HISTORY AS FORM, WITH SIMMEL IN TOW. Issue 4 (11th December 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: HUNT, NANCY ROSE
• Other Names: Stark Laura guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: History and theory. Volume 57:Issue 4(2018)
• Page Start: 126
• Page End: 144
• Publication Date: 2018-12-11
• Subjects: theory as form -- form -- postcolonial history -- égo‐histoire -- aesthetic methods -- archival surfaces -- affective archives -- mood -- tonality; History -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; Histoire -- Philosophie -- Périodiques; 901
• DOI: 10.1111/hith.12089
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0018-2656

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay is an engagement with forms, objects, and the nature of sly poetics in historical practice. It wonders about how historians have been practicing and theorizing craft at a time when postcolonial politics are urging for stronger attention to the vernacular, the archival, the affective, and the aesthetic. Offering a generous detour through a little‐known version of Georg Simmel, then driving idealist ideas about history and creativity, this essay draws attention to some parallel practices emerging in Global South terrains. It uses three late and refractory Simmel essays on history and form as a prism through which to consider generative concepts, fragmentary and aesthetic methods, and historical sensibilities. While history as form is an enduring, vital theme, aesthetic theorizing is inciting new experiments with archival surfaces, memory work, aesthetic learning, and historical assemblages. Formal attentiveness sharpens critique in addressing historical, contemporary, and archival problems. Simmel may expand our sensory range, our openness to subjectivity and égo‐histoire, tonality and mood, unknotting the interpretive impasse of much fashionable work in today's humanities: with its too tight pairing of the affective and the material.