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The “diasporized nation” and the “nation-in-diaspora”: the shifting alignments between nation and diaspora that these two expressions encode are manifest in how China and Chineseness have been conceived, negotiated, and deconstructed. This book is a project of historicization with two overlapping foci: first, to locate possible antecedents of recent scholarly-theoretical work on diasporic phenomena and their polemics and follow through such possibilities in literary-cultural productions; second, to trace some of the shifting contours in the genealogy of Chineseness as they are configured and reconfigured throughout the long twentieth century. Theoretical, locational, historical: these are the interconnections which characterize this book as it explores China and Chineseness so that what it reveals of a specific temporal-spatial context can extend into others to elucidate the many dimensions of the book.

This chapter begins with a consideration of the comparison of antiquity and modernity. From the Renaissance until around 1800, evaluative comparison of antiquity and modernity was an important mode of thought throughout Western Europe. These inquiries are often grouped under the name of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, though, these comparisons began to disappear. They were replaced by an understanding of cultural difference and relativism that is recognizably modern. This change is known as historicization, the assumption that past societies have their own unique modes of existence, which are not necessarily comparable to one another or immediately comprehensible in contemporary terms. The chapter then, as well as the next, traces the rise of historicization and its consequences for thinking about Greek tragedy.

This chapter presents an account of Clifford Geertz and his “interpretation of cultures.” It turns to Marshall Sahlins and his Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. It also suggests that a dose of Sahlins might be salutary for future work on the history of culture, given his “rethinking” of structure and event, or structure and history, in dialectical terms that rejuvenate both halves. It then reviews Geertz's influence on the textualizing move in anthropology and shows how the concerns of anthropologists are intersecting increasingly with those of historians of culture. In Historical Metaphors, questions of genesis and meaning become intertwined. Historical Metaphors and Writing Culture propose alternate routes to the historicization of a field that, until recently, had ignored Frederick Maitland's dictum and charted ahistorical, even antihistorical, courses.

This chapter argues that, beginning in 1890, a series of conceptual changes occurred in three central dimensions of reality: time, space, and subjectivity. These changes led to the gradual historicization of the Egyptian worldview. At the very core of this process was the realization that in order to get a grip on current affairs one needs to know their histories as part of a general process of development. Once historicization—this automatic extrapolation of the past to the future—was acknowledged as a more modern form of thinking, an entire genre of historical writing, namely, the chronicle, was considered to be out of touch with reality and hence obsolete. Consequently, writers began to compose historical compositions that were in part modern and yet continued the premodern Islamic tradition. Thus, when dealing with the contemporary era, these hybrid compositions had a single subject that progressively developed over time and a well-defined space that framed this subject. In that sense these were modern compositions. However, when dealing with the premodern era, these works adhered to the ideal of recording all possible events (natural disasters, social events, and marvelous deeds) in all places and in accordance to a standard temporal order of days, weeks, or years. In that sense, they were more like premodern works. Over time, slowly but surely, the historicized modern narrative emerged triumphant, and the chronicles disappeared.

This introductory chapter discusses the interest eighteenth-century readers had on Spanish America, starting with Britain's relations with the emerging ‘informal empire’ in Spanish America. It then studies the historicization and romanticizing of Spanish America, and draws on Jean-François Marmontel's semi-historical romance Les Incas, ou la destruction de l'empire du Pérou, Abbé Raynal's multi-volume Histoire philosophique et politique, and des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes and William Robertson's History of America. An outline of the following chapters is provided in the final section of the chapter.

This chapter presents an analysis of an essay on the historicization of the production of health posters in the late twentieth century. It explains that this essay was first drafted in 2005 for a session on visual culture at the Paris meeting of the European Association for the History of Medicine. It suggests that the visual culture of this period is related to the broader shifts in socio-political life and epistemology, particularly the nature of power in society directed at the human body and the increasing visualization of all aspects of modern life.

An overview of the argument of the book, the Introduction discusses postwar literature and art in light of the transformation of advanced capitalist economies, in particular the shift from the production of goods to the provision of services and the expansion of white-collar and in-person service work. Through an examination of some key examples, Bernes argues that the neo-avant-garde language of “participation,” aiming to overcome the hierarchical relationship between writer and reader, artist and audience, anticipated and contributed to a shift in management theory toward new horizontal forms of corporate structure, undertaken in response to the widespread rebellion against the “anachronistic authoritarianism” of the postwar workplace. Bernes summarizes the main chapters of the book as well as its conclusions and finishes with a general discussion of periodization and historicization, elucidating his unique methodology in light of Marxist debates about historical causality.

Chapter 6, “Epigraphs,” provides a brief historical overview of the rise and fall of typographic markers of deletion (fuseji). Counter to mainstream understanding, which figures censorship as public and known during the imperial regime and secret and hidden during the occupation, this timeline shows that the markers were being phased out long before the defeat. Hidden and secret censorship is an ineluctable part of all censorships. As censorship becomes internalized and self-censorship takes hold, the positive markers of censorship also fade from public view, transforming into new, less overt modes of expressing illegal ideas. The noticeable absenting of the overt markers in the late 1930s suggests the contours of self-censorship and begins to sketch the continuum from external, legal suppression to internal, psychical repression.

The seventh chapter examines the usage of redaction marks published in one of the major literary venues in Japan, the general-interest magazine Kaizō (Reconstruction). This study identifies three major categories of deletion marks throughout the period: word-for-word replacement of proper names; word-for-word replacement of taboo concepts; and deletions of large, irreplaceable swaths of text. What all the marks share is the possibility of a dual signification, pointing toward both that which has been removed and the act of removal itself. In order to be sensitive to specific uses of deletion marks, the chapter draws on manuscripts, examination copies of the censors, original pressings as serialized novels in Kaizō, and subsequent print editions, tracking the use of deletion marks in works by Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Junichirō, Tokuda Shūsei, Fujimori Seikichi, Edogawa Ranpo, Kobayashi Takiji, Nakano Shigeharu, Kuroshima Denji, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke.

When “After the Race” was conceived, Edwardian Dublin had been for a century the center of colonial administration. On the verge of the electric and automobile age, it was host to a continuous ferment of nationalist agitation and a five-year continuum of nationalist centennial celebrations. Written in instinctive reaction to the arrival of the automobile and in the spirit of these celebrations, this minor work requires a considerable effort of “defamiliarization.” This book is at one stroke a scholarly study which serves as a comprehensive introduction to the Joycean universe. It argues that the effort to appreciate the historical and biographical circumstances under which the story was written and attend to its technique will uncover its deceptive simplicities and reveal its astonishing coherence, subtlety, complexity, and vision.

This chapter contextualizes the specific nineteenth-century debate both within the larger question of whether and, if so, how theology is Wissenschaft (scientia; ‘science’) and within the more specific situation arising from the mid-eighteenth century through the rise of historicism and the specific turn in philosophy of religion since Kant. It starts from a discussion of theology’s institutional context in the university and its the modern transformations; F. Schleiermacher’s contribution to this debate is specifically treated. Subsequent sections explore historicization as a general phenomenon of European culture at the turn of the nineteenth century and its effect on theology in particular as well as the specific contribution made by the rise of German Idealism.

The introduction explains the need for how an international, inclusive discussion about the range of different methodological approaches from different traditions of philosophy can be read alongside each other and be seen in sometimes very critical conversation with each other. In addition, it identifies four broad themes in the volume: the largest group of chapters advocate methods that promote history of philosophy as an unapologetic, autonomous enterprise with its own criteria within philosophy. Second, three chapters can be seen as historicizing the history of philosophy from within. Third, four chapters argue for history of philosophy as a means toward making contributions to contemporary philosophy. Finally, two chapters explore the relationship between the history of philosophy and the history of science.

This chapter takes another step into the past, toward the moment that inaugurated the national imagination and the beginnings of philology. The intent is here to show that the national imagination made its debut in the 1810s under the mantle of archeology, by forcibly establishing the necessity for a voyage toward the self. The national imagination is described in the context of orientalism, an orientalism that remains unintelligible without taking into account its realization in the midst of the ethnographic nations, as well as the phenomenon of “autoscopic mimicry” and the figure of the native, i.e. both the “orientalization” of the gaze (as described by Edward Said and Stathis Gourgouris) and the historicization of the object (as described by Michel Foucault). Because the American reception of Said's Orientalism has never explicitly highlighted its treatment of philology and never read it as a critique of philology, the chapter also engages in a rewriting of this critique.

The introduction provides an overview of the scope and aims of the book. It begins by noting that the Moroccan colonial archive was the collective product of a generation of French scholars and amateur ethnologists, who, between 1900 and 1925, invented a new field, “Ethnographic Morocco,” and a new object of study, Moroccan Islam. It claimed to provide a scientific basis for the development of French colonial policy toward Morocco. The Moroccan colonial archive, however, was not just a product of its discursive destiny; it was continually reshaped in response to the multiple historical conjunctures (diplomatic, political, and intellectual) in which it was embedded. In this sense, this book is an extended argument in the importance of historicization. The introduction also forecasts a central argument: that the Moroccan ethnographic state was structured, organized, and institutionalized the way in which both non-Moroccans and Moroccans understood the Moroccan polity. In short, it created modern Morocco. The introduction also contains brief discussions of the chapters.

The historicization of nature emerged across the eighteenth century first in the development of historical geology and then in the historicization of life forms. Fossils and their stratification and the sense of ruptures in geological lime (“catastrophism”) not only dramatically extended the duration of the history of the earth into “deep time” but also included the idea of species extinction and thus raised the question of change in life forms over time. Buffon was crucial for the eighteenth-century awakening to historicization of nature. Drawing on Buffon, Kant spearheaded the formulation, in Germany, of a new sense of Naturgeschichte as a literal history of nature. Herder radicalized this reception into a theory of developmental change in life forms that alarmed Kant in its potential materialism (“hylozoism”). For Herder, nature was dynamic, indeed alive with forces of transformation.

Herder makes a number of vitally important contributions to the philosophy of history. His well-known teleological conception of history as a realization of humanity and reason was influential but is probably untenable. A more intrinsically important contribution is a deep commitment to historicization, or the radical transformation of phenomena over time, including historicism, or the deep mutability of human mental life over the course of history. Others are a closely related commitment to reorienting historiography away from explanation towards understanding; a “genetic” or “genealogical” method for explaining psychological phenomena in light of their emergence out of earlier origins and transformations thereof; a conception of historical Bildung; and a recognition that historicism leads to, or exacerbates, skeptical problems, together with a promising strategy for coping with such problems in the domain of value. Herder’s influence in this whole area on thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey was enormous.

The preceding chapter dealt with the legend of the three rings, which highlighted the close family relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This relationship, which had been an obvious one up through the Middle Ages, began to be seen as less evident in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment (or perhaps, rather, the Enlightenments) took many different shapes across Europe. The present chapter is devoted to a paradigm shift, one which reflects a new historicization of European cultural life, at least in the approach to religious phenomena. In France, on which this chapter focuses, the historical transformation started earlier than elsewhere, at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.

Valerius Maximus’ examples are fundamental for the (early) modern recollection of Republican Roman religion. Two questions. First, why is religion given such a prominent place in an collection of ‘examples’ aiming at moral improvement? Second, why are Valerius Maximus’ collected anecdotes on religion so attractive to historiographers of Roman religion? How did he ‘historicize’ religion? It is the very specific forms of historical remembrance, which Valerius introduced into Tiberian memorial culture, that form the subject of the chapter. History is taken to offer an organized, critical, and strategical form of memory—informed by and informing contemporary memories. Valerius’ strategy is to define the present consolidation of monarchic rule on the basis of a newly constructed image of the Republican past. Thus, he chooses to historicize religion and to transform it into knowledge; a people that keeps faith with this knowledge is able to face the extraordinary challenges of the present.