CROMOHS 21 (2016) – CAll for papers http://www.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/index

From Comparative to Global History: Assessing Relational Approaches to the Past (1400-1900)

In 1928, Marc Bloch made what proved to be an influential statement when he said that the practice of comparing societies distant in space and time, described rather disparagingly as “comparative method in the grand manner”, may serve some ends but is too imprecise to be of any great use “from the scientific point of view”. Decades later William H. Sewell, Jr. objected that “mere temporal and spatial proximity does not assure similarity, and some societies which are very remote from one another are surely more alike, at least in ways that are crucial for some explanatory problems, than some neighboring societies”.

Themes such as “global history,” “Transfergeschichte”, “circulation,” and “connection” all hold an undoubted appeal and draw in the present age. It has been pointed out though that all too often the history of the world, especially when it is based to a large degree on (mostly English) secondary literature, has ended up being fashioned into a flat narrative of “the rise of the West and the Westernization of the rest.” For Sanjay Subrahmanyam, an alternative to the “grand narrative of modernization” would be for historians not simply to adopt a different scale, but to take a step sideways, finding a different vantage point and employing a decentring technique to identify previously hidden or unseen connections among places and cultures.

More recent comparative endeavours have seen scholars engaging more and more with what Serge Gruzinski has described as the “alchemy of hybridization,” and the “intensity of circulation … that reveals mixed landscapes”. Entangled histories (Espagne, Kocka, Werner, Zimmermann) have explored “mutual influencing,” “reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions,” and the intertwined “processes of constituting one another.” Further efforts to restore cultural comparison to the centre of scholarship have included the “cognitive science of religion”, “World Literature” and “World Philology”. Finally, but no less important, historians of emotions have begun to investigate and to problematize the transcultural translatability of emotions.

The next issue of CROMOHS (21/2016) will offer a critical historiographical survey and discussion, accompanied by exemplary case studies, of the various approaches to comparative early modern history that have been theorized and practiced in the last two decades. These range from transcultural and translation studies to global and connected histories. The aim is to unravel, review, and compare the possibilities and limitations of this plurality of relational approaches and methods. Has a change of scale been taking place, or a shift in perspective instead? What are the consequences of adopting a practice of synchronic or diachronic comparison? How can researchers working with languages, concepts and categories that are not part of their sphere of socialization deal with the inescapable challenges of reflexivity that these pose?

We invite ground-breaking research articles that either critically address the history of relational approaches to historical and cultural studies, or apply a possible variant of such perspectives (comparative, connected, global history, etc.) to a research theme (political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and so on), combined with a reflection on its theoretical implications. Any geographic area may be considered, while the time span covered by the issue will be from 1400 to 1900. The opening historiographical essay will be by Prof. Dr. Margrit Pernau, Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions), Berlin.

Submissions must be sent no later than January 14, 2017 to: giovanni.tarantino@uwa.edu.au and/or g.marcocci@unitus.it.

Articles should be no more than 7,000 words in length, notes included. Proposals should include a c.500 word abstract and a short biography of the author. Please prepare your essays using the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/), using footnotes rather than endnotes. Authors will be informed as to whether or not their articles have been accepted for publication within two months, following evaluation by two internationally renowned referees. The issue will be published online by April 2017.

Profane Shakespeare: Perfection, Pollution, and the Truth of Performance

For its 33rd issue (Spring 2018), the online peer-reviewed journal Etudes Epistémè (www.episteme.revues.org). seeks articles examining Shakespeare’s treatment of the notions of perfection (or “purity”) and pollution (or “impurity”), understood not only along traditional moral and religious lines, but also, more “profanely”, in aesthetic and hermeneutic terms.

In recent years, much attention has been devoted to the question of Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, leading to a polarization of opinions. Though Shakespeare belonged to a deeply Christian culture and though his language is in part shaped by all-pervasive Christian texts, evidence of Shakespeare’s “true faith” remains necessarily inconclusive. The playwright and poet situates his own truth elsewhere, in his art of poetry and drama, and in the time and act of performance, rather than in any sort of religious canon or eschatological horizon, implying the notions of completion and perfection. If Shakespeare so broadly and keenly “speaks to us” to this day, it is perhaps because of how profane his art is.

This does not mean that Shakespeare does not engage in an (implicit) debate with the religious imagination of his time. His contemporary world and contemporary language are still too intrinsically imbued with the religious for him to step into the neutral ground of the “secular”. He cannot draw the contours of a profane world without using the language of religion and deflecting it to a new purpose. His poetry and his theatre can be read as specifically literary responses, addressing, and, more importantly, displacing, or even “polluting” (in the etymological sense of “desecrating”) the contemporary ethical and religious debate over purity, especially purity of heart – a burning issue at the time – to turn it into an aesthetic, hermeneutic, and possibly anthropological question.

We welcome papers focusing on the different ways in which Shakespeare recounts and stages the failure of purity (or perfection), embracing the impure (or the polluted) as a lively, creative material. This special Shakespeare issue of Etudes Epistémè is open to essays adopting a variety of methodological approaches, whether more materially- or philosophically-oriented. In all cases the issue especially invites proposals that attempt to “re-textualize” Shakespeare by favoring close examination of the text over religious or biographical speculation, to bring out the complex interplay between the notions of perfection, pollution and performance. Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Shakespeare’s treatment of spots and stains
• Shakespeare’s representations of purity and impurity of heart
• moral and poetic forms of pollution
• hypocrisy and performance
• sexuality and performance
• Shakespeare’s criticism of religious, moral, or political rigorism
• the moral, ontological and metaphysical implications of performance
• uses, misuses and abuses of religious or theological language in Shakespeare
• acts of profanation
• histrionic displacements of the religious
• spaces of mixture and contamination
• parallelisms and oppositions between the stage and the temple
• Shakespeare and hermeneutic or exegetical traditions
• early practices of censorship of the Shakespearean text, especially those revealing any “profane” quality of the Shakespearean corpus
• Christian readings / misreadings of Shakespeare

Detailed abstracts of 600 to 1000 words of proposed articles are to be sent to the editors of the issue, Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Karen Britland and Line Cottegnies by December 15th, 2016: anne-marie.miller-blaise@univ-paris3.fr, britland@startmail.com and line.cottegnies@univ-paris3.fr . Notifications of acceptance: March 31, 2017. Full articles due September 1st, 2017. The articles will then be peer-reviewed before publication in the Spring of 2018.