As a periodization that is generally understood to refer to an era of Terrestrial relationships that developed with modernization and nuclearization, the Anthropocene cannot be applied simply to premodern histories and texts. However, it has introduced historians to geological periodization as a mode of describing periods of changed Terrestrial relationships in time. This article suggests that, in thinking about how historicizing texts conceptualized environments, geological ("-ocene") periodization provides a useful model and grammar by which to observe and describe how authors understood their environmental pasts, the agencies involved in reshaping Terrestrial regimes, and the role of environments in periodization. This article uses two genres of historicizing texts from Western Britain in the twelfth century to develop an approach to reading geological periods out of such texts. It suggests that doing so not only reveals important information about how these authors thought about environments in time but also provides a model by which the "geological turn" in the environmental humanities and premodern history can be put into mutually productive conversation without being inappropriately constrained by a term that was developed for modern phenomena. Outwith the Anthropocene, reading texts for what they say about environmental pasts, times, and agencies enables environmental thought to be analyzed in multiple dimensions.
ABSTRACT Martin Jay's newest book, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph , aims to reveal the presence of a third current of thought in modern thinking. This current, which he calls “magical nominalism,” does not fit the traditional dichotomies (voluntarism–determinism, subjectivism–realism, and so on) around which the field's prevailing narratives are organized. As he shows, magical nominalism participates in the process of destroying the Scholastic idea of a perfectly ordered cosmos (an idea that was initiated by nominalism in the fourteenth century) but introduces into the nominalist matrix of thought a reference to an ontological dimension of reality that was initially absent from it. However, as he insists, magical nominalism does not constitute a homogeneous current. This form of thinking resists definition in unequivocal terms. Studying it therefore requires an approach that is capable of articulating a plurality of views.
ABSTRACT In this essay, I provide brief introductions to the notion of “prophetic” historiography that I developed in Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (1995) and to the five essays of this forum that were written in dialogue with it. I argue that “history as prophecy” forms a practice of writing in which the “prophetic historian” seizes hold of a moment of past potency to self‐consciously reinscribe it in the historian's present so that it may become a context for action in the futures of its readers. In my book, that argument is developed by means of a deeply textured reading of a unique nineteenth‐century narrative history of Java's fifteenth‐century transition to Islam, a nearly seven‐thousand‐line poetic history that was written by a royal exile. Each of the five essays engages my notion of “history as prophecy” in conversation, extending it into other realms of historical expression. The subjects of these five essays include contemporary performance cultures in Indonesia, an Arabic‐language Islamic history of the Indonesian past, genealogical practices of Acehnese Sufis, and Indonesian literary history.
In Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java, Nancy K. Florida identified a form of Javanese historical writing in which telling the past is a political act, one oriented to envisioning possible futures. This essay examines an experimental video by the artist Tintin Wulia that resonates with this prophetic form of history. Wulia's video, A Thousand and One Martian Nights, blends documentary and science fiction to tell the stories of political prisoners sent to the island of Buru as if they were exiles cast away to Mars in 2065. Footage from the United States' space program in 1965 contributes to the futuristic tone while setting the decimation of the Indonesian leftist movement within the context of US imperialism. This layered video unsettles the conventions of historical evidence and linear narrative, eschewing conventional documentary forms that the New Order regime appropriated for state propaganda. Wulia's collaged historical text challenges the evidentiary claims that underpin conventional historiography and reimagines the past to open paths toward more just futures. By staging an unlikely dialogue between Wulia's video and Florida's reading of the Babad Jaka Tingkir, this essay aims to extend the efficacy of Florida's text. It argues that, however profoundly engaged it is with a specific literary tradition and historical context, Florida's text offers us generative ways to think broadly about the politics and potentials of history-writing in contexts of political suppression.
ABSTRACT This review essay examines a recurring distinction in the philosophy of history between the phase of establishing historical facts or knowledge claims and the phase of interpreting them. Focusing on two recent books by Aviezer Tucker and Chiel van den Akker, it analyzes how each author conceptualizes historical knowledge by emphasizing one of these phases. Tucker locates the core of historical practice in evidential reasoning and the production of knowledge claims about past events, which he regards as the basis for consensus among historians. In contrast, van den Akker concentrates on the construction and understanding of narrative theses and argues that historical narratives are not direct descriptions of evidence but unique interpretations. This review essay argues that, although the distinction between research and interpretation can be somewhat useful, an attempt to synthesize Tucker's and van den Akker's accounts into a single and more comprehensive theory of historical knowledge would be problematic. Since each framework highlights one phase and leaves the other underdeveloped, a meaningful theory of historical work must be developed internally within one conceptual framework rather than assembled from incompatible accounts with distinct priorities.
