April 17, 2014, 3:35 am, SHONALEEKA KAUL, Allgemein.
Traditional scholarly opinion has regarded Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī, the twelfth-century Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmiri kings, as a work of history. This essay proposes a reinvestigation of the nature of the iconic text from outside the shadow of that label. It first closely critiques the positivist “history hypothesis,” exposing its internal contradictions over questions of chronology, causality, and objectivity as attributed to the text. It then argues that more than an empiricist historical account that modern historians like to believe it is—in the process bracketing out integral rhetorical, mythic, and didactic parts of the text—the Rājataraṅgiṇī should be viewed in totality for the kāvya (epic poem) that it is, which is to say, as representing a specific language practice that sought to produce meaning and articulated the poet’s vision of the land and its lineages. The essay thus urges momentarily reclaiming the text from the hegemonic but troubled understanding of it as history—only to restore it ultimately to a more cohesive notion of historicality that is consistent with its contents. Toward this end, it highlights the concrete claim to epistemic authority that is asserted both by the genre of Sanskrit kāvya generally and by the Rājataraṅgiṇī in particular, and their conception of the poetic “production” of the past that bears a striking resonance with constructivist historiography. It then traces the intensely intertextual and value-laden nature of the epistemology that frames the Rājataraṅgiṇī into a narrative discourse on power and ethical governance. It is in its narrativity and discursivity—its meaningful representation of what constitutes “true” knowledge of time and human action—that the salience of the Rājataraṅgiṇī may lie.
April 17, 2014, 3:35 am, History and Theory, Allgemein.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10713
April 17, 2014, 3:35 am, History and Theory, Allgemein.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10714
April 17, 2014, 3:35 am, Ian Hesketh, Allgemein.
This article considers Peter Bowler’s recent contribution to the genre of counterfactual history as exemplifying a “restrained” counterfactual framework, one that must downplay the role of contingency in the historical process in order to present what Bowler calls a more “natural course” of historical development. This restrained counterfactual methodology is discussed with reference to analogous debates within evolutionary science about the competing roles of contingency and convergence in the history of life, along with recent work done within the humanities about the more subtle nuances of counterfactual reasoning. Although there is little doubt that Bowler’s study will help legitimize the genre of counterfactual history, it is argued that the role of contingency—once thought to be integral to the counterfactual—has been necessarily minimized in order to construct a narrative that is a plausible counterfactual history of science. It is in this way that Bowler’s world without Darwin sheds light on our historiographical preconceptions about what makes for a plausible historical narrative.
April 17, 2014, 3:35 am, JOSHUA KATES, Allgemein.
This article explores what it calls the “documentarist” hypothesis: the belief that the subject matter of history, the past, is structurally absent and thus can be reached only by way of documents, testamentary traces of various sorts (not only written texts, but artifacts, land arrangements, oral witnessing, and so on). The first part of the article works out the documentarist position through interpretations of creative works that embody it and of a variety of reflections on historiography—those of Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur, as well as some “postmodern historiography.” It argues that documentarism ultimately faces an insoluble problem: it presupposes the pastness of the past, yet it cannot give itself the latter by way of the documents to which it believes itself confined. Documentarism assumes as already at hand a historical-temporal horizon of past, present, and future, for which it itself cannot account. In the second part of the article, accordingly, I turn to the historiographical portion of Faulkner’s The Bear to expose the operativity of this always already given temporality. Faulkner’s tale gives us access to a more radical historicity than any upon which documentarists reckon; yet this historicity turns out to sit askew from the usual frameworks of history as we know them, especially those of periods and epochs. The tension in Faulkner’s own work between periodizing and event-laden explanations, I conclude, points to questions that fall beyond history as currently conceived.
April 17, 2014, 3:35 am, Branko Mitrović, Allgemein.
In his latest book Frank Ankersmit develops a comprehensive philosophical perspective on the problem of the truth and reference of historical representations. The approach and the wider perspective of the book largely belong to what could be called the postmodernist paradigm, in spite of some recent attempts to interpret Ankersmit’s recent work differently. Since his 1983 Narrative Logic Ankersmit has propounded the view that individual statements that constitute historical representations may have reference, but that representations themselves do not. His most recent book remains faithful to this position and elaborates it further. This essay examines Ankersmit’s arguments as well as the assumptions and implications of this view.
April 17, 2014, 3:35 am, Anton Froeyman, Allgemein.
In From History to Theory, Kerwin Lee Klein writes a history of the central terms of the discipline of theory of history, such as “historiography,” “philosophy of history,” “theory of history,” and “memory.” Klein tells us when and how these terms were used, how the usage of some (“historiography” and “philosophy of history”) declined during the twentieth century, and how other terms (“theory” and “memory”) became increasingly popular. More important, Klein also shows that the use of these words is not innocent. Using words such as “theory” or “historiography” implies certain specific ideas about what the writing of history should be like, and how theoretical reflection on the nature of history and its writing relates to the practical issues of the discipline.
In the second half of his book, Klein focuses more on the concept of memory and the memory boom since the later part of the 1980s. He observes that “memory” came to be seen as a kind of “counterhistory,” a postcolonial, fragmented, and personal alternative to the traditional mainstream discourse of history. Klein does not necessarily disagree with this view, but he does warn us about unwanted side effects. More specifically, he argues that the discourse of memory is surprisingly compatible with that of extremist right-wing groups, and should be treated with suspicion. Although Klein certainly has a point, he presents it in a rather dogmatic fashion. However, a more nuanced version of Klein’s criticism of memory can be developed by building on Klein’s suggestion that there is an intimate connection between memory and identity.
April 17, 2014, 3:34 am, Ran Shauli, Allgemein.
In the 1980s Pierre Nora, one of France’s most prominent historians, developed the concept of lieux de mémoire (places of memory). Studies of such places where, in Nora’s words, “memory crystallizes and is being diffused,” were conducted and published in France and in other European countries in the ensuing decades. Marc Andre Matten’s collection of essays, Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity, is the first methodological attempt to use Nora’s theoretical guidelines in the context of greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). The book explores sites that are connected with three of China’s founding leaders, and with some of its constitutive moments as a nation. Using a variety of research methods, the articles in this book concentrate on the years of the People’s Republic, taking the reader from the early revolutionary phase of its short and turbulent history, through the disaster and the chaos of the 1960s and the early 1970s, to the current postsocialist era. The articles in the book examine the local: an archeological site, a memorial hall, a mausoleum, a museum, a park, and a public garden, in order to understand how each one of these locales reflects broader vicissitudes of memory and changes of identity in China.
April 17, 2014, 3:34 am, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Allgemein.
This review essay examines James McFarland’s Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History, which stages a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ works and argues that they shared a resistance to the conventions of nineteenth-century historicism as well as a desire to attend not to causation as a force in history but rather to the importance of each individual “present.” Benjamin’s term “dialectics at a standstill” is a formulation only a reader of Nietzsche could have produced, as McFarland ably demonstrates. This review essay also delves into Benjamin’s own use of the “constellation” motif, identifying complexities McFarland leaves out of his account. Influenced by Nietzsche’s own uses of astronomical and astrological motifs, Benjamin employed the image of the constellation as a symbol not only for temporality (say, of the time it takes for starlight to reach our planet). He also used it to examine our transforming relationship with the cosmos and with nature most broadly, and, in the famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he used it as a figure for the proper relationship historians should establish between their own period and the past; this is what yields an understanding of the present moment as the Jetztzeit, the “time of the now” enjoying its own dignity beyond any causal relationship with the future it may have. However, and as this review essay suggests, Benjamin’s uses of the constellation image, and of images of stars, telescopes, and planetariums more generally, were highly ambivalent. They can serve as indices of his shifting views of modernity and of his desire that modern experience, seemingly condemned to alienation, might be redeemed.
April 17, 2014, 3:34 am, Angelika Epple, Allgemein.
In this anthology, Joan Scott reconfigures her understanding of feminist history and thus contributes to a long overdue theoretical discussion on how we can write feminist history in a globalizing world. She traces both the history of gender history and the history of feminist movements. Scott’s main source of inspiration is the French version of psychoanalysis following Lacan. In a further development of her pioneering 1986 article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” she points out that gender is neither a mere social construction nor a somehow biological referent (such as “sex”). Integrating the constructive criticism of her approach elaborated prominently by Judith Butler during the 1990s, Scott argues instead that gender is a historically and culturally specific attempt to resolve the dilemma of sexual difference. Sexual difference, for its part, is also far from referring simply to physically different male/female bodies. Sexual difference is, for Scott, a permanent quandary for modern subjects, a puzzle to which every society or culture finds specific answers.
My reading of her book concentrates on two main questions that run like a thread through her considerations: First, how can we bridge the gap between a subject and a group? Second, how can we overcome binary oppositions and/or fixed categories and entities—a challenge that becomes even more important every day in a rapidly globalizing world. I broadly discuss the benefits and shortcomings of the pivotal role Scott ascribes to fantasy. Although the concept of fantasy is powerful and striking, particularly with reference to the concepts of “imagined communities” and “invented traditions,” coined by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, I find the Lacanian tone to be less convincing.