History and Theory最新文献

{"title":"HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE","authors":"Aparna Vaidik","doi":"10.1111/hith.12318","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12318","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in <i>Time's Monster: How History Makes History</i>, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti-colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present-day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and “great men” histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the “benefits” of the empire, and feed Britain's anti-immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 4","pages":"132-141"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48304484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SAME/DIFFERENCE? TOWARD A SAPPHIC/NONBINARY SEXUALITY OF HISTORY","authors":"SUSAN S. LANSER","doi":"10.1111/hith.12319","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12319","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 <i>The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830</i> (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, <i>The Sexuality of History</i> 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.”</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"356-366"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12319","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45607837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MORE THAN MEETS THE FACT: THE UNIVERSALITY OF HISTORY AND THE COLONIAL MEDIATION","authors":"EUGENIA GAY","doi":"10.1111/hith.12314","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12314","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"386-402"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49554830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"RESTORING CONTINUITY: NOTES ON HISTORY AND FICTION","authors":"JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ","doi":"10.1111/hith.12317","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12317","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>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 <i>Don Quixote</i> 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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"427-438"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46987699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"CHRONOCENOSIS: HOW TO IMAGINE THE MULTIPLICITY OF TEMPORALITIES WITHOUT LOSING THE EMPHASIS ON POWER AND CONFLICTS","authors":"Margrit Pernau","doi":"10.1111/hith.12315","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12315","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The twentieth century witnessed the historicization of the categories of time and space. Instead of functioning as a universal category, moving from the past to the present and from the present to the future, time has multiplied into temporalities, and historians have looked for adequate metaphors to describe this multiplicity, its many ways of moving forward and backward, its acceleration and decelerations, its entanglements, and its conflicts and struggles for hegemony. The editors of <i>Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History</i> offer a thought-provoking concept by translating biocenosis, the coexistence of different species in the same environment, to time studies and thus using the term “chronocenosis” to refer to different temporalities sharing the same embattled space. The volume covers a large variety of case studies—ranging from early modern Chinese historical novels to attempts to bring together social and biological time in the discussion of the Anthropocene—and draws together disciplines that are not usually discussed in studies of temporalities, disciplines ranging from law to the history of science.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 4","pages":"123-131"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41667083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"VALIDITY NOW","authors":"SUZANNE MARCHAND","doi":"10.1111/hith.12316","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12316","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This review essay offers an extended analysis of Martin Jay's <i>Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History</i>, highlighting Jay's emphasis on the need for intellectual historians to address the question of the present-day validity of ideas. In this volume of essays on twentieth-century philosophy and historiography, Jay contends that the perennial tension between historicism and truth value is integral to intellectual history; however, it is establishing the latter that is the most crucial, and perhaps most difficult, part of our practice. In thirteen separate but related pieces, Jay explores subjects such as the common ground shared by Quentin Skinner and Hayden White, the “styles” of thought represented by Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin, and recent French theories of the historical sublime and the “advent” of ideas. This review essay discusses these pieces and compares Jay's essay on historical truthfulness to ancient rhetorical discussions of the many forms of lying about history. Its final section deals with the ways in which insights from the history of science might help us to connect genesis and validity by examining the practices of idea- or knowledge-making, and it argues that validity is also, and perhaps most importantly, something we need to embrace in our roles as teachers. What makes ideas valid is the next generation of thinkers, and to make wise and well-informed life choices, they need to have a full range of older and newer ideas about the human condition from which to choose.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"477-487"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48742224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"GREEN BOUGHS ON THE GRAVES: UNMOORING HERAT FROM IMPERIAL TIME","authors":"TANVIR AHMED","doi":"10.1111/hith.12308","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12308","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>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 <i>Maqsad al-Iqbal</i>, 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 <i>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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"367-385"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47385149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"DEFENDING SPIRIT, SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES","authors":"GIUSEPPE BIANCO","doi":"10.1111/hith.12312","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12312","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's <i>Making Spirit Matter</i>: <i>Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France</i> (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition and behavior that were produced by physicians—namely, physiologists and pathologists, phrenologists, neurologists, alienists, and psychiatrists. It describes how, while engaged in this confrontation, French philosophy took a peculiar shape, eventually influencing the development of some sciences—namely, psychology, which emerged progressively as a discipline at the crossroads of medicine and philosophy. In the second part of the essay, starting from a terminological analysis of a series of terms dealing with “spirit,” I consider the formation of spiritualism by adopting an approach that diverges slightly from the ones proper to history of philosophy and intellectual history. I inscribe the philosophical discourses in their contexts of emergence, paying particular attention to institutional macrostructures and their inertia. This provides another perspective on “spiritualism,” which may no longer be conceived as a current or a school; rather, it should be conceived as the effect of the conditions of possibility of academic philosophy in France. It seems to me that, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century, because of the organization of the educational institutions, the French philosophers’ agenda consisted mainly in opposing all forms of materialism, mechanism, and determinism and in defending the legitimacy of their discipline.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"462-476"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49356677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE","authors":"BRAD S. GREGORY","doi":"10.1111/hith.12311","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12311","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p><i>The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity</i> (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, <i>The Dawn of Everything</i> 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.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"439-461"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44423144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ON FUTURES AND ENDINGS: NARRATOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF CRISES*","authors":"ANNE FUCHS","doi":"10.1111/hith.12310","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12310","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 3","pages":"337-355"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12310","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49129981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}