Placing automobility in postcolonial cities: Towards an ontology of a displaced past

The mobility turn offers a rich terrain for research to investigate the exercise of politics and power in movement through attention to associated meanings and practices. Despite this, the ontologies that can anchor this research within a historical imagination remains largely uncharted. Happily for us, coming from the opposite direction history, and especially the field of transport history, has grappled with mobilizing history in the face of the mobility turn. Several scholars have offered “usable past” as a mode of mobilizing mobility cultures of the past to inform policy actors about future choices. But is the ontology of a usable past appropriate for countries enmeshed within pre/post/colonial histories of displacement in their society and culture? Employing a case of automobilization in the city of Bengaluru in India, this paper sketches an exposition of the “displaced past” in sedimented residues that continues to live and contest the enterprise of automobility.

Introduction: Stories of Science and Empire

In this introduction, Taylor-Pirie appraises the intersections of the ‘imaginative architecture of science and empire’ by examining how, as a fledging medical discipline at the fin de siècle, parasitology entered into significant encounters and exchanges with the literary and historical imagination. Introducing readers to Nobel Prize–winning parasitologist Ronald Ross (1857–1932), Taylor-Pirie lays the foundations for the rest of the book by examining how forms such as poetry and biography, genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction, and modes such as adventure and the Gothic together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. In addition to considering the contemporaneous public understanding of science, she also explores how parasitologists were often engaged in writing their own histories of the discipline, a practice that led to a predominantly white, predominantly male understanding of science that finds a legacy in gender disparities in STEM and biases in popular histories of medicine in favour of a mode of ‘heroic biography’. She provides a brief critical overview of the field of literature and science and places her methodology and the field in the context of contemporary topics like the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and the heritage culture wars.

Verses at the Court of the King: Shifts in the Historical Imagination of the Sanskrit Literary Tradition during the Second Millennium

This essay argues that the rise and circulation of large numbers of Sanskrit literary anthologies as well as story traditions about poets in the second millennium together index important changes in the ‘author-function’ within the Sanskrit literary tradition. While modern ‘empirical authorship’ and external referentiality in Sanskrit has long been deemed ‘elusive'by Western scholarship, the new forms of literary production in the second millennium suggest a distinct new interest in authorship among wider literary communities. This new ‘author-function’ indexed a shift in the perceptions of literary production and the literary tradition itself. Focusing on the famous sixteenth-century work known as the Bhojaprabandha as both an anthology as well as a storybook about poets, this essay further argues that the paradigmatic courts of kings like Vikramāditya and Bhoja (but particularly the latter), placed not in historical time but in an archaic temporality, became the mise en scène for the figure of the poet in the second-millennium literary imagination. They were courts where the finest poets of the tradition appeared and where their virtuosity could be savored and reflected upon by generations of readers.

“CULTURE OF UNKNOWLEDGE” AS A FORM OF HISTORICAL IMAGINATION AND POLITICAL CULTURE OF RUSSIAN AND BULGARIAN NATIONALISMS

The author analyzes the images of the Ukrainian and Macedonian languages in the political cultures of Internet users in Russia and Bulgaria. The non-academic concepts of the history and status of the Macedonian and Ukrainian languages are analyzed, and the dependence of such theories on the political and ideological situation is shown. It is assumed that the analyzed interpretations of the Ukrainian and Macedonian languages historically go back to the Russian and Bulgarian nationalisms, which deny the existence of separate Macedonian and Bulgarian languages, which automatically leads to non-recognition of the political legitimacy of countries where these languages are state ones. The author believes that the analyzed levels of political culture of Internet users, on the one hand, contradict the main provisions of academic science. On the other hand, it is assumed that the activity of supporters of the analyzed versions of the Ukrainian and Macedonian languages perception is predominantly virtual, assisting to the formation of the image of the enemy in political cultures. The author believes that the analyzed moods are extremely stable and adaptive, forming symbolically significant dimensions of the Russian and Bulgarian nationalist imaginations in promotion both the concepts of identity and the formation of the images of the Other.

Blood feud through the historical imagination of Ismail Kadare: An analysis of "Broken April"

This paper explores the practice of the blood feud refracted through the prism of Ismail Kadare’s Broken April (1978), which is set in early 20th century Albania. Analysis of emerging themes reveals some important insights for Law and Literature. We examine the relationship of the blood feud with a number of themes, which fall under the structural headings of socio-political conditions, social ethos and values, and mechanisms of conflict management. Situating the author’s agenda within a perspective of historical imagination, between history and epic, past and present, suggests the perspective of la longue durée in relation to customary laws and feuding. That insight in turn prompts reflections about the survival and continuation of blood feuding as a form of life in contemporary societies.

Good Neighbor in the American Historical Imagination: Mexican American Intellectual Thought in the Fight for Civil Rights, 1930s–1940s

This article argues that historical narrative has held a significant role in Mexican American identity formation and civil rights activism by examining the way Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s used history to claim full citizenship status in Texas. In particular, it centers on how George I. Sánchez (1906–1972), a scholar of Latin American education, revised historical narrative by weaving history and foreign policy together through a pragmatic lens. To educators and federal officials, Sánchez used this revisionist history to advocate for Mexican Americans, insisting that the Good Neighbor policy presented the United States with the chance to translate into reality the democratic ideals long professed in the American historical imagination. The example of Sánchez also prompts us to reexamine the historiography in our present day: How do we define the tradition and trajectory of Mexican American intellectual thought in U.S. history? This article posits that when Sánchez and other Mexican Americans thought about their community’s collective identity and civil rights issues through history, they were contributing to a longer conversation driven by questions about identity formation and equality that first emerged at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848. These questions remain salient in the present, indicating the need for a historiographic examination that will change how we imagine the tradition of intellectual thought in the United States.