DAVID CARR'S THEORY OF EXPERIENCING TIMES PAST

This article is a review of David Carr's “Reflections on Temporal Perspective” in which Carr argues that present‐day historians or philosophers can experience the past, given that the past persists into the present and thus has a “presence” in contemporary life that makes it directly accessible to us. On that basis, Carr seeks to craft a phenomenological approach to history that puts experience in the place of representation and memory, rejecting thereby traditional notions of how we come to know and understand the past. Inherent in this approach is a new, and now widely shared, revision of our understanding of historical temporality, for such an experiencing of the past analytically demands a revised understanding of what “past” signifies when it is “present.” In this, Carr participates in a much broader movement in current historiography, which can be seen in the work of Frank Ankersmit, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Dominick LaCapra, Ewa Domanska, Eelco Runia, and others who focus on the persistence of the past in the present, embracing a materialist rather than linguistic or narrativist approach to historical research and writing. But if history signifies change over time, what “past” in the present do we actually experience? How is it logically possible to embrace both a commitment to the notion of historical development—as Carr does—and a notion of historical perseverance so powerful that the past as such survives and can be experienced? Carr's answer to this query is that “the present point of view is somehow permanent and yet always changing, framed at each moment by a different past and future.” What makes this possible, in his view, is the reality of superimposed temporalities, an idea he illustrates in his analysis of Braudel's La Mediterranée and other works. Hence it is precisely his “reflections on temporal perspective” that enable the experience of the past.     

RETROACTIVE RESPONSIBILITY:

State redress for abuse and neglect in children’s homes has been debated in all Scandinavian countries since early 2000s. In Sweden, an official apology was issued in 2011, and a temporary law enabled Swedish care leavers to apply for compensation of SEK 250,000 during 2013 and 2014. In Denmark, proposals for an official apology have repeatedly been turned down in Parliament. In this article, I compare argumentation for and against state redress in the two countries. Any claim for historical justice raises questions about how to understand the injustices committed: do they safely belong to the past, or to an extended present? Using the concept ‘politics of time’, I show that Danish opponents of the proposed apology have stressed the time distance, while proponents for state redress in both countries have stressed the need to deal with all too present memories of abuse. Another main argument against state redress in the Danish political debate was that we should not anachronistically judge historical actors against the moral framework of the present. I argue that a ‘retroactivity dilemma’ is inevitably raised in redress processes, and discuss the changing notions of retroactive responsibility during the Swedish policy process.     

4. THE MATERIAL PRESENCE OF THE PAST

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a “return to things.” This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is “real,” where “regaining” the object is conceived as a means for re‐establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the (ontological) status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between the organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to bruno latour's idea of the agency of things and object‐oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person (dead or alive) in argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the “contradictory” or anomalous status of the present‐absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present‐absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square.     

The two Jameses: a Joycean politics of criticism as commemoration

Abstract

This article considers how, and to what extent, James Connolly is represented in the works of James Joyce and evaluates the place of Connolly in Joyce through an exposition of Andrew Gibson and Len Platt’s characterisation of a “London method” and “Irish method” of Joyce criticism. Examining the relative absence of Connolly from Joycean representation in comparison to overt commemorations such as those of Yeats et al., I claim that historical criticism on Joyce displays a will-to-connection between Connolly and Joyce that makes present the absence of the former. Where Connolly appears in Joyce, I suggest it is as a ghost called into presence through suggestive absence and a drive to commemoration in critical readings, inscribed not only in a Joycean politics but also in a politics of Joyce criticism. At a critical historical juncture for a reappraisal of Connolly and in the light of recent movements for self-determination such as in Scotland, this article examines how it is Joycean criticism that forges a narrative of connection to Connolly, outlining a genealogy of Joycean criticism centring on politics and nation and drawing on examples from across the Joycean canon to posit a politics of criticism that is illuminating of both the historical method and historical moment.     

Race and the Pitfalls of Emotional Democracy: Primary Schools and the Critique of Black Pete in the Netherlands

A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete, has met with growing contestation in the past decade over its caricatural representation of people of African descent. Attacks on this national “happy object” elicited a host of majority responses that converged in professing non‐racism. As the celebration is primarily thought of as a children's festival, schools across the Netherlands had to decide whether to maintain, alter or suppress the Black Pete character. This article considers the spatial politics of race that informed school decisions about the festival. We show geographical variation in the distribution between change and non‐change. However, we find that both strategies were justified in the name of respect for “black feelings”, even as majority calls for mutual tolerance between proponents and opponents of Black Pete normatively portrayed multicultural society as conflict free and ultimately strove to disarm anti‐racist critique by framing it as anti‐democratic.     

Spectacles of Ethnographic and Historical Imaginations: Kamatapur Movement and the Rajbanshi Quest to Rediscover their Past and Selves

India since independence has experienced a series of movements based on “identity politics” demanding separate states and reorganization of its internal state boundaries. Much of the contemporary discussions find uneven development and unequal access to power accelerated by regionalism and linguistic fanatism responsible for these movements. Through the study of social movements of Koch–Rajbanshi people in North Bengal, the paper argues that these movements display a timeless quest and aspirations of people that are rooted in their deep sense of history. People's unique sense of history or “historical imaginations” are contextualized within the secular language of socio-economic injustices and socio-cultural differences celebrated in a spectacular manner through these movements marked by re-interpretation, re-writing of the past, real yet imagined, time bound yet eternal. Today the Koch–Rajbanshi people are creating a “new past” and an identity which is a blend of colonial ethnography on one hand and Rajbanshi mythographies on the other. The paper also questions the dichotomy that apparently exists between the past and the present.     

Governmentalities of Urban Crises in Inner‐city Athens,Greece

Through the notion of “conjuncture” this paper explores the interplay of urban crises that have been unfolding in the city of Athens during the past 7 years (2008–2014). By focusing on specific “critical moments” that have significantly influenced the narratives, discourses and subsequent policies concerning “Athens in crisis”, it examines a number of intertwined approaches and tactics that shaped the governmentality of such crisis. These approaches and tactics, that work in tandem, include emergency‐driven policies and politics; politics of fear that occasionally transform into geographies of fear; processes of defining the “public” and “public enemies”; and redefinitions of (il)legalities. Yet, they have repercussions on people, places and politics. In this context, certain issues are deemed critical or urgent while others do not or are even obscured.     

“FUTURE PAST”: TIME AND TELEOLOGY IN (ANCIENT) HISTORIOGRAPHY

The historian's account of the past is strongly shaped by the future of the events narrated. The telos, that is, the vantage point from which the past is envisaged, influences the selection of the material as well as its arrangement. Although the telos is past for historians and readers, it is future for historical agents. The term “future past,” coined by Reinhart Koselleck to highlight the fact that the future was seen differently before the Sattelzeit, also lends itself to capturing this asymmetry and elucidating its ramifications for the writing of history. The first part of the essay elaborates on the notion of “future past”: besides considering its significance and pitfalls, I offset it against the perspectivity of historical knowledge and the concept of narrative “closure” (I). Then the works of two ancient historians, Polybius and Sallust, serve as test cases that illustrate the intricacies of “future past.” Neither has received much credit for intellectual sophistication in scholarship, and yet the different narrative strategies Polybius and Sallust deploy reveal profound reflections on the temporal dynamics of writing history (II). Although the issue of “future past” is particularly pertinent to the strongly narrative historiography of antiquity, the controversy about the end of the Roman Republic demonstrates that it also applies to the works of modern historians (III). Finally, I will argue that “future past” alerts us to an aspect of how we relate to the past that is in danger of being obliterated in the current debate on “presence” and history. The past is present in customs, relics, and rituals, but the historiographical construction of the past is predicated on a complex hermeneutical operation that involves the choice of a telos. The concept of “future past” also differs from post‐structuralist theories through its emphasis on time. Retrospect calms the flow of time, but is unable to arrest it fully, as the openness of the past survives in the form of “future past” (IV).     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

ARCHITECTURAL MOVEMENTS,UTOPIAN MOMENTS: (IN)COHERENT RENDERINGS OF THE HUNDERTWASSER‐HAUS,VIENNA

This article explores some of the manifold entanglements of architecture and utopia. It takes as a case study a social housing block in Vienna: the Hundertwasser‐Haus. The house was designed by the artist‐architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser and has attracted enormous attention from the architectural press and tourists. I articulate a series of architectural “movements”, manifest in Hundertwasser's design philosophy, press reportage about the house, residents' experiences of living at the house, and visitors' activities outside it. I argue that from these movements, a series of essentially unconnected utopian “moments” emerged. The article makes two contributions. First, it builds upon gathering interest in the geographies of utopia – specifically by moving beyond an emphasis upon utopian hope. It locates utopian impulses that are imbued with euphoria and joy, and which are not beset by a sense of lack. It also provides empirical examples of “unsettling” utopias of different registers (such as textual and experiential). Second, the article contributes to recent geographical approaches to studying architecture. It uses the analytical motif of movements to gain a sense of how a material building – and the idea of that building – is constituted as much by tenuous relations and disjunctures (even non‐relations) as by relations. Whereas contemporary geographies of architecture do not leave room for tenuous relations and disjunctures in their narratives, this article tries to do so. It highlights how utopian moments at the Hundertwasser‐Haus are proximate to each other: they are located metaphorically and/or literally at the house. Yet those moments neither conform to a coherent, singular narrative, and in some cases, nor do they relate to each other. The article opens debate about the significance of non‐relational sociotechnical constituents to the geographies of architecture.     

Life and Death Decisions in our Posthuman(ist) Times

Abstract: Geography, like much of social science, is witnessing a resurgence of interest in Michel Foucault's formation of biopower—the power to make live and foster life. This paper seeks to engage with this interest by staging a dialogue between the work of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow on the one hand and that of Giorgio Agamben on the other. I propose that, while Rose and Rabinow provide a diagnostic for our emerging geographies of “life itself” and outline allied forms of political citizenship known as “biosociality” or “biological citizenship”, it is Agamben who enables us to consider the limit figures to this form of political inclusion. To draw out these limit figures I focus on recent debates surrounding end‐of‐life decisions and provide examples from the Dignity in Dying campaign and the Not Dead Yet movement. Throughout, I situate this paper within recent debates on posthumanism and the posthuman in geography. In doing so I effectively ask: why, in our seemingly posthuman(ist) times, does much of Western politics seek to decide on the form, the right and, inevitably, the limit of human beings?     

3. “PRESENCE” AND MYTH

There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of “presence” that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate “presence” to representation. Then I focus on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of “stowaway” (Runia), so that the past is literally “present” in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so‐called “parallel processes” for an analysis of this variant of historical representation.     

6. ACTES DE PRÉSENCE: PRESENCE IN FASCIST POLITICAL CULTURE1

In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence‐based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of “the philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the “presentification of the past.” This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual idealism, or actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural “L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica” (Pure Experience and Historical Reality), Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past.     

Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories

In this article, I explore the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a site through which social memories are transmitted and connected to the realities of Argentina’s present. The conjuncture or disjuncture between people’s direct and individual memories of the past, their memory of the society’s collective past, and the “official” history can be used as a prism for seeing how power, and resistance, work through and reinforce a complex political economy. By giving testimony and re‐contextualizing the events of the dictatorship, the Mothers have been able to challenge the historical narratives of the state and construct competing ones. Furthermore, the present‐day activism and goals of the Mothers, as individuals and as a collective, are based on political commitments that have arisen in great part out of maternal relationships and maternal memories. Their maternal memories have led to a re‐signification of neoliberalism as a type of structural violence.     

TIME,PRESENCE, AND HISTORICAL INJUSTICE

The relationship between history and justice traditionally has been dominated by the idea of the past as distant or absent (and with that, irreversible). This ambiguous ontological status makes it very difficult to situate the often‐felt “duty to remember” or obligation to “do justice to the past” in that past itself, and this has led philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Keith Jenkins to plead against an “obsession” with history in favor of an ethics aimed at the present. History's ability to contribute to the quest for justice, as a result, often seems very restricted or even nonexistent. The introduction of the “presence”‐paradigm in historiography can potentially alter this relation between history and justice. However, to do so it should be conceived in such a way that it offers a fundamental critique of the metaphysical dichotomy between the present and the absent and the underlying concept of time (chronosophy) that supports this dichotomy. The “presence”‐paradigm can be emancipatory and productive only if presence and absence are not perceived as absolute dichotomies. In the first part of this article I elaborate on the influence that the present/absent dichotomy has on the notion of justice by introducing a conceptual contrast between what I will call the “time of jurisdiction” and the “time of history.” The second part of the article focuses on the way certain aspects of the dominant Western chronosophy reinforce the present/absent dichotomy and thereby prevent us from thoroughly exploring the ambiguous but often very problematic presence of the past. Throughout the article I refer to the relatively recent phenomenon of truth commissions and the context of transitional justice to discuss some challenges for the “presence”‐paradigm.     

American Presbyterians,Freedmen's Missions,and the Nile Valley: Missionary History,Racial Orders,and Church Politics on the World Stage

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American Presbyterian “home” and “foreign” missions developed parallel and mutually reinforcing policies towards freed slaves in Egypt, Sudan, and the U.S.A. as well as towards Egypt's indigenous Christians, the Copts. Yet the racial ideologies and social hierarchies of these three countries reflected distinct historical trajectories of migration and conquest. In the Nile Valley, American missionaries struggled to understand, address, and sometimes revise Egyptian and Sudanese social hierarchies, which they found alternately idiosyncratic or unjust. This essay conjectures that these interactions, in the long run, induced the Nile Valley missionaries to confront the lingering injustices and incongruities in American social hierarchies, particularly in the mid‐ to late twentieth century. In this way, the “foreign” mission experience had a backflow for missionaries and their church by raising questions about American racial orders and by strengthening a commitment to civil rights and social justice agendas.     

SCHOLARSHIP AND PERIODIZATION

Davis argues that the familiar periodization dividing European history into medieval and modern phases disguises a claim to power as a historical fact. It justifies slavery and subjugation by projecting them onto the “feudal” Middle Ages and non‐European present, while hiding forms of slavery and subjugation practiced by “secular” modernity. Periodization thus furnishes one of the most durable conceptual foundations for the usurpation of liberty and the abuse of power. In part I, devoted to “feudalism,” Davis traces the legal, political, and colonial struggles behind the development of the concept of “feudal law” in early modern France and England and unravels just how that concept hides colonial oppression while justifying European sovereignty. In part II, devoted to “secularization,” she demonstrates the failure of twentieth‐century critics of “secularization” like Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to break out of the limits imposed by the medieval/modern periodization. Part II concludes with a look at conceptual alternatives in the writings of Amitav Ghosh and the Venerable Bede. Three limitations of this book are worth mentioning. It traces the political history hidden by the concept of “feudalism,” but does not trace the political history hidden by the concept of “religion.” It offers no answer to the question of how to break the link between scholarship and politics without ending up in a logical impasse or reinforcing the link. It does not address the possibility that answering this question may require breaking with the terms of professional historical inquiry. Perhaps the question could be answered in terms like those that led Wittgenstein to characterize his Philosophical Investigations as remarks on the natural history of human beings.     

HISTORY IN THE SIKH PAST1

This article offers a reading of an early eighteenth‐century Punjabi text—Gur Sobha or “The Splendor of the Guru”—as a form of historical representation, suggesting reasons for the importance of the representation of the past as history within Sikh discursive contexts. The text in question provides an account of the life, death, and teachings of the last of the ten living Sikh Gurus or teachers, Guru Gobind Singh. The article argues that the construction of history in this text is linked to the transition of the Sikh community at the death of the last living Guru whereby authority was invested in the canonical text (granth) and community (panth). As such a particular rationale for history was produced within Sikh religious thought and intellectual production around the discursive construction of the community in relation to the past and as a continuing presence. As such, the text provides an alternative to modern European forms of historical representation, while sharing some features of the “historical” as defined in that context. The essay relates this phenomenon to a broader exploration of history in South Asian contexts, to notions of historicality that are plural, and to issues particular to the intersection of history and religion. Later texts, through the middle of the nineteenth century, are briefly considered, to provide a sense of the significance of Gur Sobha within a broader, historically and religiously constituted Sikh imagination of the past.     

Emancipatory or Neoliberal Food Politics? Exploring the “Politics of Collectivity” of Buying Groups in the Search for Egalitarian Food Democracies

In the context of apolitical tendencies in food studies, this paper explores how alternative food networks can contribute to developing emancipatory food politics rather than constitute a tool to reproduce neoliberal subjectivities. For this purpose, I contend that the post‐political literature offers a useful approach to examining the concept of food politics by developing a more robust theoretical framework, permitting the establishment of linkages with broader contemporary processes of social change. The analysis of an action‐research process with buying groups in Spain is used to examine the “politics of collectivity” at play, that is, how these initiatives institutionalise “the political”. Specifically I explore the motivations mobilised to construct place‐based ethical repertoires and unveil how these groups govern the relationality of consumption practices in the pursuit of broader processes of change. I conclude by discussing the contribution of these initiatives to building egalitarian food democracies.