The Pantheon of Feminist Culture: Women’s Movements and the Organization of Memory

The collective memory of feminist movements, like that of nation-states, is comprised of ‘invented traditions’ and embodied in ‘lieu de mémoire’ (sites of memory). This essay considers national and international examples of collective memory, including International Women’s Day, showing how celebrations of historical events and commemorations of the past were used to cement group cohesion and define boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The essay proposes a typology of collective memory and examines the implications of the attenuation of memory in contemporary society.     

Locke on representation in politics

This article contextualises Hegel's writings on international order, especially those concerning war and imperialism. The recurring theme is the tragic nature of the struggles for recognition which are instantiated by these phenomena. Section one examines Hegel's analysis of the Holy Roman Empire in the context of French incursions into German territories, as that analysis was developed in his early essay on ‘The German Constitution’ (1798–1802). The significance of his distinction between the political and civil spheres is explored, with particular attention being paid to its implications for Hegel's theory of nationalism. The second section examines Hegel's development of the latter theory in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), stressing the tragic interpenetration of ‘culture’ and intersubjective recognition. A recurring theme here is the influence of this theory on Hegel's interpretation of Napoleon's World-Historic mission, as that was revealed in his contemporaneous letters. Section three traces the tragic dynamic underlying the discussion of war between civilised states in The Philosophy of Right (1821). Section four examines three other types of imperial action in Hegel's mature writings, particularly The Philosophy of History (1832). These are relations between civilised states and culturally developed yet politically immature societies; colonial expansion motivated by capitalist under-consumption; and conflict between civilised states and barbarous peoples. It is concluded that it is misleading to claim that Hegel glorified conflict and war, and that he did not see domination by ‘civilised states’ as the ‘final stage’ of World History.     

Standing buildings and built heritage

SUMMARY: This essay examines the available archive of articles on standing buildings published in Post-Medieval Archaeology. After setting out some general trends evident in a brief analysis of the number of buildings archaeology articles published over the last 50 years, their subjects and authors, this essay places these articles in three key wider contexts: the relationship of buildings archaeology to architectural history; buildings archaeology in Post-Medieval Archaeology in an international context; and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology’s relative lack of engagement with modern buildings and contemporary built heritage.     

The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer

Forgetting has rarely been investigated in historical theory. Insofar as it attracted the attention of theorists at all, forgetting has ordinarily been considered to be a defect in our relationship to the past that should be overcome in one way or another. The only exception is Nietzsche who so provocatively sung the praises of forgetting in his On the Use and Abuse of History (1874). But Nietzsche’s conception is the easy victim of a consistent historicism and therefore in need of correction. Four types of forgetting are identified in this essay. Central in the essay’s argument is the fourth type. This is the kind of forgetting taking place when a civilization “commits suicide” by exchanging a previous identity for a new one. Hegel’s moving account of the conflict between Socrates and the Athenian state is presented as the paradigmatic example of this kind of forgetting. Two conclusions follow from an analysis of this type of forgetting. First, we can now understand what should be recognized as a civilization’s historical sublime and how the notions of the historical sublime and of collective trauma are related. Second, it follows that myth and (scientific) history do not exclude each other; on the contrary, (scientific) history creates myth. This should not be taken to be a defect of history, for this is precisely how it should be.     

From Paper to Celluloid and Back Again: Finance and Form in Jorge Délano’s Films

This essay argues that our current understanding of the cinematic work by the pioneering Chilean film director Jorge Délano obscures a sophisticated interaction between politics, art and economics, one that reveals unexamined aspects of how the film industry developed in Chile. Most notably, it argues that Délano’s illustrated political satire magazine Topaze was central to the development of early sound cinema in the country. Following Rielle Navitski, the essay utilizes and examines tensions between models drawn from periodical studies and the concepts of remediation and intermediality in film studies. Examining illustrations from the first three years of Topaze’s production (1931–1933) in the context of the country’s economic situation, the essay argues that Délano remediated cinema in Topaze as a strategy of capital accumulation. This analysis also makes it possible to see how one of his sound films, Escándalo (1940), similarly remediated the illustrated paper periodical as he pursued financing for the production of cinematic commodities for export. The essay ends by examining the relationship between these issues and the political situation in early Cold War Chile.     

‘Nothing is Certain’: Czech Post-War Literature Between the Avant-Garde and Expressionism

The Czech post-war avant-garde is split between collective enthusiasm, the adoration of the masses, and the depiction of the lone individual in crisis. Interpretations of this period have until now been based on the opposition of Literární skupina (the ‘Literary Group’, with an expressionist, individualist platform) vs. Devětsil (with an avant-gardist, collectivist platform). This study examines how understanding of the terms ‘expressionist’ and ‘avant-garde’ changed in the period in which Literární skupina and Devětsil emerged, followed by literary historical reflections on this process during the 1960s and 1970s, when Literární skupina came to be seen as distinct from the avant-garde on the basis of its espousal of expressionism. By comparing theoretical discourse and literary texts — in particular, hitherto overlooked avant-garde short prose — the present article examines the extent to which these established oppositions are valid. This article argues that expanding the analysis to include the neglected genre of the short story brings greater nuance to the underlying opposition of ‘expressionism vs. avant-garde’ (and individualism vs. collectivism), and thereby challenges standard interpretations of the era in question.     

‘Affirmative Signalling’: Dickens’s Railway Journalism and Victorian Risk Society

This essay explores Charles Dickens’s railway journalism of the 1850s and 1860s and its differences from his more well-known fictional accounts of the British railway network. While fictional works such as Dombey and Son and ‘The Signalman’ emphasize the catastrophic aspects of railway accidents, Dickens’s journalism in Household Words and All the Year Round examines the modern systematicity of the railway network, which by its nature as system, necessitated accidents on the lines. The essay incorporates theoretical readings of risk by Ulrich Beck and Paul Virilio into its critical assessment of Dickens’s railway journalism. Fundamentally, it aims to demonstrate that Dickens’s railway journalism illuminates the complexity of Victorian narratives of technological and bureaucratic industrial and transport systems by prioritizing the global dimensions of systematic accidents over the period’s tendencies to focus merely on local accidental events.     

‘How to handle eternity’: infinity and the theories of J.W. Dunne in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman

This essay examines the importance of the notion of infinity to the work of Flann O'Brien and Jorge Luis Borges. Using as a starting point their shared interest in the Irish-born popular scientist J.W. Dunne's highly eccentric theories about the ‘multidimensional’ nature of time, the essay goes on, through a close analysis of a number of Borges' stories and of O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman, to call attention to a fundamental affinity between these two ostensibly quite different authors. A case is ultimately made for a consideration of Borges and O'Brien as writers with remarkably similar views on fiction and the universe.     

Pier Paolo Pasolini and the medium of song: Texts written for Laura Betti for the Giro a vuoto show

This article focuses on the outcome of an important episode within contemporary Italian culture: the encounter between the world of literature and song, and specifically examines the lyrics written by Pier Paolo Pasolini for the actress and singer Laura Betti for the Giro a Vuoto show, performed in 1960 in Milan. This essay intends to highlight the key elements of this encounter and the characteristic elements of these songs by virtue of textual and stylistic analysis, and provide remarks with regard to the relationship between music, text and singing performance. A study of this kind allows emphasis to be placed on the innovation originating from this distinctive collaboration which represents an important sign of change towards the emergence of a quality song within the mass market which would later come to be defined as canzone d’autore (singer-songwriter genre).     

A Life in Maps: Leo Bagrow,Imago Mundi,and the History of Cartography in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT:

This essay provides a critical commentary on the life of Leo Bagrow (1881–1957), the founding editor of Imago Mundi, drawing on previously unused correspondence from the journal’s archive, recently catalogued by the British Library in London. Bagrow’s experiences in the three European cities in which he lived and worked (St Petersburg, Berlin and Stockholm) are examined afresh and new insights are provided about the complex intellectual and sometimes political objectives and motivations of Bagrow and his fellow map dealers, map collectors and map historians. Particular attention is paid to the productive but often strained relationships between Bagrow and the expanding global network of map historians with whom he collaborated while establishing and editing Imago Mundi between 1935 and his death. This network was divided into four distinct and to some extent rival constituencies (university academics, map librarians, map collectors and map dealers). The essay examines how Imago Mundi, under Bagrow’s often confrontational editorship, emerged as the central co-ordinating forum through which these constituencies communicated with each other and within which the foundations for the modern discipline of map history were established.     

Rethinking historiography and ethnography: Surrealism’s intellectual legacy

ABSTRACT

Taking up Maurice Blanchot’s perceptive claim that “Surrealism remains always of our time”, the essay traces the importance of Surrealism for rethinking the methods of historiography (for Walter Benjamin) and ethnography (for James Clifford) in ways that allow us to appreciate the significance of Surrealism’s intellectual legacy. In his early essays on Surrealism and the monumental, unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin developed a new historical methodology, what I term surrealist historiography, that sought to uncover the latent dimensions of culture, obscured by the dazzling sheen of progress embedded within conventional historical narrative. If Benjamin found in Surrealism a way to overcome the limitations of a Rankean historicism, the point of departure for Clifford’s essay, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” is the crisis of ethnographic authority precipitated by a postcolonial critique of the discipline of anthropology. Clifford’s aim in this essay is thus to provide a provocative reassessment of Surrealism’s self-reflexive ethnographic spirit and what it might contribute to a refashioning of ethnographic practice as a polyvocal assemblage that holds in tension disparate material realities and aesthetic principles. Surrealism’s intellectual legacy thus lies, as Michel Foucault has claimed, in its path-breaking interdisciplinarity, which is why it continues to be, for Blancot and others, “a brilliant obsession”.     

POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE TWO SITES OF HISTORICITY

This essay examines the two sites of historicity, namely history‐writing and historical agency, and their interrelationship. I borrow the idea of “sites of historicity” from historian Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). For the purpose of analyzing how the relationship between the two sites changes with time and context, using Trouillot's theoretical lens, I examine the philosophies of history of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. By citing instances from these two philosophers, I claim that with the rise of nineteenth‐century colonialism, the two sites of historicity became discursively related in a specific way, whereby historical agency came to be predicated on history‐writing. Hence, in contrast to Kant's work, in Hegel's philosophy of history the relationship between the two sites of historicity acquired a decidedly colonialist form. As a result of this predication of historical agency on history‐writing, the alleged lack of historiography of certain cultures began to be considered as a token of their lack of political ability. The essay ends with the suggestion that the postcolonial thinkers and commentators who deal with historiography should challenge the foregoing predication, as it continues to inform contemporary thought concerning historiography.     

Framed Memories: The Politics of Recollection in Mana Neyestani’s An Iranian Metamorphosis

This essay examines the graphic memoir An Iranian Metamorphosis, by the acclaimed cartoonist Mana Neyestani, in the context of Iranian diaspora literature, particularly the genre of comics. Neyestani’s book is analyzed for its engagement with the politics of exile literature, and its attempt at challenging a two-dimensional view of the political discourse, in which the ethical boundaries of pro- and anti-government are overtly simple. The essay focuses on the book’s narrative techniques that exhibit a complex awareness of what is anticipated from a representative work of Iranian exile memoir, and the way it negotiates its own narrative politics. To clarify the arguments, several comparative examples are drawn from two well-known graphic narratives by Iranian diaspora authors, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Amir and Khalil’s Zahra’s Paradise.     

OPACITY AND TRANSPARENCY IN HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS

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.     

Framing papal communication in the central Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the production and consumption of papal communication in the central Middle Ages. It outlines the development of the papacy, which formed the historical and political framework for papal communication, and discusses the processes, themes and meanings behind various types of communication relating to the papacy in Latin Christendom principally between the years 1100 and 1300. Particular emphasis is placed upon the plurality of responses to papal communication and on the relationship between papal communication and authority, and papal self-identity and perceptions. The essay introduces seven diverse and interdisciplinary articles in a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on the papacy and communication in the central Middle Ages.     

Historicising Agency

Why has ‘agency’ been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield of African women's and gender history, statements like ‘African women had agency’ can stand as the impoverished punch lines of empirically rich studies. Consideration of Walter Johnson's 2003 essay ‘On Agency’ highlights the intellectual and political imperatives of 1970s Marxist and feminist social history that placed agency at centre stage. This essay examines why, more than a decade after Johnson's critique, agency endures as a ‘safety’ argument for reasons related to representational politics, research methodologies and the circumscribed imagination of intellectual gatekeepers. It argues that we should move beyond agency as argument by attending to the multiple concerns and desires – some intentional, others not – that animate human actions, including contentious gendered practices, and by examining how different historical actors have themselves understood agency. Agency has a history. By acknowledging and tracing that history, we will be better able to discern the usefulness and limits of agency for our own analyses.     

Other messages,other missions; or,Sahlins among the Melanesians

Responding to a number of developing critiques, Sahlins (1991) has recently adapted his ‘structural history’ model to accommodate endogenous change in pre-colonial conditions. His reformulation, however, critically restricts the model's applicability to mythopraxis of a specific sort, viz. the historical actions of divine heroes in societies structured along Dumontian lines of ‘hierarchy’ as supposedly exemplified in Fiji and Polynesia generally. This article examines certain implications of this new structural history – particularly Sahlins's revision of the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ notion – by analyzing a case of relatively late historical contact and change involving exogenous Europeans as well as Melanesians (i.e. the later phases of the so-called Yali movements of post-World War II Papua New Guinea). Here, neither ‘heroic history’ nor ‘hierarchy’ as Sahlins has incorporated them into his new model are evident. What is apparent instead is a dialectical interplay of articulated messages and enacted missions on the part of a complex and shifting multiplicity of both expatriate as well as indigenous constituencies.     

Time After Time

Summary

This essay is an analysis of a series of writings by the Australian intellectual historian Ian Hunter on the subject of ‘theory’. It examines the methodological issues raised by attempting to write a history of theory. The essay particularly seeks to analyse the various aporias at stake in Hunter's project: between the empirical and the transcendental, between history and the event, and between theory and ‘empirical’ history.     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.     

Letter-writing and literary culture in Merovingian Gaul

This essay discusses Gregory of Tours' claim that literary culture was in decline in light of the considerable quantity of poetry and letters composed by Merovingian authors. Scholars have come to appreciate the importance of letter-writing for historical inquiry, yet the contrast between Gregory's assessment and aristocratic literary activity remains under-explored. This essay discusses fifth-century precedents and examines the continuity and discontinuity that occurred in the literary transition from late Antique to early-medieval Gaul. It examines the place of literary culture within Merovingian elite friendship networks, focusing on the interconnected writings of three Merovingian authors. Venantius Fortunatus was an Italian-born poet who spent most of his career writing for Merovingian elites. The royal officials Dynamius and Gogo composed letters found in a compilation of sixth-century letters called the Epistolae Austrasicae. Using the letters and poetry of these three writers, this essay argues that literary skill facilitated the creation and maintenance of connections across distance and was a necessary part of elite identity. It shows that Gregory of Tours' dramatic rhetorical claim did not reflect the true state of literature in Gaul.