History and Theory最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.