematic about the representability and translatability of disconnective political futures and communities.
ARTICLES
Harleen Kaur & prabhdeep singh kehal, "Epistemic Wounded Attachments: Recovering Definitional Subjectivity through Colonial Libraries," History and Theory 62, no. 2 (2023).
Postcolonial theorizing on empires and subjects focuses on governance and infrastructure as relevant geographies of relation. However, when governance-driven knowledge production migrates from colony to metropole, what postcolonial subjectivity formations are recovered from colonial archives, particularly if these archives are structured by epistemic difference? We theorize a wounded attachment to a colonial library, or the construction of subjectivity through colonial archival recovery, as a means of transforming a colonial library of governance into an academic discipline. Through the case study of Sikh studies, a discipline originating out of colonial governance of Sikhs, we argue that epistemic difference is transformed into epistemic distancing as a tool by which scholars pursue legibility to the Euro-American academy. We contextualize the ongoing investment in measures of academic legibility (for example, objectivity, distance, and validity) as how area and region are tied to the production of universal knowledge; these measures result in the elision of embodied knowledge as a valid framework for intellectual pursuit.
Federico Sor, "Metaphysics in History: Notes on the Origins of Authoritarianism and Populism," History and Theory 62, no. 2 (2023).
This article contains an analysis of metaphysics in historical narrative, especially as it pertains to the study of authoritarianism and populism, and a brief exploration of the political implications of metaphysical narratives. The article engages closely with twentieth-century accounts of the origins of authoritarianism and populism and related topics insofar as they are relevant today. Some present-day authors continue to adopt some of the tropes of twentieth-century accounts, though they do so without acknowledging the uncertainties and doubts expressed by twentieth-century historians and social scientists with regard to their own paradigms. The analysis proceeds through an immanent critique, examining the internal contradictions of complex notions. The focus is on teleology and transcendentalism. Teleology occludes short-term causality, contexts, and conjunctures. It entails anachronism, or the retrospective attribution of meaning, and ontological fatalism, which renders historical explanation irrelevant. Eschewing fatalism means allowing for the causal efficiency of intervening conditions, which contradicts the premises of the teleological approach. The reification of stages (or eras) in teleological successions leads to asynchronies, or the coexistence of elements belonging to different totalities. The formulation of origins as predispositions and potentialities entails a transcendental approach. Immanently, there are no potentialities but actual existents immersed in their historical context; these can only be potentialities with respect to a transcendental being or essence. But this approach leads to irresoluble contradictions and an alienated form of history in which human agency and actors themselves are only manifestations of a beyond. The neglect of social antagonisms as immediate causes of authoritarianism entails a specific political position. The postulation of populism as transcendentally equivalent to authoritarianism carries a negative valuation of challenges to liberal democracy. With a less deterministic approach to history, analytical and normative assessments become less predetermined.
Hannah Skoda, "Nostalgia And (Pre-)Modernity," History and Theory 62, no. 2 (2023).
This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately connected. Given these framings of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon, this article seeks to explore the implications of premodern nostalgia. It begins by setting out the arguments for the intertwining of nostalgia and modernity. Some have argued that modernity brings a sense of rupture and that this produces nostalgia. Others, relatedly, have argued that modernity seems to speed up our experience of time and that this produces a nostalgia for a slower-paced and more predictable past. I juxtapose these arguments with evidence of fourteenth-century outpourings of nostalgia across a range of contexts in England, Italy, and France. I analyze examples of nostalgia in political contexts (both radical and reactionary), nostalgia for apparently lost economic orders, nostalgia for a lost set of chivalric values, and nostalgia for disrupted social orders. I then suggest that these fourteenth-century manifestations of nostalgia were actually produced by precisely the features of the period that are usually deemed to be exclusive to modernity: it was rapid, rupturing structural change that provoked nostalgic regret. Nostalgia, then, would seem to indicate that there are features of the fourteenth century that might be deemed modern. However, rather than simply trying to therefore push back the moment of the birth of modernity, I argue that nostalgia is indicative of the problems of periodization. The presence of nostalgia across epochs—these echoes across the webs of time—suggest that lines of periodization, birthing moments, need to be treated with extreme caution. And it is appropriate that such a reminder should come from a phenomenon such as nostalgia, which is, after all, about resonances and echoes across time—resonances that are amplified, distorted, whispered even, but that all challenge and complicate any straightforward sense of either linear or cyclical time.
Nico Mouton, "An Apologia for Arthur Lovejoy's Long-Range Approach to the History of Ideas," History and Theory 62, no. 2 (2023).
Arthur Lovejoy's long-range approach to the history of ideas is little appreciated and largely abandoned. The list of Lovejoy's supposed sins is long. His critics have charged that, among other things, he treated ideas as timeless entities with essences that are independent of individual thinkers, separate from specific texts, isolated from immediate contexts, and insulated from intellectual change. This article defends Lovejoy against such attacks and argues that his approach is still viable and valuable.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Nancy Partner, "What, at Long Last, Is Historical Theory For? Reflections on Historical Theory in a Post-truth World," History and Theory 62, no. 2 (2023).
The term "post-truth" is a capacious trope that collects threats to the stability of shared knowledge on many fronts—digitally spread disinformation, ignorance and resistance to science, unabashed lies in the public sphere, mythologizing by resurgent nationalist forces, and so on. History is particularly vulnerable to this array. Post-truth threats to serious history produced to professional standards for research and reasoning by historians free of coercion, intimidation, or pressures for co-optation are too blatant to need explanation. Avenues of response to the politicizing of history have been protests by public intellectuals and academics and a growing scholarly literature recording the imposition of memory laws by the police powers of numerous states. Attacks on empirical history, and the academic freedom required to sustain it, provoke clear responses, but the situation of historical theory is more problematic. Historical theory is a superstructure of analysis that presupposes the free production of history that invites and justifies the cultural work of theorizing. Reading Karen S. Feldman's Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality, an erudite, philosophical contribution to historical theory advancing a severe critique of history's fundamental powers of representation against a widening background of nationalist state-sponsored policing of history, produced an acute cognitive dissonance in this reviewer. In this essay, I frankly acknowledge this dissonant experience and lay out some of the most egregious causes of it in history distorted and undermined to nationalist ends in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and beyond. I pose the question of whether the intellectual work of theorizing history can continue with any confidence when the ground on which theory stands is being eroded and distorted.
REVIEW ESSAY
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon on The Climate of History in a Planetary Age by Dipesh Chakrabarty, History and Theory 62, no. 2 (2023).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Anne Fuchs, "On Futures and Endings: Narratological Reflections on Contemporary Forms of Crises," History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
The article examines the changing relationship of the present to the future from a narratological perspective. It argues that three dominant narrative schemas structure the contemporary experiences of temporality in the Western social imaginary: the modern crisis narrative, the apocalyptic narrative, and the chronic crisis narrative. In its first part, the article shows how the modern sense of crisis, which emerged in the late eighteenth century, sedimented into a powerful narrative template by knitting together the past, the present, and the future into a unified plot. The second part focuses on the resurgence of apocalyptic stories in the Western social imaginary and humanities discourse. The final part highlights the special contribution of aesthetics of precariousness to the Western imaginary of time and temporality. It argues that the "chronic crisis narrative" deflates the teleological narrative arc of the modern crisis paradigm while also shunning the end-time discourse of the apocalyptic narrative.
ARTICLES
Susan S. Lanser, "Same/Difference? Toward a Sapphic/Nonbinary Sexuality of History," History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
What is the next step when one has published a strong intervention in a field but later recognizes that one's angle of vision deserves new scrutiny? In this article, which began as a roundtable talk, I return to The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (2014) to interrogate its "same-sex" logic through a nonbinary/trans lens. My book argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century representations of the sapphic became a flash point for European cultures grappling with questions of power and governance, desire and duty, mobility and difference in an age of colonialism, racial capitalism, revolution, and reaction. In figuring the sapphic exclusively through notions of sameness, however, The Sexuality of History does not do justice to trans and nonbinary figures both historical and fictional. Is there a place among sapphic subjects for these figures, and, if so, with what implications? I argue here for a both/and approach that requires recoding certain figures as nonbinary while still insisting on their efficacy as signs of the sapphic. This recoding encourages a more nuanced exploration of the cultural work performed by sapphic representations and a more expansive conception of what I have called a sapphic episteme. Such revisionist thinking may be useful at a time of social and theoretical tensions at the intersections of "lesbian" and "trans."
Tanvir Ahmed, "Green Boughs on the Graves: Unmooring Herat from Imperial Time," History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
The aim of this article is to explore how popular historical knowledge disrupts the spacetimes produced by imperial power. To this end, I present my reading of a shrine guide that was composed by Asil al-Din Waʿiz in 1460 and that documents the city of Herat's blessed dead. This work, the Maqsad al-Iqbal, anchors Herat to space and time by both the graves of the city's myriad saints and the tales told about them locally. I investigate the ways in which the popular historical knowledge recorded in the Maqsad al-Iqbal>/I> offers a counterpoint to the ideas of Herat's past that have been generated by dynastic chronicles, luxurious visual arts, and the grandeur of royal construction projects. I am interested not only in alternative historical visions themselves but in how nonelite productions of history resist easy adaptation into a hegemonic scheme and how the dead themselves are constantly at work in our narratives, breaking down every attempt at a singular, coherent past.
Eugenia Gay, "More than Meets the Fact: The Universality of History and the Colonial Mediation," History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
This article examines how mediation is not just limited to the format that's selected to convey the findings of previously conducted research that supposedly followed the conventional protocols of the historical discipline. Rather, it considers mediation as a fundamental part of building historical knowledge, for it assumes that every part of the historiographical operation can be defined as "mediation." Specifically, it deals with colonial historical mediation, a concept that refers to the combination of an overt or concealed agenda, intentional or unnoticed bias, commonsense assumptions, inherited academic and political traditions, conceptual constellations, and more or less informed theoretical beliefs that configure the subtext upon which historical explanation is built, particularly in Latin America.
Pedro Telles da Silveira, "The Counted Time: Technical Temporalities and Their Challenges to History," History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
One of the main debates regarding historical representation within digital media concerns narrative, particularly the difficulty in articulating it. Digital technologies are usually presented as opposed to linear, written narratives, which is of consequence to historical writing. Despite the many merits of scholarly approaches that try to circumvent this difficulty, the lack of theoretical understanding of the categories implied in such discussions is noticeable. To counter this, this article addresses the relationship between time, technics, and narrative. I contend that the challenges of crafting narratives in digital media conceal a problem pertaining to the relationship between time and technics. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative, Jimena Canales's studies of the history of science, Wolfgang Ernst's and Yuk Hui's discussions of technical temporality, and Bernard Stiegler's understanding of the relationship between time and technics, I argue that it is the temporality imbued in the workings of technical objects (such as computers) that renders them averse to narrative. In making this argument, I employ the notion of "counted time" (in contrast to Ricoeur's "narrative time") to denote a temporal mode that, despite its intersections with social, human temporality, is alien to narrative.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, "Restoring Continuity: Notes on History and Fiction," History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
In 1935, as Europe witnessed the rise of fascism, Paul Valéry tried to identify the origins of the crisis in a lecture titled "Le bilan de l'intelligence." Things were better, he claimed, when people were able to understand their present moment as the result of past events—that is, when "continuity reigned in the minds." In this article, I discuss why that sense of continuity with the past is, in fact, indispensable for individuals and societies alike; using instances from great works of fiction, ranging from Don Quixote to the novels of Toni Morrison and Abdulrazak Gurnah, I suggest that fiction—the literary imagination of the historical past—might be uniquely adept at restoring continuity when it is broken.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Brad S. Gregory, "History and Politics as If We Still Lived in the Holocene," History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Giuseppe Bianco on Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France by Larry Sommer McGrath, History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
Suzanne Marchand on Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History by Martin Jay, History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023).
NUMBER 4
“Chronopolitics: Time of Politics, Politics of Time, Politicized Time,” edited by Fernando Esposito & Tobias Becker
ARTICLES
Fernando Esposito and Tobias Becker, "The Time of Politics, the Politics of Time, and Politicized Time: An Introduction to Chronopolitics," History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing futures in the present or preventing them from materializing. Consequently, the relationship between politics and time encompasses a broad spectrum of phenomena and processes that cry out for historicization. In our introduction to this History and Theory theme issue on chronopolitics, we argue that the concept of chronopolitics makes it possible to do this and, in the process, to move the operation of rethinking historical temporalities from the periphery toward the center of historiographical attention as well as to engage in a dialogue with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. To this end, we propose a broad concept of chronopolitics by discussing existing definitions, by distinguishing between three central dimensions of chronopolitics (the time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time), and by systematizing possible approaches to studying chronopolitics.
Fernando Esposito, "Peasants, Brigands, and the Chronopolitics of the New Leviathan in the Mezzogiorno," History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
The image of a backward, archaic South whose barbarian population had remained at a low tier of civilization was a child of Italian unification. Not unlike the Orientalist East, the South that meridionalist discourse brought forth was a "chronotopos"—that is, a time-space that had supposedly remained in the past. The war against brigandage in the Mezzogiorno demonstrates the workings of the "politics of historicism." This article first sheds some light on the grande brigantaggio and on the descriptions of the South that it generated among both contemporaries and later historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm. With the help of Pierre Clastres's and James C. Scott's political anthropology, it then attempts to uncover the structure beneath the "denial of coevalness." It argues that the dichotomy between the "backward" and the "modern" was based on the political distinction between friend and enemy, which, in the age of historicism, was temporalized; that is, the temporal dichotomy of the savage and the civilized can be understood as the historicist variant of those "asymmetric counterconcepts" that have always served the state and its representatives to demarcate the corpus politicum from other political entities, to justify the state, and to praise the advantages of being governed. In conclusion, the article addresses the close interweaving of state and history, progress and civilization, in the historicist worldview and argues that it was this nexus of state and history that drove the mechanics of time-power.
Marcus Colla and Adéla Gjurčová, "1989: The Chronopolitics of Revolution," History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
A failed effort at "reform from above" or a dramatic reassertion of "people power"? Almost thirty-five years on, studies of the Revolutions of 1989 continue to be framed by these two polarities. However, this historiographical focus has meant that scholars have often overlooked the actual content and character of protest itself. This article argues that one way of reinjecting agency and ideas back into our historical understanding of 1989 is through examining the chronopolitics of revolution: that is to say, by addressing how the control and interpretation of time became a political battlefield, a site of contention and negotiation, between Communist regimes, on the one hand, and political activists and society, on the other. Investigating events in the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia, the article contains two central claims: first, that an interrogation of the concept of "chronopolitics" can provide a new angle by which to grasp the revolutionary character of "1989" and the democratic transformations that resulted and, second, by way of inversion, that a study of the temporal experiences across 1989 and the early 1990s can in turn shed light on the analytical value of "chronopolitics" more generally.
Benjamin Möckel, "'What Has Posterity Ever Done for Me?': Future Generations, Intergenerational Justice, and the Chronopolitics of Distant Futures," History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
"Future generations" play a key role in current political debates. In the context of the climate crisis especially, political controversies are often framed as moral problems of "intergenerational justice." This article aims to historicize the use of the concept of "future generations" in modern political discourse and to uncover its long—and often ambivalent—history. Its main argument is that talking about "future generations" was part of an attempt to integrate (distant) futures into the political discourse of the time. The first part of the article outlines a theoretical perspective on the relationship between generations and temporalities. The second part focuses on how anticipating "future generations" became an important part of the history of utopian thinking and political planning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the realm of demographic and economic discussions. The third part analyzes the emergence of "future ethics" and "intergenerational justice" as important political discourses in the 1970s. This part refers both to the academic debates about "future generations" and to the way political decision-makers used the concept to legitimize their policies. The article argues that the concept of "future generations" should not be taken as an ethical principle that transcended the political debates of the present. Rather, it was itself the result of intense political controversies.
Helge Jordheim, "The Manifesto, the Timeline, and the Memory Site: The 22 July 2011 Attacks in Norway and the Chronopolitics of Genre," History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
In addition to being heinous crimes, acts of terrorism are complex chronopolitical events. Perpetrators, victims, survivors, families, and authorities manage their relationship to the events by engaging with and giving shape to time, or, rather, to a plurality of times. To perform this time work, they avail themselves of different genres, which serve as chronopolitical tools. This article discusses three such genres: the manifesto, the timeline, and the memorial site. These genres belong not only to different phases of the terror attacks but also to different actors. They are used to shape temporal progression in ways that enable specific forms of action, survival, and memory. The article takes the 22 July 2011 attacks in Norway as an example to map and analyze the role of these chronopolitical genres in managing the multiple times of terror.
Ethan Kleinberg, "Deconstructing Historicist Time, or Time's Scribe," History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that "historicism" is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of "historicism" that is derived from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, which I call Historicism B. I am less interested in what draws these varying definitions of Historicism apart and instead investigate a point of intersection in their understanding of time and temporality. Both strains serve politics via a concept of time as a neutral, uniform, and apolitical scale upon which any political or ideological agenda is enacted. Time here serves as the basis for historical explanation, but its neutrality, homogeneity, and extra-historicality are a trick. I employ Gérard Genette's analytic of the palimpsest, with the help of Nancy Partner, to expose the ways that Historicism allows the past to be rewritten and overwritten to political and ideological ends that the temporal construct conceals. This then enables me to work through the politics of Historicism and ultimately deconstruct Historicist time, demonstrating how the universal or eternal claims of Enlightenment or pre-Historicist thought are actually maintained in Historicism as the mechanism to advance political and ideological positions under the cloak of neutrality. In what follows, I make the temporal mechanism of Historicism explicit in order to expose the ethical failings that this mechanism conceals.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Aparna Vaidik on Time's Monster: How History Makes History by Priya Satia, History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
Hannah Skoda on Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America by Nadia R. Altschul, History and Theory 62, no. 4 (2023).
