Table Of ContentK The Ethos of History L
MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY
Studies in Historical Cultures
General Editor: Stefan Berger
Founding Editor: Jörn Rüsen
Bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory,
this series crosses the boundaries between both academic disciplines and cultural,
social, political and historical contexts. In an age of rapid globalization, which
tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, locating the cultural
practices involved in generating its underlying historical sense is an increasingly
urgent task.
For a full volume listing please see back matter.
T E H
HE THOS OF ISTORY
Time and Responsibility
Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
First published in 2018 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2018 Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78533-884-7 hardback
ISBN 978-1-78533-885-4 ebook
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
Situating the Ethos of History 1
Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson
Chapter 1. Towards a New Ethos of History? 14
Aleida Assmann
Chapter 2. The Vampire, the Undead and the Anxieties of
Historical Consciousness 32
Claudia Lindén and Hans Ruin
Chapter 3. History, Justice and the Time of the Imprescriptible 54
Victoria Fareld
Chapter 4. Narrating Pasts for Peace? A Critical Analysis of
Some Recent Initiatives of Historical Reconciliation through
‘Historical Dialogue’ and ‘Shared History’ 70
Berber Bevernage
Chapter 5. Psychoanalysis and the Indeterminacy of History 94
Joan W. Scott
Chapter 6. Does Time Have a Gender? Queer Temporality,
Anachronism and the Desire for the Past 112
Kristina Fjelkestam
Chapter 7. ‘The One Who Should Die Is the One Who Shall Live’:
Prophetic Temporalities in Contemporary Colonial Brazil 126
Patricia Lorenzoni
vi Contents
Chapter 8. Radical Time in (Post)Colonial Narratives 144
Stefan Helgesson
Chapter 9. Engaged History 160
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback
Chapter 10. Speakers for the Dead: Digital Memory and
the Construction of Identity 175
Alana M. Vincent
Chapter 11. History Begins in the Future: On Historical
Sensibility in the Age of Technology 192
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Afterword 210
Hans Ruin
Index 214
Acknowledgements
We wish, fi rst of all, to express our gratitude to Hans Ruin, without whose
intellectual guidance as the research leader of the ‘Time, Memory, and Rep-
resentation’ initiative, this volume would never have materialized. Thanks
are also due to the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences,
whose generous support facilitated this intellectual endeavour. As we con-
ceptualized this volume, Stefan Berger’s enthusiastic reception of our initial
proposal was likewise essential in facilitating its genesis.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Situating the Ethos of History
Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson
History is no longer what it used to be. With the advent of poststructuralism
in the 1970s, theorists of history would pay increasing attention to the forms,
assumptions and disciplinary conditions of historiography, rather than the
‘thing itself’. This diff ered from earlier twentieth-century debates between,
for example, liberal and Marxist historians who struggled over the very con-
tent and truth of history – its ontology, one might say. Regardless of ideo-
logical orientation, and irrespective of any pragmatic diffi culties in securing
archival evidence, the actuality of history as that which ‘really happened’ – to
allude to Leopold von Ranke’s famous motto – was never really questioned
in those earlier exchanges.
The poststructuralist turn unsettled this attachment to the real by re-
framing history as a regime of knowledge and mode of representation rather
than an empirical science; epistemology, not ontology, took the front seat.
History could now be theorized in terms of ‘discourse’ (Foucault) or ‘meta-
history’ (White), which unmoored old truth-claims. Instead of being au-
thorized as the science of the past, history could be defi ned as irreducibly
involved in the construction, distribution and exercise of power. Contrary
to earlier varieties of ideology critique – the notion of ‘false consciousness’,
after all, presupposed the possibility of truth – there was, in the most extreme
versions of poststructuralist theory, nothing ‘behind’ the narrative of the past.
Nothing, that is, besides the conventions of genre and the will to power that
governed these conventions.
The strongest thinker in this vein was Hayden White, whose mark on
the fi eld is impossible to ignore. By questioning the authority that historical
Notes for this section begin on page 12.
