The key point of congruence between postcolonialism and postmodernism seems to be the desire to question hegemonic and prevalent historical discourse and to promote the voices of those not yet represented. Other points of congruence ultimately seem less important than this one – without the desire to upset the apple cart, the primary impetus for …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
On postcolonialism
Dane Kennedy very nicely summaries the contributions of postcolonialism to history as threefold: “identities, geographies, and epistemologies.”[1] The clearest of these three factors is identities, and it’s here that we see reverberation with other historical approaches, particularly those “from below,” and with postmodernism generally. The second, geographies, addresses “the spatial assumptions or geographies that informed …
On postmodernism
This question is a bit of a poser for me because I’m frankly not sure whether one can use the term “contribution” when one considers the effect to have been ambivalent. I feel this way for two reasons: first, I was a literature graduate student in the 1990s, so I felt the full brunt of …
Social history or cultural history?
There seems to be little question that social history and cultural history intersect, but perhaps it is more accurate to say that they form complement one another and together form a coherent whole – much like yin and ying together form a complete circle. The difference, as I wrote in another post, has mainly to …
“New” cultural history?
I think that the thing that is primarily new about the “new cultural history” is the focus on the cultural artifact, or perhaps more precisely on the “text.” On the one hand, cultural history seems to be concerned with many of the same underlying questions and concerns of earlier approaches. That there is such considerable …
The postcolonial in critical diplomatic history
Is “Saidism” useful or even evident in diplomatic history? If Saidism can be defined as the extension of Said’s theories about colonialism (orientalism) into the foreign policy realm, then I think it’s a foregone conclusion that it is both useful and evident. Andrew Rotter’s essay on the history of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis south Asia …
Continue reading “The postcolonial in critical diplomatic history”
Interpreting history through objects
Of the two descriptions of the Chippendale tea table, I like the second one better because it links the object to the sort of person who might have used it. What’s interesting about the comparison to me is how little of the same information is contained within the two descriptions. I was able to find …
Material and culture studies: The resonance of objects
According to Kuriyama, strings are resonant because, in his own words, they “defined the meaning – and demonstrated the importance – of tension.”[1] This tension that he speaks of is both actual and figurative. On the one hand, the string is commonly used as a device, the tension of which provides some utility, whether violence …
Continue reading “Material and culture studies: The resonance of objects”
Microhistory and material culture studies
To determine the connection between Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s essay on a quilt and microhistory, it’s important to have a clear conception of the latter. Carlo Ginsburg, who wrote one of the most famous examples, The Worms in the Cheese, argues that, at least in an earlier iteration, “microhistory is synonymous with local history, written … from …
Continue reading “Microhistory and material culture studies”
Material and culture studies: Object examples
There are two objects in my house that I thought could result in interesting investigations. The first is a photography of my grandmother, her four siblings, and her mother, posed at the back of a train called the “Atlantic City Express.” Since one of her brothers is an infant in the picture, I can date …
Continue reading “Material and culture studies: Object examples”
Inevitable Historicity 