This essay engages the dismissal of presentism and identity politics by the former president of the American Historical Association. In doing so, the essay argues that his essay shares a rhetorical style with other intellectuals and politicians that can aptly be called the spectacle of transgression. The essay argues that this spectacle works to obscure the material conditions of higher education in general and of history in particular.

Revisiting Psychoanalytic History Brian Connolly (bio) Michael Paul Rogin. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New Brunswick, NJ. Transaction Books, 1991. xxxiv + 373 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $48.95. Whatever happened to the once-promising intersection of history and psychoanalysis? And, despite its demise having long passed us by, what might we have lost? Is there something worth recovering? It is hard to overstate the excitement around psychoanalysis in the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and early 1980s. This was particularly the case in the feminist remaking of the discipline through re-readings of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan, among others.1 History was by no means immune to this fervor. Indeed, psychohistory was of great import across the decade. And yet, like its much different but coeval counterpart, cliometrics, for some time now it has had little purchase on the discipline, very likely because of its own problems as well as the persistent "anti-theory" tendencies of the historical discipline. Yet here and there, a renewed interest in psychoanalysis seems to be taking shape. Psychohistory reached its peak in the 1970s–The Journal of Psychohistory was founded in 1973–and yet its trajectory was set more than a decade earlier. In his 1958 AHA Presidential Address, William L. Langer, a historian of France, wrote that a new, intensive history would be produced "through exploitation of the concepts and findings of modern psychology. And by this, may I add, I do not refer to classical or academic psychology which, so far as I can detect, has little bearing on historical problems, but rather to psychoanalysis and its later developments and variations as included in the terms 'dynamic' or 'depth psychology'."2 Just as the psychohistory of the 1970s was part of a larger intellectual ferment, Langer, too, was not alone–psychoanalysis was central to cultural and intellectual formation at midcentury. Betty Friedan spent a whole chapter of The Feminine Mystique critiquing "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud," while unorthodox Freudians, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, each in their own way and each making signal contributions to the thought of the New Left, would theorize liberation as, in Brown's words, "the abolition of [End Page 385] repression."3 For all of this, there is a way in which the period between 1950 and 1980 seems also to be a last gasp of this expansive life of psychoanalysis. It may now be time to rethink the field's relation to psychoanalysis. Recently psychoanalysis has been taken up as an object of historical analysis, notably in works by Dagmar Herzog and Eli Zaretsky that attempt, among other things, to think through the political life of the discpline.4 A major new biography, the first in a generation, appeared a few years ago, as did a smaller one attending to Freud's childhood.5 The vexed translation of psychoanalysis into other cultural forms and intellectual idioms has been the subject of much attention recently, most notably in Omnia el Shakry's work on psychoanalysis and Islam in modern Egypt.6 Much of this work tends in the direction of histories of psychoanalysis rather than psychoanalytic history, although el Shakry's work is a masterful blend of both. Such attention suggests, at minimum, a revival of interest in the intellectual trajectories of psychoanalytic thought. This simmering revival, however, has, for the most part, not yet hit U.S history, a discipline that once was a fertile field for psychohistory. An exception, and an ideal book to think the relationship between psychoanalytic interpretation and political culture in the 1830s, is the political theorist Michael Paul Rogin's classic Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. Not only is it an exemplary work of psychoanalytic history, it offers two other compelling reasons for a current read or re-read: first, it allows us to consider what we might call the psyche of capitalism at a moment when the "new history of capitalism" occupies a significant part of U.S. historiography; second, it speaks to the small-scale contemporary investment in the memory of Jackson, from the cottage industry of...

Research Article| October 01 2019 The Subterranean Life of Repression Brian Connolly Brian Connolly Brian Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2014). His articles and essays have appeared in History of the Present, J19, Feminist Theory, Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, Public Seminar, and The Immanent Frame. He is currently working on two projects: the first, The Age of the Phallus, is a collection of essays on psychoanalysis and contemporary culture; the second, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in Nineteenth-Century America, is a critical history of the discourse of sovereignty. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2019) 9 (2): 203–212. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.9.2.0203 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Brian Connolly; The Subterranean Life of Repression. History of the Present 1 October 2019; 9 (2): 203–212. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.9.2.0203 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 University of Illinois Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This chapter turns to the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans retold the biblical story of the “curse of Ham” as a fantasy to promote the notion of racial purity, which contradicted the social reality of interracial reproductive sex that prevailed throughout slavery. It contends that nineteenth-century Americans clung to the so-called curse of Ham or curse of Canaan as a religious fantasy that attempted to negate interracial sex as foundational to the origins of race and instead propagated a fantasy about racial purity. This fantasy was the field in which identities were forged, subjugations articulated, and desire structured. And by making the familial form universal and perpetuated by the (sovereign and nonsovereign) sexual transmission of race, it held out a singular humanity cut by racial inequality.

Introduction| October 01 2016 Introduction: From Archives of Slavery to Liberated Futures? Brian Connolly; Brian Connolly Brian Connolly is associate professor of history at the University of South Florida. He is an editor of History of the Present and author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marisa Fuentes Marisa Fuentes Marisa J. Fuentes is associate professor of women’s and gender studies and history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2016) 6 (2): 105–116. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0105 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Brian Connolly, Marisa Fuentes; Introduction: From Archives of Slavery to Liberated Futures?. History of the Present 1 October 2016; 6 (2): 105–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0105 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2016 University of Illinois Press2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Introduction You do not currently have access to this content.

This paper addresses the place of the ears and their potential as musical instruments. Psychoacoustics research into the non-linearities of the inner ear has proven that the organ has much more to offer the composer than has been previously considered. By reversing the role of the ear from being a submissive receiver to an active participant in the creative process, an exciting level of opportunity opens up for the composer. A focus is given in this paper to bandwidth phenomena and auditory distortion products with references to the author's own compositional material which seeks to highlight that the investigation of the non-linear nature of the inner ear is revolutionary in relation to the place of the ear within contemporary composition. Central to this work is the notion that the ear is not simply a passive component of the musical experience. Adorno once stated that the ear is a “dozy and inert” organ and by disproving such a view one can destabilize common assumptions about psychoacoustics and the potential of the ears as musical instruments.

Against Accumulation Brian Connolly (bio) We might, with a little work, productively imagine the archive as the historical unconscious, with the evidence therein the near endless series of signifiers. If we were to push this analogy a little further, we might say that the archive is structured like the unconscious (which is structured like language), and if this is the case, then we might be apprehensive about the relationship between the archive, evidence, and “the real,” or reality. The real, we know from the work of Jacques Lacan, is that which is foreclosed, impossible to be symbolized, and thus incapable of being represented in language. It is also undifferentiated, whole—the cut of signification (castration) does not exist there. It is that which we desire, that impossible place without lack. If this is the case, then the archive will never, no matter how much evidence we accumulate, yield reality. Yet, for all of this, recent accumulative trends in digitization of archives (more accessible evidence searched more easily) and extranational scales of analysis (which add geographic spaces in order to challenge the hegemony of the nation) have led to a neo-empiricism that, once again, chases that elusive phantasm of reality. In one sense, this empirical, positivist search for reality is not particularly new. Since at least the nineteenth century, the archive has been figured as the repository of documentary evidence. It was the institutional site where evidence could be found to document the veracity of historical narratives. Of course, this empiricist account of the archive has long been critiqued: think of Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever or Joan Scott in “The Evidence of Experience.” In some instances, the capacity of both evidence and the archive to satisfy our contemporary political desires is called into question, as in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”1 For Scott, a critical relation to evidence shifts our work from “a belief in the unmediated relationship between words and things, to one that takes all categories of analysis as contextual, contested, and contingent.”2 In a word, Scott asks historians to acknowledge that we read evidence—we do not discover unmediated accounts of that elusive phantasm, the past “as it actually was.”3 Yet no matter how many critiques, empiricism persists. Recently, a confluence of technology, framework, and new practices of reading have resulted in a newfound fascination with an empirical [End Page 172] orientation toward evidence, one frequently offered as a substitute (or antidote) for now supposedly “tired” hermeneutics. The digitization of archives (and the attendant quasi-disciplinary formation we have come to call digital humanities) and global (and other extranational) studies have engendered an accumulative logic toward evidence and the archive.4 Supposedly, the more evidence we have the better, whether through the multiplication of pieces of evidence or the ability to search keywords across a previously unimaginable number of sources. This move has been accompanied by the emergence of new practices of reading—distant, surface, descriptive—that embrace a certain kind of empiricism—one designed, in part, to move across a large body of evidence, something at which older, tired, and out-of-date critical and hermeneutic practices would be less adept. Yet the digital and the global stand as sentries at the archive, orienting our analyses and capacities for critique. As Derrida wrote of the archons (those who secured the archive and its documents), “They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives.”5 The archons of the contemporary scene of historical writing might just be the digital humanities and the spatial turn. While there are certainly critical projects that come out of both domains—indeed, my own work has benefitted greatly from the digitization of archives—there is also a celebratory tone that is primarily about accumulation. Despite its insistent antihermeneutic logic, it is a hermeneutic imperative nonetheless—accumulate more and more, think beyond and against the nation, but always do it in a manner, aided and abetted by digitization, which adds rather than subtracts. The tendency among historians and others to lionize the digital...

The table is often an overlooked piece of furniture both at home and in society. We eat, drink and often work at a table, we discuss unresolved issues at one. We can sit or stand behind one, hide under it, turn it, tip it and basically use it every day. The table is the basis for many activities; it is a level surface, which supports many of our accoutrements and activities. The table is a meeting place, a symbol of power, a base from which we each grow to meet the world. I worked with the allegorical table in the Black & White Hall, Layon Building at Queens University, raising it slowly using a series of G Clamps and wooden batons. The table was placed directly in front of a Statue of Galileo, my initial reason for choosing this location, and much of the imagery and performative actions within the work poetically, directly or indirectly referred to aspects of astronomy, scientific thought and methodologies and questions about how we choose to view our world and the universe around us.

Research Article| April 01 2011 Liberalism’s Incestuous Subject: Private and Public Sex in the Nineteenth-Century United States Brian Connolly Brian Connolly Brian Connolly is assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida. He is completing a book on incest, kinship, sexuality, and liberalism, Domestic Intercourse: Incest in Nineteenth-Century America. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2011) 1 (1): 31–58. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.1.1.0031 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brian Connolly; Liberalism’s Incestuous Subject: Private and Public Sex in the Nineteenth-Century United States. History of the Present 1 April 2011; 1 (1): 31–58. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.1.1.0031 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 University of Illinois Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.