History and Theory最新文献

Unlike those studies that conclude with a future collapsing under presentism, this article takes a fresh look at the issue of futures. To that end, the first part of the article offers a review of presentism, which amounts not to the erasure of any given future but to the proliferation of possible futures in the age of the Anthropocene. The second part sets out to identify novel futures that, while they may differ from those of presentism, do not seek to revive the future proposed by the defunct modern regime of historicity. By tracking the experience of “real utopias” bent on birthing other worlds, we can begin to map their preconditions. At the intersection of several extant regimes of historicity, the autonomous Zapatista zone that has, since 1994, arisen in southern Mexico has proven uniquely inventive; it may serve as a remarkable observatory for the appearance of unprecedented futures.

One hundred years have passed since Max Weber's death. This article explores an aspect of his work that, although fundamental, has received little attention in theoretical discussions about historiography: the relationship between explanation and narration. This article's analysis proceeds from two basic hypotheses: (1) some of the questions posed by narrativism to theory of history were already present in Weber's intellectual context; (2) in Weber's work, we can find a helpful, albeit nearly forgotten, answer to these questions insofar as his proposal situates the narrative explanation of history in the logical framework of causal imputation. Based on these hypotheses, this article's central objective is to examine how and to what extent a return to Weber can shed new light on the problem of historical explanation without disregarding its narrative nature. The article's first step, then, is to briefly review the fundamental questions posed by narrativism to the theory of history, with an emphasis on the structure of a historical narration; after that, it shows how and to what extent we can find a response to these questions in Weber's work. Ultimately, the article seeks to demonstrate the compatibility between the structure of a narrative, as evidenced by Arthur C. Danto, and the logical-causal explanation model proposed by Weber, which will serve as the basis for a clearer distinction between historical narratives and fictional ones.

This article addresses four questions: What is Afropessimism? What is history? What can history (not) do in service of black people given the insights of Afropessimism? If history fails to service black people, what should be done with history? It argues that an unavoidable conclusion of Afropessimism is that history, a disciplinary mode of knowledge production, is tethered to the historical construct of the Human and thus is exploitative of the Slave/the Black, which is the negative image of the Human. This article elaborates on the implications of this indictment of history, suggesting that invention of different ways of being becomes at least possible to imagine—to think about—when history is brought into relief, not as the form by which historians account for the past but rather as the evidence of who historians are and what they value in the world as it exists.

While much of Donald Bloxham's History and Morality is devoted to analyzing the evaluative processes of historians, Bloxham develops and relies on two strong philosophical concepts. The first is his claim that context must be understood as causality because a historical context is one of the causes of actions. Bloxham uses this to argue that historians must ascribe responsibility to past actors rather than blame their cultures. A wide critique of moral relativism emerges from this principle. The second is a distinction between a type of account that explains past events or entities in terms of their internal, unified natures and a type that understands them in terms of their relations to the rest of their world. Here, Bloxham's great concern is the isolation of forces from one another that helps to put them into conflict. The twentieth-century nation-state is the most important example of this. The “internalist” approach was part of what led to the Holocaust, to which Bloxham has dedicated most of his scholarly life. These two concepts anchor and justify historians in morally evaluating the decisions and deeds they study. But these ideas also point to deeper and more fully philosophical conceptions supporting moral evaluation that historians should practice in an exemplary way and that link historical consciousness to the chief issues of moral philosophy.

In Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South, Prathama Banerjee challenges the ontological givenness of the category of the political in South Asian histories. The claim is surprising since the most productive interventions that heralded a postcolonial turn in the field have been preoccupied with analyses of colonialism, nationalism, political economy, and sovereignty. I situate Banerjee's claims in the context of her arguments about the meaning and appositeness of a decolonial historiography of the global South. This book is an attempt to break out from the postcolonial into a decolonial mode of history writing. While seemingly simple, stable, universal, and singular, the political, she argues, is anything but. How, then, do we recognize it? The political shows itself through a contest or comparison with that which is not identical to it, the nonpolitical. The semantic field of the political always includes “nonpolitical” and “extrapolitical” aspects such as the economic or the spiritual. And the concept of the political comes undone when we follow up on these connections. This essay analyzes the intellectual stakes of the book as a conceptual history of the political by analyzing its constituent “elements”: Self, Action, Idea, and People. I conclude with an assessment of it as a model for decolonial histories of the global South.

From the twelfth to the nineteenth century, Persian was used as the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia. Mana Kia's Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism, a searching account of selfhood across this vast region, is novel in its use of Derridean deconstruction to distill shared forms of belonging and affiliation during the political disarray of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kia is part of a growing and important chorus of scholars who are questioning primordialist conceptualizations of identity by challenging widely held assumptions that Persian is a language that has always belonged to Iran or that its use in India was a foreign import, out of place and unnatural. More broadly, Kia's work holds a mirror up to historians of precolonial contexts, encouraging us to think more carefully about the fundamental conceptual and descriptive language that we use to describe how people inhabited those worlds.