CULTURAL HISTORY,THE POSSIBLE,AND THE PRINCIPLE OF PLENITUDE1

Cultural historical research has deliberately challenged “historical realism,” the view that history is comprised entirely of observable actions that actually occurred, and instead has emphasized the historical significance of thoughts, emotions, and representations; it has also focused on the invisible, the momentary, and the perishable. These latter elements introduce the notion of the possible in history. This article examines the ways in which cultural history has approached the notion of the possible, as well as the methodological and theoretical implications of this approach. Its chief claim is that the idea of possibility is fundamental for the concept of culture and ineliminable from its historical study. The question of possibility is present in multiple ways in the study of history; it is important to distinguish among different levels of possibility. The possible may mean, for instance, what it is possible for historians to know about the past, or the possibilities open to historical agents themselves, or, indeed, the possibilities they perceived themselves as having even if these seem impossible from the point of view of the historian. The article starts with the first aspect and moves on toward the possibilities that existed in the past world either in fact or in the minds of those in the past. The article argues that the study of past cultures always entails the mapping of past possibilities. The first strand of the essay builds on the metaphor of the black hole and intends to solve one of the central problems faced by cultural historians, namely, how to access the horizon of the people of the past, their experience of their own time, especially when the sources remain silent. The second, more speculative strand builds on the notion of plenitude and is designed to open up avenues for further discussion about the concept of culture in particular.     

‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence,Non‐Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non‐violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post‐1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter‐relationship between self‐defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by‐product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self‐defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.     

Will Historical Archaeology Escape Its Western Prejudices to Become Relevant to Africa?

A major problem facing North American approaches to historical archaeology is the exclusionary manner in which the discipline is defined. By confining historical archaeology to the era of capitalism and colonialism, we declare that the indigenous histories of many areas of the globe are of no interest to such an intellectual agenda. If we practice an historical archaeology that only valorizes the colonial experience, then what happens to history making that engaged cultures in the pre-capitalist and pre-modern era? Such approaches separate the histories of people in Africa from those of the West, and, is in effect, academic apartheid. To remedy this disjuncture, we interrogate how historical archaeology may escape the bounds of implicit racism in its denial of historicity before literacy. We suggest that breaking the chains of exclusion is the only way to realize an inclusive archaeology sensitive to all history making projects.     

THE PRICE OF METAPHOR

In his critical response to our skeptical inquiry, “Does Culture Evolve?” (History and Theory, Theme Issue 38 [December 1999], 52–78), W. G. Runciman affirms that “Culture Does Evolve.” However, we find nothing in his essay that convinces us to alter our initial position. And we must confess that in composing an answer to Runciman, our first temptation was simply to urge those interested to read our original article–both as a basis for evaluating Runciman's attempted refutation of it and as a framework for reading this essay, which addresses in greater detail issues we have already raised. Runciman views the “selectionist paradigm” as a “scientific”“puzzle‐solving device” now validated by an “expanding literature” that has successfully modeled social and cultural change as “evolutionary.” All paradigms, however, including scientific ones, give rise to self‐validating “normal science.” The real issue, accordingly, is not whether explanations can be successfully manufactured on the basis of paradigmatic assumptions, but whether the paradigmatic assumptions are appropriate to the object of analysis. The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to “evolution.” But these reductions, which are required by the selectionist paradigm, exclude much that is essential to a satisfactory historical explanation–particularly the systemic properties of society and culture and the combination of systemic logic and contingency. Now as before, therefore, we conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history.     

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.     

LEON GOLDSTEIN AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF HISTORICAL KNOWING1

Leon Goldstein's critical philosophy of history has suffered a relative lack of attention, but it is the outcome of an unusual story. He reached conclusions about the autonomy of the discipline of history similar to those of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, but he did so from within the Anglo‐American analytic style of philosophy that had little tradition of discussing such matters. Initially, Goldstein attempted to apply a positivistic epistemology derived from Hempel's philosophy of natural science to historical knowledge, but gradually (and partly thanks to his interest in Collingwood) formulated an anti‐realistic epistemology that firmly distinguished historical knowledge of the past not only from the scientific perspective but also from fictional and common‐sense attitudes to the past. Among his achievements were theories of the distinctive nature of historical evidence and historical propositions, of the constructed character of historical events, and of the relationship between historical research and contemporary culture. Taken together, his ideas merit inclusion among the most important twentieth‐century contributions to the problem of historical knowledge.     

THE FLATNESS OF HISTORICITY

This article pursues an explication of the meaning of “historicity.” This explication is in part theoretical and in part historical, passing by the German conceptual history of the term, a Romantic‐era fairy tale with bearings on the matter, and structuralist theories of history, especially Claude Lévi‐Strauss's and Louis Althusser's. The “flatness” of historicity, the article argues, emerges from the absence of layers of explanatory and semantic depth that would provide a foundation for the term. The closer the concept of historicity was tied to notions of human existence and phenomenal and aesthetic experience in the hermeneutic tradition, the more such layers appeared to emerge. The structuralist argument started out from the impulse to reject this tradition. Diverse variations of this argument rally around an understanding of the reality of the historical in both set‐theoretical and semiotic terms. They dismantle a variety of manners in which historicity can be tied to notions of the phenomenal subject and of intentionality and existence/Dasein. The article asserts that the structuralist argument, in spite of a tendency to develop its own layers of seeming profundity, has a considerable degree of rigor and establishes the plausibility of the flatness of historicity. I conclude by discussing some of the positive implications of this notion, which in particular affect the manner in which the historical and the political interlock.     

THE ORIGINS OF RACISM: A CRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

This essay has two objectives. First, it seeks to engage critically with contemporary scholarship on the origins of racism through the lens of an older debate centered around the history of ideas. Specifically, it argues that Quentin Skinner's influential critique of the history of ideas can help identify the pitfalls of our current fascination with the origins of racism—most particularly when such origins are traced back to antiquity and the European pre- and early modern periods. In pursuing its second objective, the essay turns from histories cataloguing ancient, medieval, and early modern racisms to objections leveled, in these same literatures, against scholarship defending the modernity of race. The defense of a premodern origin to race is, I argue, not just a historical argument but a contemporary politics embedded in a narrative of continuity that insists on the relevance of the medieval past to the racial configurations of our current moment. Rather than demonstrating continuity and sameness, this essay seeks to draw attention to alternative modes of historicizing that are more attentive to the alterity of the past.     

Interview with Darlene Clark Hine

Born in Missouri in 1947, reared and educated in Illinois, Hine earned her bachelor's degree in history at Roosevelt University, Chicago, and her master's and doctoral degrees from Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio. She has written about African-American women by focusing on the intersections of race, gender, and class. In the past fifteen years, Hine has edited forty volumes (including a two-volume historical encyclopedia, Black Women in America), published three award-winning books, and produced over forty articles and essays (some just collected for the book, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History). As John A. Hannah Professor of History at Michigan State University since 1987, she has developed a new doctoral field in Comparative Black History. Hine has one daughter, Robbie Davine. This interview was conducted at the Southern Historical Association meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, in November, 1994, by Roger Adelson.     

POSTPOSITIVISM AND THE LOGIC OF THE AVANT‐GARDE

The purpose of this article is to explore the conditions under which the postpositivist interest in rewriting or reinterpreting history could operate legitimately from a historical point of view. The first part of the article outlines and explains some of the key thematic elements of historical postpositivism. The second proceeds to investigate how these elements can be configured and related to each other within Arthur Danto's influential account of the development of contemporary art, and especially the avant‐garde. The intention is to acquire a sense of the working dynamics of postpositivist thought, so as to better understand its possible implications for the writing of history. In the concluding section an argument is proposed to the effect that, although the postpositivist interest in the rewriting of history can in principle be admitted as entirely legitimate, its legitimacy depends on introducing some substantive constraints on content, in addition to the formal considerations that postpositivist discourse generally tends to favor. It is further suggested that this constraint should take the form of a requirement on historical literacy whose meaning is, finally, elucidated by drawing a contrast with historical common sense.     

THE ENDURING PUBLIC STRUGGLE TO CONSTRUCT,CONTROL, AND CHALLENGE HISTORICAL MEMORIES

Sumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 develops important arguments about the public significance of historical knowledge and the essential role of historians in public life. All societies need collective memories to sustain their cultural identities, as Guha shows in this wide‐ranging account of how such memories have been constructed in South Asian societies since the thirteenth century. The knowledge of historical experts is increasingly challenged or derided by contemporary social groups and political activists, who circulate their own historical narratives via new networks of communication. Political uses of historical knowledge are not new, however, as Guha shows in detailed accounts of how Hindu, Muslim, and British imperial regimes all used historical narratives to justify their own power. He also explains how other social groups challenged official historical narratives with their own popular stories about the past. This book contributes to recent work in global intellectual history by comparing similarities in the historical practices of premodern Europe and South Asia, discussing the cross‐cultural exchanges in colonial‐era institutions, and describing postcolonial challenges to European ideas. Guha thus offers an insightful analysis of how social and political forces influence and respond to the cloistered institutions that produce historical knowledge and construct collective memories. He concludes that evidence‐based historical narratives must be continually defended amid current public assaults on historical knowledge in both South Asia and the United States. More generally, Guha's book suggests the need for ongoing analysis of how public events, social conflicts, and new communication systems can reshape or discredit the work of historical experts.     

Anglo‐Saxon attitudes: In search of the origins of English racism

In this article I examine the attitudes of the dominant ethnic group in Anglo‐Saxon England, the Germanic ‘settlers’, to the subordinate group, the indigenous British. 1 confine myself to the earlier period, before the tenth century, because the British population of England has disappeared from the historical record by that time. This probably means they had been absorbed into Anglo‐Saxon society and were no longer recognised as a distinctive group. Then, partly by means of a comparison with white English attitudes to black people today, I ask whether Anglo‐Saxon attitudes constituted, in modem terms, a racist ideology, and conclude that they did. Realising that this question will be held by some historians to be illegitmate, I finish by considering why they might take this view, and suggesting that racism has in fact been part of English national identity from the beginning.     

论浮田和民《史学通论》与梁启超新史学思想的关系

日本史学家浮田和民所著《史学通论》,是一部广征博引西方诸家之说,同时又有自己识断的;以进化史观为指导的较为系统的新史学理论著作。梁启超在《新史学》等专论中所阐述的基本史学理论,实际上主要是从浮田和民的《史学通论》中有选择地移植过来的。20世纪初的梁启超在新史学的理论建设方面,基本上没有自己的创见,因此,将其视为中国新史学理论的奠基人或创立者,是不准确的。当然,梁氏的移植并非完全照搬照抄,而是有所归纳,并结合中国旧史弊病有所演绎,这就使其《新史学》等专论所宣传的新史学思想更条理、更易为中国学界所接受,并且有了针对性。正因为如此,梁氏在中国新史学发展史上,有着无人能够取代的地位。     

HISTORY AND RELIGION IN THE MODERN AGE

This essay seeks to clarify the relationship between history and religion in the modern age. It proceeds in three steps. First, it draws attention to the radical asymmetry between first‐person and third‐person statements that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations rescued from the metaphysical exile to which it had been condemned by Descartes's definition of the self as a thing. Second, it argues that religion is designed to alleviate the peculiarly human kind of suffering arising from this asymmetry. Third, it maintains that history relies on the same means as religion in order to achieve the same results. The turn to historical evidence performed by historians and their readers is more than just a path to knowledge. It is a religious ritual designed to make participants at home in their natural and social environments. Quite like the ritual representation of the death and resurrection of Christ in the Mass, the historical representation of the past underwrites the faith in human liberty and the hope in redemption from suffering. It helps human beings to find their bearings in the modern age without having to go to pre‐industrial churches and pray in old agrarian ways. History does not conflict with the historical religions merely because it reveals them to have been founded on beliefs that cannot be supported by the evidence. History conflicts with the historical religions because it is a rival religion.     

3. THE EXPRESSION OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

The theory and philosophy of history (just like philosophy in general) has established a dogmatic dilemma regarding the issue of language and experience: either you have an immediate experience separated from language, or you have language without any experiential basis. In other words, either you have an immediate experience that is and must remain mute and ineffable, or you have language and linguistic conceptualization that precedes experience, provides the condition of possibility of it, and thus, in a certain sense, produces it. Either you join forces with the few and opt for such mute experiences, or you go with the flow of narrative philosophy of history and the impossibility of immediacy. Either way, you end up postulating a mutual hostility between the nonlinguistic and language, and, more important, you remain unable to account for new insights and change. Contrary to this and in relation to history, I am going to talk about something nonlinguistic—historical experience—and about how such historical experience could productively interact with language in giving birth to novel historical representations. I am going to suggest that, under a theory of expression, a more friendly relationship can be established between experience and language: a relationship in which they are not hostile to but rather desperately need each other. To explain the occurrence of new insights and historiographical change, I will talk about a process of expression as sense‐formation and meaning‐constitution in history, and condense the theory into a struck‐through “of ,” as the expression of historical experience.     

论柯文的"中国中心观"

柯文《在中国发现历史》一书所提倡的“中国中心观”,不仅仅是一个史学方法论问题,更是一个深层次的史学理论问题;尽管它仍存在着明显的缺陷,但对于克服美国中国史研究领域中的“西方中心主义”弊端,具有重要的意义。     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

Black sisterhood: The situation of urban aboriginal women and their relationship to the white women's movement 1

The article argues that Aboriginal women in urban aboriginal society experience very different oppressions than do white women in urban white society. Aboriginal women believe that their greatest oppression is racism not sexism. When their objective conditions are examined it becomes obvious that this is indeed so. In fact Aboriginal women are statistically better educated and better employed than are Aboriginal men. Other economic and societal factors combine to produce a situation whereby a black woman's status within her own society is very different to that of her white sisters. Black women are more likely to be heads of household; more likely to be political leaders and less likely to be child‐burdened than their white counterparts. Consequently women's movement demands such as abortion, child‐care, the right to work and sexual liberation are not given high priority by the Aboriginal women's movement. Aboriginal women's demands stem from the politics of poverty and discrimination. These are caused by racism not sexism.     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.