Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2158647
Verónica Tozzi Thompson
In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul Roth undertakes the task of answering a philosophical question of substantive importance: that of ‘why narrative form typifies and is essential to historical explanations’ (xiii). The author warns about the undeniable fact of the widespread use of narratives to explain in all kinds of history: social, political and cultural history, history of science and history of philosophy. Narratives tell us that something happened: ‘A narrative explanation presumably presents an account of the linkages among events as a process leading to the outcome one seeks to explain’ (22). The philosophical question raised is whether this practice is to be tolerated or condemned (22). Roth takes on the challenge of revisiting the question with respect to the analytical philosophy of history of the 1960s by, among others, Arthur Danto, Louis Mink, W. B. Gallie and Morton White – thinkers labelled ‘narrativists’ by Dray (for the first time in Ely et al 1969 and later in Dray 1971). Although interest in narrative structure in general and in historical narrative in particular has continued to grow since that time – and has attracted all kinds of disciplines to its conceptual elucidation, the question about the explanatory capacity of narrative has attracted little or no attention. The issue of the status of narrative explanation that Roth raises in the book’s first pages was approached, on the one hand, in a negative way by neo-positivist philosopher Carl Hempel, who excluded narrative as a kind of scientific explanation. Let us remember that Hempel reconstructs explanation as an argument – a logical structure of premises and conclusion. To explain scientifically is to show that an event (or, more precisely,
{"title":"Historical irrealism: Paul A. Roth and the epistemic value of narrative explanation","authors":"Verónica Tozzi Thompson","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2158647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2158647","url":null,"abstract":"In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul Roth undertakes the task of answering a philosophical question of substantive importance: that of ‘why narrative form typifies and is essential to historical explanations’ (xiii). The author warns about the undeniable fact of the widespread use of narratives to explain in all kinds of history: social, political and cultural history, history of science and history of philosophy. Narratives tell us that something happened: ‘A narrative explanation presumably presents an account of the linkages among events as a process leading to the outcome one seeks to explain’ (22). The philosophical question raised is whether this practice is to be tolerated or condemned (22). Roth takes on the challenge of revisiting the question with respect to the analytical philosophy of history of the 1960s by, among others, Arthur Danto, Louis Mink, W. B. Gallie and Morton White – thinkers labelled ‘narrativists’ by Dray (for the first time in Ely et al 1969 and later in Dray 1971). Although interest in narrative structure in general and in historical narrative in particular has continued to grow since that time – and has attracted all kinds of disciplines to its conceptual elucidation, the question about the explanatory capacity of narrative has attracted little or no attention. The issue of the status of narrative explanation that Roth raises in the book’s first pages was approached, on the one hand, in a negative way by neo-positivist philosopher Carl Hempel, who excluded narrative as a kind of scientific explanation. Let us remember that Hempel reconstructs explanation as an argument – a logical structure of premises and conclusion. To explain scientifically is to show that an event (or, more precisely,","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"27 1","pages":"144 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44838725","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2158644
D. Booth
ABSTRACT How might we distil the meaning of a place amid a myriad of competing representations, perspectives and narratives? In this article, I address this question with a case study of Bondi Beach, Australia. Bondi is a synecdoche for an Australian beach lifestyle, and for urban congestion, dysfunction and the destruction of the natural world. I argue that appeals to historical facts, which are invariably contested, can never reconcile disparate representations into a single truth. All representations are mediated by contextually laden perspectives. Here I explore the issue of representational histories of places by presenting a case study of Bondi Beach. The article comprises two sections. In the first I highlight the problem of competing evidence and representations that emerge from traditional empirical-analytical research into three subjects relevant to Australian beaches including Bondi: Aboriginal custodianship, colonization, and coastal management. In the second section, I propose a biographical/autobiographical form of representation using Bondi’s voice. I advocate Bondi’s voice as an approach to mediating competing representations of place. Bondi’s voice – in the form of a biographical/autobiographical narrative – is not an attempt to produce a single truth but to tell a story from the perspective of a natural environment under siege from destructive human cultures.
{"title":"Experiments in history: the voice of Bondi","authors":"D. Booth","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2158644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2158644","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How might we distil the meaning of a place amid a myriad of competing representations, perspectives and narratives? In this article, I address this question with a case study of Bondi Beach, Australia. Bondi is a synecdoche for an Australian beach lifestyle, and for urban congestion, dysfunction and the destruction of the natural world. I argue that appeals to historical facts, which are invariably contested, can never reconcile disparate representations into a single truth. All representations are mediated by contextually laden perspectives. Here I explore the issue of representational histories of places by presenting a case study of Bondi Beach. The article comprises two sections. In the first I highlight the problem of competing evidence and representations that emerge from traditional empirical-analytical research into three subjects relevant to Australian beaches including Bondi: Aboriginal custodianship, colonization, and coastal management. In the second section, I propose a biographical/autobiographical form of representation using Bondi’s voice. I advocate Bondi’s voice as an approach to mediating competing representations of place. Bondi’s voice – in the form of a biographical/autobiographical narrative – is not an attempt to produce a single truth but to tell a story from the perspective of a natural environment under siege from destructive human cultures.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"27 1","pages":"124 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46074034","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2155362
María Inés La Greca
{"title":"Mapping the displacement of history: from twentieth-century crisis to twenty-first-century possibilities","authors":"María Inés La Greca","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2155362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2155362","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44331516","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}
Pub Date : 2022-12-12DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2151231
Kalle Pihlainen
ABSTRACT The article proceeds from the assumption that poststructuralism contains an ethical dimension despite contrary claims by many of its critics. This ethics can be seen in the poststructuralist refusal of representation and, importantly, allows for representative interventions when their benefits are assumed to outweigh any conceivable harm. As an elaboration of this ethics, the aim is to defend a representational strategy of complexity. Such a use of complexity parallels modernist and postmodern artistic representations advocating alienation or defamiliarization but is here examined specifically in relation to referential representations like history writing. The key ethical argument is that complexity in such representations can foreground the existence of radical alterity and foster an attitude of respect toward it. Hence, the central goal is not for representations to maximize presentational effectiveness as much as for them to provide a means of subverting representation in its oppressive, colonizing aspect, sometimes even at the cost of presentational appeal. In addition to discussing the general conditions for this subversion, the article outlines some potential means for constructing such representations, including the presentation of referential materials as disruptive elements; the way in which these disruptions foreground the sense-making nature of daily experience; and the related and desirable shift of investments of meaning and attributions of significance from author to reader.
{"title":"Complexity and materiality in representations of reality","authors":"Kalle Pihlainen","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2151231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2151231","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article proceeds from the assumption that poststructuralism contains an ethical dimension despite contrary claims by many of its critics. This ethics can be seen in the poststructuralist refusal of representation and, importantly, allows for representative interventions when their benefits are assumed to outweigh any conceivable harm. As an elaboration of this ethics, the aim is to defend a representational strategy of complexity. Such a use of complexity parallels modernist and postmodern artistic representations advocating alienation or defamiliarization but is here examined specifically in relation to referential representations like history writing. The key ethical argument is that complexity in such representations can foreground the existence of radical alterity and foster an attitude of respect toward it. Hence, the central goal is not for representations to maximize presentational effectiveness as much as for them to provide a means of subverting representation in its oppressive, colonizing aspect, sometimes even at the cost of presentational appeal. In addition to discussing the general conditions for this subversion, the article outlines some potential means for constructing such representations, including the presentation of referential materials as disruptive elements; the way in which these disruptions foreground the sense-making nature of daily experience; and the related and desirable shift of investments of meaning and attributions of significance from author to reader.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"27 1","pages":"93 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42563687","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}
Pub Date : 2022-12-08DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2151220
M. Valderrama
ABSTRACT This article presents a first outline on the relations between the middle voice and the century that staged it as a novelty or an archaic repetition. The middle voice has the trace of a dispute in historiography. It announces an alteration or interruption in the modern regime of historical representation. At least, it seems to be clear from the use of this expression by philosophers, historians and semiologists in debates about the writing of history. I would like to establish in this essay that the middle voice can be considered the ‘object of the century’, or better still the ‘thing’ or ‘cause’ on which the twentieth century seems to be based on.
{"title":"Trauma, modernism, realism: a genealogy, the middle voice","authors":"M. Valderrama","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2151220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2151220","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article presents a first outline on the relations between the middle voice and the century that staged it as a novelty or an archaic repetition. The middle voice has the trace of a dispute in historiography. It announces an alteration or interruption in the modern regime of historical representation. At least, it seems to be clear from the use of this expression by philosophers, historians and semiologists in debates about the writing of history. I would like to establish in this essay that the middle voice can be considered the ‘object of the century’, or better still the ‘thing’ or ‘cause’ on which the twentieth century seems to be based on.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"27 1","pages":"74 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46165705","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-15DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2143672
María Inés La Greca
ABSTRACT We have witnessed in the field of theory of history an effort to come to terms with its past, namely, the linguistic turn and the specific narrativist debate that emerged after Hayden White’s Metahistory. However, ‘linguistic turn’ refers to a broader shift in twentieth-century Humanities. In the writings by Joan W. Scott, we find a paradigmatic intersection between theory of history, gender studies and a linguistic turn-stance of a specific poststructuralist kind. Reflecting on White’s and Scott’s work, I show how their criticisms of narrative and identity meet and how developments in the fields of feminist theory and history become relevant for those interested in moving forward discussions in theory of history. This paper aims at calling our attention to how marginalized groups' struggles have forced an ongoing negotiation of the terms of humanity within and beyond academia. I recall White’s thoughts around middle-voice, specifically his claim that we have to rethink the relationship between the agent of historical writing and its writing. I claim that feminist struggles and theorization allow us to refigure the idea of assuming a voice as a process that involves as much disidentification from, as rewriting of, our received identities: as middle voice writing.
在历史理论领域中，我们看到了一种与过去妥协的努力，即海登·怀特的“元历史”之后出现的语言转向和具体的叙事主义辩论。然而，“语言转向”指的是20世纪人文学科更广泛的转变。在琼·斯科特(Joan W. Scott)的著作中，我们发现了历史理论、性别研究和特定后结构主义类型的语言转向立场之间的范式交叉。在反思怀特和斯科特的作品时，我展示了他们对叙事和身份的批评是如何相遇的，以及女性主义理论和历史领域的发展是如何与那些对推进历史理论讨论感兴趣的人相关的。本文旨在唤起我们对边缘化群体的斗争如何迫使学术界内外正在进行的人性条款谈判的关注。我想起了怀特关于中音的想法，特别是他的主张，即我们必须重新思考历史写作的代理人与其写作之间的关系。我认为，女权主义斗争和理论化使我们能够重新定义假设一种声音的概念，这是一个过程，它涉及到对我们所接受的身份的去除和重写:就像中间声音写作一样。
{"title":"The other side of the linguistic turn: theory of history and the negotiation of humanity","authors":"María Inés La Greca","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2143672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2143672","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We have witnessed in the field of theory of history an effort to come to terms with its past, namely, the linguistic turn and the specific narrativist debate that emerged after Hayden White’s Metahistory. However, ‘linguistic turn’ refers to a broader shift in twentieth-century Humanities. In the writings by Joan W. Scott, we find a paradigmatic intersection between theory of history, gender studies and a linguistic turn-stance of a specific poststructuralist kind. Reflecting on White’s and Scott’s work, I show how their criticisms of narrative and identity meet and how developments in the fields of feminist theory and history become relevant for those interested in moving forward discussions in theory of history. This paper aims at calling our attention to how marginalized groups' struggles have forced an ongoing negotiation of the terms of humanity within and beyond academia. I recall White’s thoughts around middle-voice, specifically his claim that we have to rethink the relationship between the agent of historical writing and its writing. I claim that feminist struggles and theorization allow us to refigure the idea of assuming a voice as a process that involves as much disidentification from, as rewriting of, our received identities: as middle voice writing.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"27 1","pages":"3 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42158629","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-11DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2144024
Natalia Taccetta
ABSTRACT In Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Hayden White argues that the theory of historical writing must attend to what the author characterizes as modernist events. He is thinking about the World Wars, genocides, the overwhelming growth of world population, the widespread poverty in most of the global population and famines on an unimaginable scale, among other factors linked to nuclear explosions and the ecological disaster. These events imply a revision of the very concept of event and new categories and conventions for attributing meaning to them. Similarly, Walter Benjamin draw attention to historical thinking in this mutation of the structure of modern experience. It is only necessary to remember the distinction that the author establishes between a kind of “true” experience (Erfahrung) and a devalue experience (Erlebnis) in a classic 1933 text, “Experience and poverty”. There is an irreducible distance between the communicable experience, collected from tradition and transmitted from generation to generation, and the modern depreciated experience, that is reactive to linguistic formulation. Considering the so-called archival turn in theory and art since the end of the 1990s, Latin American archival art posits complex archaeologies about the relationship between the present and the past in post-dictatorship societies, and new challenges to historiography and art history. It is by collecting these traditions that we could explore some artistic devices that defy history-writing conventions and archival considerations. To do so, this paper explores two films considered as archival works of art focusing on some relationships between Benjamin’s and White’s reflections on history that have not been thoroughly analyzed.
{"title":"Disappearance and archive fevers in film: the rewriting of history and practical uses of the past","authors":"Natalia Taccetta","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2144024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2144024","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Hayden White argues that the theory of historical writing must attend to what the author characterizes as modernist events. He is thinking about the World Wars, genocides, the overwhelming growth of world population, the widespread poverty in most of the global population and famines on an unimaginable scale, among other factors linked to nuclear explosions and the ecological disaster. These events imply a revision of the very concept of event and new categories and conventions for attributing meaning to them. Similarly, Walter Benjamin draw attention to historical thinking in this mutation of the structure of modern experience. It is only necessary to remember the distinction that the author establishes between a kind of “true” experience (Erfahrung) and a devalue experience (Erlebnis) in a classic 1933 text, “Experience and poverty”. There is an irreducible distance between the communicable experience, collected from tradition and transmitted from generation to generation, and the modern depreciated experience, that is reactive to linguistic formulation. Considering the so-called archival turn in theory and art since the end of the 1990s, Latin American archival art posits complex archaeologies about the relationship between the present and the past in post-dictatorship societies, and new challenges to historiography and art history. It is by collecting these traditions that we could explore some artistic devices that defy history-writing conventions and archival considerations. To do so, this paper explores two films considered as archival works of art focusing on some relationships between Benjamin’s and White’s reflections on history that have not been thoroughly analyzed.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"27 1","pages":"26 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45825010","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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2136595
Rodrigo Mayorga
ABSTRACT In the last fifteen years, high schoolers became key actors in the Chilean political landscape, as members of anti-neoliberal and feminist social movements. Although social researchers have paid increasing attention to them, few have analyzed how these young people relate to and make use of history in the context of their political struggles. Combining an ethnographic and a microhistorical approach, this article examines a Chilean public high school and a particular and widespread historical narrative about it. I argue that the different ways in which this narrative was invoked, transmitted and contested in a context of massive student protests – and the pedagogical devices and practices of cooperation and conflict used to do so – allowed the students of this school not only to use history in favor of their political agendas, but to participate in the continual production of a political field in which the borders of their historical community and who could be considered members of it were being disputed. In doing this, the article illuminates some of the complicated interactions between historical consciousness, political action and citizenship in modern societies, as well as illustrates the usefulness of combining an historical and an ethnographic lens to visualize the nuances and tensions existing when human beings make use of history. Further, it sheds light on the concept of historical consciousness itself, illustrating how historians and other social researchers can operationalize it to better comprehend how human beings relate with the past, but also the present and the future.
{"title":"The histories we tell: historical consciousness and student protests in a Chilean public high school","authors":"Rodrigo Mayorga","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2136595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2136595","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the last fifteen years, high schoolers became key actors in the Chilean political landscape, as members of anti-neoliberal and feminist social movements. Although social researchers have paid increasing attention to them, few have analyzed how these young people relate to and make use of history in the context of their political struggles. Combining an ethnographic and a microhistorical approach, this article examines a Chilean public high school and a particular and widespread historical narrative about it. I argue that the different ways in which this narrative was invoked, transmitted and contested in a context of massive student protests – and the pedagogical devices and practices of cooperation and conflict used to do so – allowed the students of this school not only to use history in favor of their political agendas, but to participate in the continual production of a political field in which the borders of their historical community and who could be considered members of it were being disputed. In doing this, the article illuminates some of the complicated interactions between historical consciousness, political action and citizenship in modern societies, as well as illustrates the usefulness of combining an historical and an ethnographic lens to visualize the nuances and tensions existing when human beings make use of history. Further, it sheds light on the concept of historical consciousness itself, illustrating how historians and other social researchers can operationalize it to better comprehend how human beings relate with the past, but also the present and the future.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"466 - 492"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42645098","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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2145062
Taynna M. Marino
ABSTRACT This article rethinks the problems of empathy in historical theory in the context of current discussions about environmental problems, relations between humans and nonhumans as well as Western and Indigenous knowledges. The category of ‘empathic unsettlement’, coined by the theorist of history Dominick LaCapra, is presented to address the role of empathy as a way to know, engage and narrate the experience of historical subjects in the past. In this article, I analyse and expand the understanding of empathy in dialogue with reflections by the Indigenous activist and intellectual, Ailton Krenak. The purpose of this article is not to review the literature on the topic of empathy or to bring comparative analyses from the reflections of LaCapra and Krenak. Rather, their works serve as a platform that creates space for discussing the notion of empathy as a bridging concept that helps to develop a complementary and collaborative approach between Western and Indigenous knowledges. I claim that the role of empathy is to recognize other ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, and to ‘make time to tell new stories’ that would contribute to building sustainable knowledge.
{"title":"The role of empathy in bridging Western and Indigenous knowledges: Dominick LaCapra and Ailton Krenak","authors":"Taynna M. Marino","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2145062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2145062","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article rethinks the problems of empathy in historical theory in the context of current discussions about environmental problems, relations between humans and nonhumans as well as Western and Indigenous knowledges. The category of ‘empathic unsettlement’, coined by the theorist of history Dominick LaCapra, is presented to address the role of empathy as a way to know, engage and narrate the experience of historical subjects in the past. In this article, I analyse and expand the understanding of empathy in dialogue with reflections by the Indigenous activist and intellectual, Ailton Krenak. The purpose of this article is not to review the literature on the topic of empathy or to bring comparative analyses from the reflections of LaCapra and Krenak. Rather, their works serve as a platform that creates space for discussing the notion of empathy as a bridging concept that helps to develop a complementary and collaborative approach between Western and Indigenous knowledges. I claim that the role of empathy is to recognize other ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, and to ‘make time to tell new stories’ that would contribute to building sustainable knowledge.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"569 - 595"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48229215","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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2135818
Marleen Hiltrop, S. Polak
ABSTRACT This paper offers a semiotic analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s role in American cultural memory by addressing the interaction in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) between Lincoln’s two roles as a larger than life persona and a relatable ‘common’ man. By using the literary tropes of synecdoche and metonym, and Ernst Kantorowicz’s notion of the King’s two bodies (‘body natural’ and ‘body politic’), this paper examines Lincoln’s roles in the novel and argues that his portrayal as a synecdochic representation of the nation (his body natural) is crucial to the formation of his metonymic representation (his body politic). Discussing examples that range from the connection between the White House and the nation during the Civil War, to Lincoln’s remarkable appearance and his role in the abolition of slavery, we reach the conclusion that Lincoln’s popularity in American cultural memory is owing to the interweaving of these two semiotic relations.
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