Volume 64
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Ewa Domańska, "Revisiting Montaillou," History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
Based on extensive scholarship in English and French, this article offers an analytical survey of both the laudatory and critical reception of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (1975). I revisit the Latin text of Jacques Fournier's register and compare it with relevant fragments in the French and English translations of Montaillou. This comparison provides a starting point to comment on Le Roy Ladurie's novelistic writing style and the “hypnotic effect of narrative” achieved by the book. It also enables me to address historians' criticisms of how Le Roy Ladurie used historical sources. In the second part of the article, I discuss anthropological history and the history of mentality as subdisciplines of contemporary historical writing, and I situate Montaillou within this tradition. Following Charles Tilly, I argue that Le Roy Ladurie's work is an example of “retrospective ethnography,” a term that more accurately describes Le Roy Ladurie's traditional approach to anthropological research, particularly the method of participatory observation. I also highlight prosopography as a method in Le Roy Ladurie's study of social relations in the medieval village. In conclusion, I reflect on the contemporary relevance of Montaillou for supporting human dignity and agency as well as the “humanity of history” needed in times of social and political upheaval.
Callum Barrell and Sara Raimondi, "The Stupid Nineteenth Century: Philosophy of History in Critical Posthumanist and Post-Anthropocentric Thought," History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
This article addresses the charge of “stupidity” leveled at nineteenth-century thought by recent critical posthumanist and post-anthropocentric theorists. The article's first section traces a particularistic reading of nineteenth-century philosophy of history in the writings of Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour, both of whom have employed the nineteenth century as an intellectual shorthand for human exceptionalism and its implicit collusion with the present ecological crisis. Their respective posthumanist and post-anthropocentric provocations (1) question the composition, agency, and exceptionalism of the human, and (2) posit multiple temporalities as an alternative to the linear time of universal history. While intellectual historians have begun to complicate the first provocation in relation to the nineteenth century, we lack an equivalent intervention for the second. In response, the article's second section draws on John Stuart Mill's (1806–1873) reception of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) to demonstrate that speculative philosophy of history in fact grappled with its own problems of scale, multiplicity, and direction. We show that Mill, partly in response to Comte, employed incommensurable historical registers, such as the universal and the relative, to interpret the past at different scales of analysis. These scales were undeniably human, not to mention Eurocentric, but they nevertheless invite a more nuanced reading of the nineteenth century as well as a less linear and troubled logic of overcoming that afflicts Braidotti, Latour, and others. In this spirit, the article's final section suggests that nineteenth-century philosophy of history may actually facilitate the recomposition of the human in time, a task that is central to the multifaceted crisis of the present posthumanist, post-anthropocentric, and Anthropocenic conjuncture.
Paul Cheney, "Inheritance and Incest: Toward a Lévi-Straussian Reading of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois," History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
The premise of this article is that Montesquieu, while seen as an Enlightenment thinker who contributed centrally to the development of the social sciences before the period of discipline formation in the nineteenth century, is generally appreciated in only the vaguest of terms. To the degree that he has been seen as a social theorist rather than as a belletrist or a political writer, scholars have had to amputate major sections of his masterwork, De l'esprit des lois (1748). In so doing, they have tended to give false or at least only partial readings of a work whose author insisted must be read as a whole. This article proceeds in an unorthodox fashion—at least for a historian—through a reading of De l'esprit des lois against Claude Lévi-Strauss's Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949). Through this parallel reading, I establish that Montesquieu's treatment of inheritance bears a remarkable homology with Lévi-Strauss's treatment of incest in Les structures élémentaires. These authors saw their respective objects—the incest taboo, in one case, and inheritance law, in the other—as fundamental to regulating sociability itself. This technique offers a more unified reading of De l'esprit des lois and, in so doing, reassesses Montesquieu's contribution to modern social theory. From a methodological point of view, I am hoping to interest my readers in an alternative way of reading historical texts: juxtaposing texts or corpora that do not have the clear genetic links between them that are generally highly valued by historians. This is an example of what Robert B. Pippin has called “interanimation” and what I have elsewhere likened to the painterly technique of simultaneous contrast.
Andrew Flack and Alice Would, "Misfits, Power, and History: Rethinking Ability Through an Animal Lens," History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
In this article, we construct a critical history of “ability” by focusing on the specific case study of dark-dwelling animals and the ways in which they have been understood over the course of modernity. Such creatures were frequently the subjects of assumptions and judgments about what they could and could not do. Dark places have historically been imagined as extreme environments and as home to equally strange beings. We argue that discourse relating to dark-dwellers—from bats and hedgehogs to deep-sea creatures—reveals that ability, in the animal context, relates to several connected ideas and phenomena. Not least, these include ideas around specialization, adaptation and adaptability, the concentrated interrogation of “special” sensory organs and neurological pathways, and the idealized coherence between a body and its wider environment. We also show that the idea of ability became increasingly inseparable from notions of vulnerability, resilience, and care especially in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century environmental change. The concept of ability, then, was a shifting constellation of many different ideas, and our study underlines how big ideas such as ability are far from homogenous in character but instead are complex, multilayered, and of their time. Reconceptualizing these kinds of ideas about “ability,” particularly as they manifested across diverse contexts, is crucial for understanding how people understood themselves and other beings across time and space. Such an approach to the history of ability matters. It points to the urgency of interrogating the roots of a seemingly everyday idea, one that appears commonplace and apparently unproblematic but that has material consequences for all living beings, human and animal, across a wide range of environments.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Clifford Siskin, "The Advancement of Knowledge Mow, or The History of Knowledge and the Elephant in the Room," History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
What role should history play in the advancement of knowledge? Because it was so “hard,” so “unbelievably difficult … to get people to believe” in his Great Renewal, Francis Bacon thought a history of knowledge could provide evidence of advancement—a reason to “believe” and participate in his experiment. By indexing advancement, historians of knowledge could foster it. If Bacon were with us today, he would be happy to hear that the history of knowledge is a thriving enterprise. But upon reading our version, he would be dismayed to discover that advancement is nowhere to be found. It's the elephant in the room. That shouldn't surprise him or us—the great difficulty of The Great Renewal is that it always needs to be renewed—but this is a new kind of precarity. I call it friendly fire, because it's damage done not by those who wish to contain or undermine knowledge but by those whose purpose it is to produce and valorize it. Why, I ask in this article, is a volume that offers so much of value—Information: A Historical Companion—so unattuned to issues of advancement? Although occasioned by the current ubiquity of “information,” its focus is not on change—asking such questions as “why information?” and “why now?”—but on asserting the “belief” that “every age is an information age.” In a history built on that belief, change is relegated to subordinate clauses (“while recognizing changes over time”) and advancement isn't even on the table. I put it back on not by rejecting this companion but by providing a companion for it, one in which identifying and classifying change is the central task. I take two preparatory steps. First, I clarify how the concept of “culture” configures the agenda and the findings of Companion 1 while fencing out advancement. Second, I set the agenda for Companion 2 by specifying that the knowledge at stake in advancement is “explanatory knowledge.” I both address concerns about the notion of “progress” and provide a vocabulary for explanation highlighted by the concepts of “fit” and “reach.” Companion 2 then approaches the elephant from a number of angles, from a shift in information over four centuries from a matrix of currency to a matrix of possibility to the pacing of that change by a feature of the history of knowledge that I call the “sequence of surprise.” Since Bacon's highest hope for his history of knowledge was to make us better at advancing it, I conclude with a speculative turn to information's future, from Alan Turing's first use of the word “information” in its modern sense to a rethinking—through the history of knowledge—of the “hallucination” issue in our new forms of generative AI.
REVIEW ESSAY
Fernando Esposito on Der Riss in der Zeit: Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
Andrew Baird on Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography by Enzo Traverso, trans. Adam Schoene, History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
Premesh Lalu on Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling by Erica Fretwell, History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025).
ARTICLES
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Ethics for Artificial Historians," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
Artificial historians do not need to have intentions to complete actions or to solve problems. Consequently, a revised approach to the ethics of history is needed. An approach to ethics for artificial historians can be proposed through the recognition of historiographical logic, which is a hybrid of modal, propositional, and erotetic (question-based) types. Looking to examples of texts produced by artificial and human historians, I argue that this hybrid historiographical logic is seen at play in what Jo Guldi has called “signal” (which can denote both the focus and interpretation of historians) and I call “healthy noise,” or metadiscursive question-begging and possible world generation. Together, the signal and noise of histories generate an ethical stance of openness toward the possibilities of new evidence from the past, new ways of interpreting that evidence, and new combinations of signal and noise. Recognizing the potential presence of this logic in modal-propositional-erotetic statements about the past in a wide range of texts, I argue for the recognition of historiographical logic as broadly useful for AI and specifically useful for the discipline. This historiographical and logical turn facilitates stepping beyond treating ethics as the generation of lists of principles that may fail in application and toward recognizing particular forms of logic as indicating ethically beneficent outcomes. This shift may facilitate the detection and deterrence of histories shaped by logics that indicate ethically maleficent outcomes.
Vinsent Nollet, "Philosophy of History as a Critique of Violence: History, Theology, and Politics in Walter Benjamin's Early Writings," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” became a classical work on revolutionary politics mainly due to influential political-theological expositions of its arguments. The main challenge with the political-theological understanding of the essay, however, is that Benjamin seemingly argued against any reconciliation of politics and theology. For this reason, this article develops a historical-philosophical rather than a political-theological interpretation of Benjamin's “Critique of Violence.” It demonstrates how Benjamin's essay on violence can be best understood if it is read as a text containing a speculative philosophy of history. In the essay, Benjamin indeed presented the role of violence in history as a historical “law of oscillation” between lawmaking and law-preserving violence. The problem of violence transcends the framework of the political, which can witness only “administered” violence, not violence as such, and hence cannot escape the dialectical movement of this “law.” While Benjamin's philosophy of history is usually located in the final period of his philosophical activity and comprises a messianic-Marxist complex, Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” suggests the existence of a more substantial philosophy of history in Benjamin's early writings than is usually assumed. The period between 1919 and 1922 especially shows a concentration of anarchistic and nihilistic texts devoted to developing this philosophy of history.
Abhishek Kaicker, "From Eternity to Apocalypse: Time, News, and History Between the Mughal and British Empires, 1556–1785," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
The eighteenth-century origins of colonial orientalism in India spurred not just the translation of Indian texts but the production of interstitial histories, works that were forged in the intellectual culture of the Mughal Empire and created by individuals who explicitly sought to inform and influence their new colonial patrons. Turning to one such interstitial text, Muhammad Bakhsh Ashob's History of the Martyrdom of Farrukh Siyar and the Reign of Muhammad Shah (1782), which was produced at the behest of the East India Company orientalist Captain Jonathan Scott, this article explores the origins of the pervasive misconception that Mughal historical thought had faded to insignificance in the eighteenth century. It examines Ashob's representation of Mughal historiography for Scott in order to propose the existence of three discrete modes of historical writing over the course of the empire, modes that were each marked by a distinct temporal imagination. The article briefly discusses the first two modes—the “millenarian” mode of the late sixteenth century and the “eternal” mode of the seventeenth century—before focusing on the “apocalyptic” mode that became widespread in the early eighteenth century. This article argues that, against the influential and still widespread sense of the decline of historical production in that era, the Mughal bureaucracy (particularly its intelligence infrastructure) spurred the elaboration and efflorescence of historical writing outside the traditional ambit of the imperial court in a period of political turbulence. This article concludes by reflecting on the recasting of the apocalyptic sensibility of late-Mughal historical thought into a vision of imperial decline by men, such as Scott, who were involved in the foundation of British colonial rule in India.
Nagatomi Hirayama, "'Civilization' or 'Empire'? 'China' as a Historical Entity in Contestation'," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
Two distinct approaches have shaped the landscape of modern Chinese historical studies. One approach is the civilization-to-nation thesis, which examines modern China's difficult emergence out of its supposedly cohesive civilizational past, a past that could be shared across different groups of people in contemporary China. The other approach—that is, the empire-to-nation thesis—focuses on China's national rise from the disjointed colonial empire of the Qing (and, to a lesser degree, the Ming), a transformation through which China has become the metropolitan center that enacts structural imperial control over different local or ethnic groups across its territorial domains. This article discusses the epistemic capacities, limits, and distortions of both approaches by examining their historiographical and political implications through different historical configurations of late-imperial China and the resubstantiation of national histories in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Although the empire-to-nation approach has become more or less the standard in Western academia over the past three decades, I argue that these two approaches are both essentialist, although in decidedly different ways. In doing so, I call for a more reflective and vibrant perspective on historical China, a perspective that focuses on the lived historical experiences of the diverse groups of people who are not really confined by totalizing and essentializing national subjectivities.
LECTURE
Joan W. Scott, "'A Guesser in This Vale of Tears': On the Politics of History Writing'," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
The essay makes three points about historians’ responsibilities in the current moment. The first has to do with making sense of the present by bringing the past to bear on it—that is, offering to the current eruptions of politics a history that can help explain what has brought them to this point in the form of narratives that counter the dominant ones. The second is what Foucault called a “history of the present.” That is a critical interrogation of the terms we use to represent the past, a dismantling of the naturalized understanding of history that has long served to legitimize modernity as the inevitable outcome of a singular chronology. The third calls for the avowal of our ethical investments in the history we write.
REVIEW ARTICLES
Margrit Pernau, "Decolonizing Theory and Concepts: Perspectives from the Global South," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
Until recently, most concepts and theories used in social sciences and the humanities were developed in the West. They were both provincial, as they were based on Western experience and designed to interpret these local experiences, and presumed universal. If they did not fit developments in the Global South, this was due not to the inadequacy of the concept but to a “history of lack.” Dilip M. Menon's edited volume Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South can be situated within the broader movement to not only challenge these concepts and theories but also offer alternatives developed from the Global South. This review article lays out the larger intellectual framework of the volume. The history of concepts offers the possibility to distinguish more precisely between concepts used by the historical actors (hardly anyone challenges the need to base research on their careful investigation) and the analytical concepts. Especially in a global context, using analytical concepts from one of the languages of the Global South raises many questions that need to be addressed; the question of which language academics are to communicate with in the future is not the least important. Paracoloniality, the notion that there are areas of continuity beyond the “tired triad” of the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, in turn, needs to be brought into conversation with the central assumption of decoloniality, which argues for an epistemic rupture between the precolonial and the colonial.
Ian Hunter, "Creative Disintegration: The Perpetual Emergence of Modern Political Thought," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
Michael Sonenscher's After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought offers a rich overview of nineteenth-century French, Swiss, and German political thought. The work's central argument is that modern political thought emerges in a series of attempts to close germinal “gaps” opened in the fabric of European intellectual life by Kant's philosophy and philosophical history. Less a narrative than a bricolage, the work consists of a myriad of intellectual cameos, walk-on roles, philosophical speculations, and political and social theories whose detail threatens to overwhelm even the most assiduous reader. The most striking feature of Sonenscher's book, however, is its theoretical method. Measuring his distance from both dialectical philosophical history and Cambridge school contextualism, Sonenscher makes powerful use of a method of intellectual history whose last great exponent was Arthur Lovejoy. Under this method, political thought is neither governed by the telos of self-consciousness nor explicable in terms of the historical circumstances in which it has arisen and whose uses and purposes it might serve. Instead, political thought “emerges” unforeseen from a condition of sheer metaphysical indeterminacy. This condition is brought about by the dissolution of prior conceptual oppositions in an amnesic maelstrom of inversions, arguments, and debates. New oppositions are then created through “chance and choice” only to disintegrate in their turn, leading to further cycles of destruction and recreation that Sonenscher calls “palingenesis.” This anti-contextual method is responsible for the rich mosaic of intellectual fragments that the reader encounters in this engaging book. It is also responsible for the book's central shortcoming, for it renders the author oblivious to the way in which their impact on those forced to live and think through them makes historical circumstances resistant to their metaphysical liquefaction, with this in turn making Sonenscher heedless of the historian's duty to investigate these circumstances.
Terence Renaud, "Historical Antifascism and the Global Left," History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025).
Joseph Fronczak's Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism presents antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s as a universal cause that united people across social and ideological divides, creating the discursive framework for the global Left we know today. It revises standard accounts according to which the Left originated either with the Atlantic revolutions circa 1800 or with the international workers’ movement that took shape in the late nineteenth century. This article accepts the weak form of the book's argument that the antifascist era was remarkably creative and essential for understanding the development of today's Left. However, it rejects the strong form of the argument that dissociates the Left from any prior history in the revolutionary tradition or the workers’ movement. To complement the book's discursive analysis of languages of the Left, this article outlines a structural analysis of antisystemic opposition in the contexts of global capitalism, imperialism, and mass politics. What results is a long-term concept of the Left that, among other things, highlights the promise and pitfalls of antifascist populism. The core problem of defining the Left is accounting for the historical disjuncture between unity of antisystemic consciousness and unity of organized action.
ARTICLES
Martin Jay, "Can History Absolve? Can History Judge?," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
Appealing to history, rather than to God, to provide an ultimate judgment about human actions can have a justificatory or consolatory function. The former grants proleptic absolution for acts that may be morally dubious because of their benign consequences, while the latter enables victims in the present to gain a measure of relief by imagining they will be honored by posterity. In both cases, problematic assumptions about “history” and “judgment” call into question the belief that future generations will vindicate present-day struggles. The first of these assumptions is that “history” conveys worth by what might be called “victors’ justice,” in which success proves that the winner was morally superior. The second is that “history” is an impersonal process that can be recounted in a single metanarrative rather than an ongoing series of different narratives that are themselves variable depending on who is doing the narrating. When “history” means the community of historians who recount and analyze the past, there is rarely, if ever, a grand consensus agreed upon by all. Finally, whereas the judgment of God is assumed to be qualitative and individualized, and thus perfect for each case, human judgment depends either on deontological rules, which may not be universal, or on analogies that are only roughly equivalent. In either case, the judgment can never transcend the fallibilities of those doing the judging and approach the perfection of a divine Last Judgment. Perhaps the most plausible version of “history will judge” is the realization that we are judged in the present by the still admirable aspirations of the past, which have yet to be realized.
Jakub Stejskal, "'Stranded on the Shores of History'? Monuments and (Art-)Historical Awareness," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
Can past agents deliberately influence our historical awareness by designing objects’ appearances and sending them to us down the stream of time? We know they have certainly tried to do so by raising monuments. But according to an influential narrative, the efforts of the “monumentalists” are destined to fail: no monument can keep a legacy alive in perpetuity. In this article, I argue that this narrative misrepresents the nature of the monumentalists’ mission, and I set out to show that monumentality should be understood as a means of addressing what I term “art-historical awareness.” This mode of historical awareness attends to artifacts’ appearances in search of visual manifestations of relevance that can survive the loss of context. Those who raise monuments aim to produce such artifacts, or what amount to intentional art-historical documents, and they do so in order to overcome the tension between the monuments’ nature as public art and their commemorative function. By visually manifesting a transcendent relevance, monuments ideally appeal to both present and distant audiences, insofar as these audiences are able to appreciate the monuments’ potential to sustain at least a semblance of relevance beyond their immediate contexts.
FORUM
TRANSLATION, MIGRATION, NARRATIVE
Edited by Christoph Rass and Julie M. Weise
Christoph Rass and Julie M. Weise, "Editors' Introduction: Translation, Migration, Narrative," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
Laura A. Zander, "Travelers in Translation: Of 'Liminal Spaces' and 'Literary Contact Zones,'" History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
Despite the global visibility of the migrant as a key figure in discussions of human rights, the contours of the migrant as a subject of rights still remain unspecified. However, global human rights fictions, which are often rooted in autobiographical and biographical accounts, offer alternative subjectivities by producing narrative forms that contrast with dominant “migration literatures.” Literature emerges as a contact zone where migrant voices engage with host cultures, facilitating dialogues that challenge stereotypes and reshape cultural imaginaries. In these spaces, language becomes the central medium to navigate and negotiate liminality. Processes of translation are the most obvious means of this negotiation, as translation bridges personal experience, political ideologies, and social imaginaries. By translating precarious migrant experiences into narratives, literature reconfigures the migrant as a central figure of human rights while also challenging dominant political discourses. Helon Habila's 2019 novel, Travelers, exemplifies these dynamics by mapping migrancy through a network of interconnected characters whose fates illuminate the complexity of migrant experiences and challenge received notions of migrancy. As individual narratives intersect and transform into a collective story, Travelers reflects the potential of literary contact zones to mediate cultural exchange and envision alternative migrant subjectivities. By moving beyond tropes of cultural clash and identity struggles, such narratives reimagine migration and its connection to human rights.
Catherine S. Ramírez and Christoph Rass, "Producing Integration: The Translation of Non/Belonging in Germany and the United States," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
This essay examines how the concept of integration has been produced, translated, and institutionalized in Germany and the United States as a key element of policy frameworks that migranticize some people and, thus, translate them as outsiders. By combining conceptual history and translation theory, we analyze how the meaning of integration has evolved within academic and political discourse, tracing its emergence as a key category in migration governance. We argue that the production of what integration means can be read via and as translation, resulting in an ambiguous medium that structures access to belonging in a way that facilitates the reproduction of exclusionary hierarchies. We begin by outlining our theoretical framework, linking cultural translation with conceptual history to examine how integration operates as a dynamic but historically contingent concept. We then explore integration in Germany, tracing its genealogy from racializing notions during the Nazi years to its institutionalization as a migration policy in a multicultural society during the twenty-first century. Next, we turn our attention to the US, where integration remains undefined in official policy but is shaped through differential inclusion in the market and illegality. Focusing on Duldung and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, we argue that the German and US systems translate older forms of exclusion into contemporary governance structures. Far from a neutral or inclusive concept, integration becomes operative as a tool for regulating mobility and non/belonging through a twofold translation: the production of what integration means determines how the concept translates people.
Albert Manke and Fredy González, "From Secrecy to the Public Sphere: Translating Chinese Sworn Brotherhood Practices for Western Audiences," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
This essay reflects on how changing practices and knowledge repertoires of Chinese migrant associations in the Americas shaped translocal collective spheres in the asymmetric setting known as the Exclusion Era. In order to achieve this, we highlight certain aspects and layers of what Homi K. Bhabha has called “cultural translation,” which, in our case, was advanced through the agency, ideas, and practices of individuals who organized in Chinese sworn brotherhoods, a type of mutual aid association that prioritized secrecy and actively managing knowledge dissemination. As historians, we argue that an interdisciplinary analysis of these processes enables us to trace the evolving ways that migrants translated themselves and were translated transculturally, how they permeated (intentionally and unintentionally) sociolinguistic barriers, and how they communicated information in public and in private. This enables us to gain a clearer picture of the frameworks for mutual support, (non)shared knowledge, and dynamics of translation in migrant collectivities, whose members displayed creative agency while operating within powerful constraints. This makes for an innovative scholarly contribution that resides at the intersection of translation studies, history, migration studies, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Peter Schneck and Julie M. Weise, "Migration, Mobility, and Being in Translation," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
Drawing on an expanded concept of translation as process and practice, this contribution to the “Translation, Migration, Narrative” forum explores how migrants, as described by scholars such as Paul F. Bandia, embody “translated beings” who are marked both by agency and by constraint. We argue that translation serves as a literal and metaphorical framework for analyzing archives of migration by illuminating the interplay between migrants’ identities, their larger social networks, and the legal, cultural, and linguistic translations they enact and endure. The piece begins by developing theoretical insights from two works of literature: Valeria Luiselli's writings about her experiences as a volunteer interpreter for child migrants and Yuri Herrera's novels reflecting on migrancy as a form of evolving self-translation between languages and cultures. These literary perspectives on translation as an essential component of migrant experience emphasize the hybrid, translational experiences of migrants and the paradoxical, but also resilient, nature of their identities and agency. We then bring these theories to bear as methodology and analyze a 1954 document from the archives of South Africa's Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) that translated and transcribed Malawians’ messages to their mineworker family members in South Africa. We consider how the lived experience of “being in translation” was both common and differentiated between migrants and their “left-behind” family members. Ultimately, our intervention offers an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that bridges literature, history, and cultural analysis. This perspective not only underscores how translation practices are essential to the experience of migration but also helps to (re)constitute migration histories, in turn contributing to the archives and narratives that navigate the complex terrain of mobility, identity, and cultural mediation.
Anand A. Yang, "First Person Singular? North Indian Migrant Narratives from the Era of Indenture," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
Between the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, over one million people from India served as indentured laborers in European-dominated colonies scattered across the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean. To understand this mass migration at the individual and micro-level, scholars have recently turned their attention to the autobiographies of two “translated” people, Totaram Sanadhya and Munshi Rahman Khan, because their texts offer firsthand accounts of indenture from within that system. Sanadhya spent twenty-one years in Fiji after arriving there in 1893, and Khan went to Suriname in 1898 and stayed there for the next seventy or so years of his life. Their reminiscences, which translate into words the lived experiences of migrants from North India, offer crucial insights into the language practices they had to negotiate and the different subjectivities they had to assume (or were assigned) not only while en route to indenture but also during and following their period of indenture. Such information cannot be extracted from the official archives that historians typically rely on to compile macro- or meso-histories of mobility in colonial India. But migrant self-writing also has limitations: many personal stories of indenture are organized solely around the theme or plot of suffering and coercion, as demonstrated in Sanadhya's testimonio, and many self-narratives represent the experiences and thoughts of a single historical agent, as evidenced by the autobiographies of both Sanadhya and Khan.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, "List, Assemblage, Interruption: Migrant Literature Against Story," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
Building on the centrality of translation theory in literary studies, this essay makes the case for the utility of literature in understanding the experience of migration. Rather than assuming that this means narrative fiction or nonfiction, it explores arguments against narrative. Using frameworks developed by Maria Mäkelä, Hanna Meretoja, and Andrew Abbott, it argues that a story-critical, nonnarrative approach can better illuminate momentary experience and slow down the reader's rush to consume and oversimplify story features. Examples drawn from recent work by US Chicano poet-artist Juan Felipe Herrera illustrate some tactics that interrupt the flow of narrative, including the list, the assemblage, and the concrete space of the page.
REVIEW ARTICLES
Arielle Xena Alterwaite, "All That Glitters: The Many Objects of Rome's Museum of Civilizations," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
This review article examines the various methodologies practiced by Rome's Museum of Civilizations (Museo delle Civiltà) to discuss the contemporary curatorial approaches of traditional ethnographic museums. It adopts a historical and comparative perspective to situate the diverse collections within ongoing debates about art restitution. In emphasizing the unique work of the curators along with that of contemporary artists, this review article demonstrates how their use of history destabilizes rather than solidifies the permanence of museum collections. An analysis of this dynamic artistic and curatorial work reveals exhibited objects’ multifaceted acquisition histories and, in so doing, presents alternative past value systems to counter the homogenizing and commodifying tendencies of the contemporary art market.
Jacob Collins, "On Decolonizing the Social Sciences," History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025).
This review article discusses George Steinmetz's The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, a history of the French social sciences and their colonial entanglements. Surveying a vast array of objects, including institutions, texts, journals, thinkers, and concepts, Steinmetz demonstrates how central the colonial relation was to the production of social knowledge in France. This formation, he argues, has been actively repressed in historical accounts of sociology, and in an effort to decolonize the discipline, Steinmetz brings these connections out of the shadows and uses them to compose an alternative (colonial) history of the field. While acknowledging Steinmetz's major accomplishments, not least among them the consideration of unjustly neglected colonial thinkers, I challenge some of the book's basic narratives around the history and politics of decolonization. In what ways, I ask, is the contemporary call to decolonize the humanities and social sciences related to the social movement of decolonization, which swept through the colonized countries of Asia and Africa after the Second World War? What role did French social scientists play in the historical process of decolonization? Finally, how were these Third World social movements tied to social struggles happening in metropolitan Europe, notably the revolts of 1968? I conclude by suggesting that a more “genealogical” approach to the history of the colonial relation might lead to a more productive set of engagements on these important questions.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Bradley J. Irish on Emotion, Sense, Experience by Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2024).
Vera Keller on Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries by Alain Corbin, trans. Susan Pickford, History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2024).
PHILOLOGY NOW
Edited by Valeria López Fadul and Courtney Weiss Smith
Valeria López Fadul and Courtney Weiss Smith, "Philology Now: Editors' Introduction," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
In this introduction to the “Philology Now” theme issue, we make a case for “philology” as a useful sign under which to consider the ways historians are already working with words in their efforts to understand the past. Doing so, we recognize that “philology” has been variously defined. Rather than being normative or prescriptive about what philology entails, we proceed from a historical awareness that, in many of its uses, the word binds interrelated concerns of language, history, and method. The articles featured in this issue take up this nexus as providing opportunities for theory of history. Together, they demonstrate how attention to philology's methods of treating words in history enables self-reflective work on disciplinary formations and their political legacies, on the relationships between language and power, and on temporality itself. It also enables innovative new approaches to words and concepts.
Nancy Partner, "History and Theory and Philology Now: Together in Theory," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
In English-speaking academe, philology has virtually disappeared as a defined discipline, although its traditional array of skills and techniques for reading, editing, and interpreting texts are indispensable to fields ranging from biblical studies through every language and literature and are central to historical research. Philology's status “now” seems to be that the analytic skills for dealing with texts, skills developed over centuries, have been appropriated by multiple academic specialties while the framework that used to contain them has been dismantled and nearly forgotten. From a historian's viewpoint, I track the lively resistance movement pressing for a return to philology and a turn to a “new” philology, a revived, recovered, restored discipline with its own coherent identity. This movement of renewal and restoration is complicated by the need to come to terms with philology's deep entanglement with racialist thought and anti-Semitism, a past that has indelibly stained the reputation of philology as a discipline. The guiding intent of this article is to bring philology, with all its complications, back together with history, its formerly yoked companion discipline, and inquire where and how theory emerges—a metaphilology analogous to metahistory.
Helge Jordheim, "The Stakes of Philology: Realities, Origins, Futures," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
What does philology mean today? And what can it do in the future? In this article, I respond to these questions by performing—again—a “return to philology,” as Paul de Man proclaimed in the 1980s. To engage with the present and future of philology, I return to nineteenth-century Germany and to some of the controversies that played out between the main proponents of the new discipline, including Gottfried Hermann, August Boeckh, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. This was the time and place where philology came into its own and some of the discipline's stakes were spelled out for the first time. These stakes were both methodological and theoretical, phenomenological and ontological, and can be discussed according to their three main concerns: the struggle for the real, the possibility of origins, and the futures of the past. Invoking “Philology Now,” I argue, means bringing these stakes back into our discussion about history and theory.
Alexandra Lianeri, "Chronopolitics of Classical Philology Through the Non Sequitur," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
This article argues that classical philology can play a vital role in debates about the importance of philology now and configures a genealogy that may contribute to the quest for alternative philologies. Building on Werner Hamacher's definition of philology as “love of the non sequitur,” I turn to founding texts of Western classical philology by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Friedrich August Wolf, and August Böckh in order to interrogate their identification with modern classicism and historicism. Examining the science of philology as Altertumswissenschaft, I focus on a language of ambiguity and undecidability with regard to philology's classical object (Greek and Roman pasts) and the discourse of philological science that constructs it. This is grasped as the relation between a transcendental temporality that enunciated classical antiquity's wholeness and a kind of perturbation of time that destabilized philology's alignment with classicism and historicism. For Winckelmann, Wolf, and Böckh, the philologist's task required a conceptual and temporal leap toward the past that signaled the absence of philology's grounding. In this sense, it differed from evocations of a seamless movement across a unified horizon of time linking antiquity and modernity. This was conveyed by stressing the past's mutilation, absence, and accidental expression as the vanishing ground on which philology could build its classical vision. By configuring these notions as the self-hollowing basis of its knowledge, classical philology came to be divided by a paradoxical appeal to sequential time and the non sequitur. Tensions produced in this context bring classical philology to the center of debates that seek to interrogate modern historical intelligibility and time. Far from perpetuating ideas of irreversible and linear time, classical philology claims to engage with an absent past, and as such, it disrupts sequential temporalities by desiring something that is always beyond presence or reach and therefore always available for times to come and for future emancipation from regimes of present time.
Anthony Grafton, "Toward a Conjectural History of Conjectural Histories," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
Most intellectual historians use the term “conjectural history” to designate a new form of speculative history created in eighteenth-century Scotland by Adam Smith and a few others. These writers traced the development of human society and culture through conjectural reasoning based on philosophers’ views about human nature and travelers’ accounts of “primitive” peoples. Their work had a deep impact on eighteenth-century philology: it helped to shape such original and influential studies of the ancient world as Edward Gibbon's history of the fall of Rome, Johann Joachim Winckelmann's history of the rise of ancient art, and Friedrich August Wolf's demonstration that Homer was an oral poet. But the connection between conjectural history and classical philology began long before any of the varied Enlightenments conjured up by modern scholars came into being. Conjectures about the past were deeply rooted in the central humanistic discipline, rhetoric; this gave Lorenzo Valla the tools for his conjectural refutation of the legend of the Donation of Constantine. But these same tools were plied with similar skill and originality by many other humanists, from Valla's contemporary in the Roman curia, Leon Battista Alberti, to the Jesuit historian of the New World, José de Acosta, a century later. And they saw them not as an innovation but as part of the philological and historical tradition in which they were grounded. Valla, for example, saw Thucydides—whose histories he translated into Latin—as a conjectural historian and thus identified conjecture as a central feature of historiography in the classical tradition.
David B. Lurie, "The Wind That Melts the Ice: Reflections on the Scale of Philology," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
The global history of philology, like that of writing systems and other technologies, is characterized by diffusion and adaptation. These processes are made more difficult to grasp if we maintain a presentist focus on the Western philological tradition and its deeply Eurocentric legacy. Arguing against those who wish to resolve the problem by abandoning the term “philology” as irredeemably tainted, I propose that we introduce the notion of scale. Heuristically, it is helpful to think in terms of “small-p” philology, the low-level quotidian strategies and tools used by students and scholars to solve problems of textual interpretation, and “big-P” Philology, a larger ideological edifice linked to metahistorical and transhistorical narratives about abstract concepts such as civilization, race, and religious truth. As a first step toward illuminating this issue of scale, this article excavates a highly specific moment of philological scholarship in twelfth-century Japan and shows how a difficult word from a classical waka poem is explicated through the extension of an existing Chinese exegetical system. The example is taken from the Ōgishō, a pioneering treatise by the Heian period scholar Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104–1177).
Alan Durston, "Teaching Spanish in the Universal Monarchy: Tomás Pinpin's Grammar for Tagalogs (1610)," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
In 1610, a Tagalog printer named Tomás Pinpin published a Spanish grammar in Tagalog that was intended to help natives avoid errors and misunderstandings in their interactions with Spanish colonizers. This article attempts to clarify the book's genesis and to contextualize it within the global expansion of Spanish. Pinpin exemplifies a pattern whereby Spanish was taught by colonial subjects on their own initiative and following their own criteria. At the same time, his grammar is associated with a missionary translation project in which the printers, among them Pinpin himself, were non-Spanish. This text thus offers an opportunity to broaden understandings of early modern colonial translation and linguistic description by stressing the creations of native collaborators.
Alexander Jabbari, "Cosmopolitan Philology and Sacred Grammar," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
Persian developed a formal grammatical tradition comparatively late in its thousand-year history as a lingua franca. This article takes up the emergence of Persian grammar within the larger trajectory of Persian philology. It explores questions about why and when such a tradition developed in Persian by closely analyzing the earliest formal grammar of Persian in the language: Minhaj al-Talab (Program of Study; ca. 1660), which was written by a Hui Muslim scholar in eastern Qing China. This text is contrasted with a more mature later work of Persian philology from Mughal India: Musmir (Fruition; 1750s). Through comparative study of these texts and by drawing comparisons to Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and other languages, the article complicates characterizations of Persian and the Persianate as cosmopolitan and explores the complex relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular and between Persian and Islam. Persian has a sacred dimension for many Chinese Muslims, despite its primarily cosmopolitan function in Mughal India. This article concludes with a historical materialist analysis of the role of philology in general, arguing that the discipline is neither fundamentally reactionary nor colonial but rather a tool that can be used for multiple ends.
Claire Gilbert, "Dead Letters and Living Words: Iberian Arabism as Political Philology," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
A surge of Arabic studies in Spain and Portugal during the eighteenth century responded to specific anxieties connected to national identities. Philology offered a means to contend with Iberia's Islamic past through present-day geopolitics that seemed to threaten national futures. A comparison of lexicographic projects from the last decades of the century shows how philologists relied on translation strategies of domestication and foreignization to recast the history of the Arabic language and its users in Spain and Portugal. Such strategies merged historical and ethnographic techniques that mapped peoples, places, and languages. Collectively, these projects contributed to a revised emplotment of al-Andalus as a vital space for intellectual encounter and especially the translatio studii that was credited as a source of Enlightenment ideals. It became a transhistorical resource for nationalist claims within and beyond Spain and Portugal.
Ronit Ricci, "Implicit Comparisons: Visuality and the Interlinear Manuscript Page," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
A central question for European philology, informed by various agendas and ideologies, concerned comparison and the positing of hierarchies among languages. With this “traditional” question of philology in mind, but hoping to think in less traditional ways, this article asks how comparative understandings of Arabic and local languages of the Indonesian archipelago may have been reflected in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic manuscripts that contain interlinear translations. These Islamic interlinear translations contain a text written in Arabic with a translation into Javanese or Malay appearing in between the lines of Arabic text. Such translations often follow a word-for-word model, striving to replicate the source down to the level of prepositions and word order even when the result is far from idiomatic. Many questions could be asked about the translation of doctrine, values, and stories through these bilingual manuscripts. However, although I have been trained to examine texts for their content and literary dimensions, I will attempt to put these dimensions aside momentarily in favor of considering “sensory translation.” Doing so, I explore what visual aspects (including script size, ink color, and writing angle) might tell us about the “implicit comparisons” between languages as reflected on the page.
Peter de Bolla, "On Concepts as Historical Forms," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
What are the consequences of holding fast to the axiom that words are not the same thing as concepts? This article explores some of them in relation to the tensions between two different but overlapping approaches to the history of concepts: philology and computationally informed historical semantics. The methods utilized were developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab and essentially comprise a measurement for word associations that can then be exported into comparative frameworks for tracking the evolution of concepts over time. Some examples are provided using the dataset Eighteenth Century Collections Online that are intended to demonstrate the fecundity of computational approaches to the history of ideas and concepts. Throughout the article, a distinction is held between two interconnected terms: meanings and concepts—or to put that more pointedly, the hard case of distinguishing between a change in meaning of a word and a change in conceptual form is addressed. Although the article comes to the conclusion that hard-and-fast distinctions between words and concepts are extremely difficult to maintain, it nevertheless insists on the benefit of supposing that such distinctions can be held. This enables one to characterize concepts in terms of their functions rather than their meanings, and some examples of these functions are provided. In conclusion, the article returns to the issue of historical approaches to words and concepts and suggests that a conceptual history formulated through the lens of conceptual function complements philological accounts of how words and meanings inform us about the past.
Catherine Cymone Fourshey, "Philology in African Historical Inquiry: Troubling the Meaning of Girlhood in Bantu Speech Communities," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
Language and history are inextricably entangled with each other, but can one be used to illuminate the other? This article focuses on the generations of philologists and Bantu speakers who have collectively, in different ways, obscured and illuminated our understandings of such categories as gender and childhood. In particular, it challenges the antiquity of girlhood as a historical designation in eastern and central African Bantu speech communities. It addresses questions regarding philology's relevance in studying ancient Bantu speakers’ practices marking gender and generation as characteristics of childhood and identity. Rather than looking to written literature, this article draws on spoken word in a part of Africa where historians have long developed models of historical analysis through philological methods that forefront African intellectual trends over externally imposed ones. The words people develop reflect their ways of thinking about who they are and which categories matter to them. In this article, ancestry and familial generations act as both a subject of and method for reclaiming the past and understanding some of the processes through which identity categories were formed within ancient Bantu speech communities. It concludes by demonstrating that childhood and, specifically, girlhood are not innate and automatic categories that can be easily defined but are historically contingent identities that are forged in particular, identifiable circumstances.
Emily Apter, "Planetary Concept-Work: Philology, Untranslatables, Language Justice," History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025).
Starting with an example of philological method drawn from Leo Spitzer's essay titled “Linguistics and Literary History” (1948), which, for many years, served as a foundational text of the discipline of comparative literature, this article delineates some of the reasons why philology, especially in its most specialized guises, became an outmoded discipline in contemporary pedagogies of the humanities. A case is made, however, for “philology now” in the form of plurilingual concept-work and translation theory. Crucial to forms of philosophizing across Western and non-Western languages and traditions, recognized as an important fulcrum of global language justice movements, and repurposed in the emergent field of ecotranslation (which enlarges the semiosphere beyond human language even as it prioritizes language survival among humans), philology gains renewed traction in the contemporary translational humanities.
