Category: Uncategorized

*** Work in Progress ***

Abstract

Historical distance, the perceived otherness that separates the past from the present, is often conceived as the condition for historical research since history’s professionalization in the mid-19th century. There have been two approaches to conceptualize historical distance: a realist one that presupposes it as an innate ontological fact, and an irrealist one that embraces it as a result of human construction. Both approaches have shortcomings: the former neglects various ways in which historians mediate the past-present relation, and the latter fails to address how distance is practically constructed and embodied in historiographical text. Drawing on the contructivist elements in the second irrealist approach, I adopt a Ricoeurian view that historical distance is an artificial product of narrative emplotment. I argue that there’s a dual nature of distance configuration: the narratives that intensify such otherness to create detachment, referred to as distanciation, and those that alleviate the otherness to fashion immediacy as approximation. To bridge the gap between philosophical speculation on distance and contemporary historical practice, and to elucidate the political implication entailed by distance configuration, I will conclude by briefly touching upon a case from the late Natalie Zemon Davis. I show how the balancing between distanciation and approximation not only aligns her text with disciplinary requirements but also characterizes it as an implicit emancipatory political engagement.

Bionote 

Bowen Ran is PhD candidate in history at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). He has a keen interest in meta-reflections on how people from different contexts and times have shaped and related to the past. The primary concern of his research includes historical consciousness, historical culture, and philosophy of history. His PhD project examines the configuration of historical distance in politically engaged Anglophone historiographies from the 1960s to the 1990s, based on the historical narrative of three historians: Howard Zinn, E. P. Thompson, and Natalie Zemon Davis. Additionally, he works as a freelance academic translator, having translated numerous books, articles, and videos into Chinese. He is also co-running a social media channel focused on history and theory that facilitates intellectual exchanges between the Sinophone academia and the West.

Practical Information

When?

November 10, 2023  – 12:30 – 14:00 BST

Where? 

• Join us offline:

Vergaderzaal Malpertuis at the UFO (third floor, when you come out of the elevator turn right), Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, 9000 Ghent. If you wish to join us offline, please send us an e-mail at tapas@Ugent.be so that we can reserve you a seat.

• Join us online:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84684155791?pwd=aHO6GskTnYjKDbNgJ9iLEdQRcoEkrT.1

会议号: 846 8415 5791

密码: 614333

In the course of the last few years, there has been a growing interest in our relationship with the past in a large variety of different cultural and social areas. Examples are historical trauma studies, history and memory, history and identity, history of science, as well as the more traditional philosophy and methodology of historiography. What is special about this tendency is that is its pre-eminent transdisciplinary character. There are tendencies to reflect on our relationship with the past in many different disciplines (historiography, literary sciences, post-colonial studies, jurisprudence, philosophy of science, sociology,…), but it does not hold a mainstream position in any of them. As a consequence, researchers who are interested in reflecting on our relation with the past often find themselves isolated within their own discipline.

The aim of this forum is to change this situation by bringing together young researchers from different disciplines who work on the reflection on our relationship with the past, whether or not this relation is popular, literary or scientific or whether or not it comes from a historiographical, philosophical, post-colonial, anthropological or sociological agenda. This initiative is meant in the first place for young researchers (pre- and post-doc) working in Belgium and the Netherlands, but in principle it is open to all. The main aim of this project is to give young researchers the opportunity to share their views with their colleagues, to create a broad intellectual network, to get feedback about their own work, and to organize transdisciplinary reading groups and workshops on topics which are too uncommon in their own discipline.

TAPAS is a forum which means that there is no single goal, approach or method. The intention is to bring together different approaches and methods rather than propagate one of them.

‘Practicing History in Super-Diverse Societies: Possibilities, Challenges, Dilemmas’

TAPAS/Thinking About the PASt is pleased to announce its workshop and reading group series for 2019-2020.

As our societies become increasingly ‘super-diverse’, so do various ways to engage with the past. Within the public sphere, collective tools to deal with a ‘super-diversity’ of ‘historical cultures’ are often felt to be lacking, as is reflected in inabilities to deal with difficult (genocidal, colonial, religious) pasts and the formation of counter-histories and -identities. This specialist course will start with a theoretical introduction to the concept of ’super diversity’ in relation to history and memory, to then explore the use of history in four super-diverse ‘contact zones’: schools, the academy, heritage sites, and museums.

Click here to view the full programme and all practical info.

To inscribe, send an email to tapas@ugent.be.