The History of Politics and the Politics of History
INSTRUCTORS
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The course explores transnational interactions between Politics and History throughout the last two
centuries. It analyses how historical research and the writing of History may have contributed to the formation of modern political cultures and ideologies, as well as investigates ways through which political events and political views may have fostered methodological and theoretical transformations within the discipline of History itself. Encompassing developments as diverse as the unification of Germany and the emergence of Postcolonial Theory, the course will specifically focus on the emergence of modern
conceptions of space and time and on the making of historical and political subjects. How did economic nationalism participate in the consolidation and renewal of National History, from the unification of Germany to the rise of new nations in Asia and Africa? How the emergence of the labour movement and Marxist discussions on Russia and Latin America may resonate to today’s debates on Transnational History?
How did the term totalitarianism gain a conceptual life of his own throughout the 20th century, progressing from Italian antifascist discourse to American Cold War sovietology? Or how the so-called “pensée 68” invests recent scholarship on Nazism, as well as ethical debates on the memory of the Holocaust? And, to give one final example: how the development of a Postcolonial critique of the discipline of History is linked to the spread of Maoism from China to India throughout the second half of the 20th century? And how this Postcolonial critique may lead historians to be less dismissive towards non-scientific ways of making sense
of, and being sensitive to, history and time?