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Losing the Present to History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2022

Faisal Devji Open the ORCID record for Faisal Devji [Opens in a new window]
Faisal Devji*
Affiliation:
History Faculty, University of Oxford
*
*Corresponding author. faisal.devji@history.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

Histories of the present are premised upon the loss of their subject, which is paradoxically deprived of its integrity by being tied back to the past. Attending to the present has been the prerogative of anticolonial and Cold War writing, for which the disconnection of present from past was crucial. If Gandhi, a critic of historical consciousness as a modality of imperialism, represented the former, Arendt did the latter kind of thinking. Histories of the present disregard these forms of thought, which stress rupture over continuity. This makes them Eurocentric almost by definition, as well as anti-global in their conceptualization. The attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 offers us an example of how an event, understood provincially within a Euro-American history of the present, can be globalised to quite different effect.

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Type
Forum: History and the Present
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 592 - 600
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Many instances of this narrative can be found in Lawrence, Bruce, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

2 See Gandhi, M. K., Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. J., Anthony Parel (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar.

3 For Gandhi's emphasis on the present see Gandhi, M. K., The Bhagvadgita (New Delhi, 1980)Google Scholar.

4 Iqbal, Mohammad, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (New Delhi, 1990)Google Scholar.

5 Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?”, in Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, 1995), 81-94, at 83.

6 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 3 (Chicago, 1977), 433–4Google Scholar.

7 See, for instance, Chakrabarty, Dipesh, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.