The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below.
In his 2003 essay, "On Agency," Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars' focus on agency presumed a "unidirectional trade between past and present," treating "history writing as a mode of redress." It marginalized "human-ness lived outside the conventions" of a "liberal notion of selfhood." Restorin...
| Publicado en: | Journal of Social History Vol. 57; no. 3; pp. 420 - 431 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Oxford University Press / USA
Spring2024
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=176041388&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 176041388 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00224529 JSH jtl: Journal of Social History issn: 00224529 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Spring2024 vid: 57 iid: 3 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 176041388 10.1093/jsh/shad056 ppf: 420 ppct: 11 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 215KB tig: atl: The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below. aug: au: Satia, Priya su: Johnson, Walter Agent (Philosophy) Social history Practical politics Scholars Liberalism Subjectivity sug: subj: Agent (Philosophy) Social history Practical politics Scholars Liberalism Subjectivity Johnson, Walter ab: In his 2003 essay, "On Agency," Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars' focus on agency presumed a "unidirectional trade between past and present," treating "history writing as a mode of redress." It marginalized "human-ness lived outside the conventions" of a "liberal notion of selfhood." Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: "therapy rather than politics." Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept's original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of "agency" were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up "the present-life of the past" and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history's actual end of internal transformation. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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