Abstracts

PHD STUDENTS PRESENTATIONS

 

Taynna Mendonça Marino
Can epistemic racism be overcome through empathy?

This paper aims to discuss the problem of epistemic racism in the geopolitics of knowledge and the role of empathy in responding adequately or not to the supremacy of Western knowledge and in assisting the production of alternative futures based on the recognition of the diversity of epistemologies, cosmologies, and worldviews and the relationships among them. To do so, it seems necessary to discuss: firstly, what is epistemic racism, what are its bases, and how do they operate; secondly, the uses of empathy as an anti-racist device; thirdly, the potential contribution of empathy to the resolution of epistemic racism from a critical analysis of its controversies; and, finally, to propose a critical balance evaluating if there is a place for empathy in counteracting epistemic racism and building knowledge based on ideas of cooperation and coexistence between Western and non-Western ways of knowing.

Jarosław Jaworek
Sonic history as a sub-discipline of historical research


Including the issue of sound and its perception in reflections on the past presents historians with epistemic and methodological questions. How can  an ephemeral phenomenon such as sound be studied? Are we able to reconstruct it at all? If so, what kind of research apparatus can we use to analyse the soundscapes of the past? Or perhaps instead of researching how the past sounded, it would be more important to look for answers to the question: how did sound or audio phenomena influence past reality? How did their perception, defined as the culture of listening, change? As yet there has been no general work, marked by a unified theoretical and methodological approach, on sound history, a new trend in historical research. Although there are some reflections in this field, existing studies are scattered across different texts by different researchers and tend to focus on individual indications of the specific case studies they analyze. In my talk, I will outline my ideas for creating a synthesis  of this young sub-discipline of history while highlighting selected problems that I dealing with in my work.

Michał Kępski
In a search of “water heritage”: A case study of the Warta River in Poznań, Poland

What is lacking in existing Polish scholarship is a holistic approach to water, with the dearth of research that would take into account recent trends in exploring the future of water and its heritage, including natural-cultural heritage, particularly noticeable. My PhD project aims to conceptualize the idea of the water heritage base on a case study of the Warta River. Until the nineteenth century, the Warta remained in a more-or-less natural and unregulated state, meaning that the project’s timeframe (19th-20th century) enables investigation of the river’s anthropogenic transformations. Conceptualizing the idea of the water heritage will involve defining social practices that are indicative of taking responsibility (consciously or unconsciously) for the Warta River.

Hugo R. Merlo
Naming the different, conceptualizing difference: On the theoretical limits of comparative and global studies

Since the dawn of comparative studies in the early nineteenth century, many theoretical categories were coined to designate what can generally be described as the unfavorable position in the geopolitics of knowledge and culture: 'minor,' 'peripheral,' 'marginal,' 'third world,' 'subaltern,' 'global south,' 'colonial,' to name just a few. While generally designating the same phenomena, these categories differ from each other and emphasize different aspects of the uneven relationships amongst cultures and intellectual traditions. This presentation will discuss these categories and their implications for comparative and global studies - especially historiography and literary studies. Paying attention to the theoretical foundations of comparative and global studies becomes particularly important in a moment, like ours, in which these trends are steadily becoming more and more popular. Our concern, however, lies mainly in the possibility of producing comparisons that are not 'center-centered,' that is, on establishing comparisons that open up the possibilities of dialogues between the intellectual peripheries of the world.

Tomasz Wiśniewski
Postcolonial contexts of postsecular reflection

The aim of this paper is to discuss the postcolonial contexts of postsecular reflection. I argue that the postsecular turn in the humanities and social sciences has a manifold genealogy, and some of its important contexts could be traced to discussions of South Asian (Indian) theorists including Ashis Nandy and Dipesh Chakrabarty. What is interesting is that they had criticized secular politics as well as secular interpretations of history for some time before the “official” emergence of the postsecular turn (which often is ascribed to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda in the United States and following discussions, animated mostly by Jürgen Habermas). Today the number of postsecular scholars from South Asia, who in some way are indebted to postcolonial theory, is even higher (Ananda Abeysekara, Rajeev Bhargava, or Manav Ratti, to name only a few).
I enquire into the meaning of this postcolonial context, its geopolitical conditions and implications, as well as its potential impact on postsecular perspectives, especially in the theory of history. Given that South Asia is considered one of the most prominent “peripheral” and/or “subaltern” geopolitical regions of the world, I enquire into possible parallels with other similar regions. Here I will focus on Central-Eastern Europe, including Poland. While acknowledging its postcolonial situatedness (as well as postcolonial theory’s efficiency in interpreting the problems of the region), there is also a need to highlight the lack of events and processes with a paradigmatic meaning for “indigenous” postsecular reflection. The topics of most discussions and categories used in this region are “imported.” I will therefore discuss some potential examples of such events and processes, and to assess risks and opportunities associated with them (largely political ones).

 

ROUND TABLE

 

Patricia Marinho Aranha
Mapping the Unknown: An investigation into the cartography and discourses on the territorial occupation of Latin America

This research aims to analyze the historical development of concepts regarding the interior of Latin America. Those areas are referred to as unknown, wild spaces, or the last frontier in historic and geographic descriptions produced by scientific expeditions carried out between the 17th and 20th centuries. By offering a comparative analysis, this work intends to intertwine representations of the territory: for exampole, historical maps and territorial descriptions of Amazonia, Chaco, Patagonia, and Altiplano, as well as of areas that are not precisely demarcated on maps or whose symbolic meaning extrapolates their geographical location, such as the sertão and the desert/void. My approach, then, involves investigating the history of the geographical conceptualization of Latin America by examining the different discourses, the tensions between different historical actors, and the sedimentation of concepts related to the territorial occupation. This symbolic perspective also exposes the paradox of nationality: areas portrayed as backward, uncivilized, or resistant to modernization, at the same time denote authenticity and the nation's archetype contrary to the Europeanized coast. According to this perspective, the specificity of the Latin American interior is given by its index as a social engine, its power as the force that drives a national cultural formation, from which the critical importance of territorial representations in Latin American historiography emerges.

Marcelo Durão Rodrigues da Cunha
Towards a South-South meta-historical dialogue: Some possibilities emerging from the Latin-American tradition of historical thinking

Were anyone to attempt to summarize some of the most promising pathways taken by historiography in the last several decades in just a few terms, there is no doubt that concepts like 'global,' 'transnational,' and 'cross-cultural' would emerge as catchwords pointing towards a growing international trend. Transcending national borders, abandoning 'methodological nationalism,' and overcoming epistemological ethnocentrism are almost mandatory stances that have become an essential part of contemporary historical thinking. However, despite the advances brought about by this ‘global turn’ in historiography, attempts at finding alternatives to a Eurocentric view of history are scarce, and most comparative patterns still attain ‘center-Western’ standards of reflecting upon the past-present-future configurations. Nonetheless, like never before, historians today are attentive to old and new anti-colonial critiques of historical thinking from the Global South. In light of this scenario, Latin America, for example, has emerged as a source of inspiration for numerous non-linear, multilayered, and polychronic approaches to the past in the last few years. Hence, while outlining some of such trends, this paper aims to reflect upon the epistemic advantages that could arise from the Latin-American perspectives on historical thinking and from a metahistorical outlook not restrained to the North Atlantic but focused instead on the potentialities of a South-South comparative dialogue. 

Moira Pérez
Destroying Heritage and/or Building Knowledge: A view from the Colonial South


In recent years, social movements have increasingly incorporated interventions on monuments as a form of social protest by tearing down, vandalizing, or modifying statues and other homages to figures related to the colonial past. Debates around this practice tend to focus on whether it constitutes an unacceptable “destruction of heritage”, which is understood as something in itself worth preserving, or as a valid form of political expression. In this presentation, I explore such collective initiatives not as a form of destruction, but of construction – in particular, of building new, alternative understandings of colonial pasts. By considering how the geopolitics of knowledge affect the ways in which colonial history tends to be narrated in the Latin American South (with focus in the case of Argentina), I stress the importance of the concept of coloniality as an atmosphere that permeates both narratives and the representations of history in the public space, in order to suggest that tearing down monuments is effectively providing better understandings of our past - and, as a consequence, of our present and future.

Julia Freire Perini
Brazilian metahistory as global history: On the possible contributions of Brazilian historiography to the overcoming of ethnocentrism in present-day historical thinking 

This paper aims to analyze the history of the concept of metahistória ('metahistory') throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Brazilian historiography while focusing on its implications for the consolidation of the country's national identity as well as on the global-theoretical possibilities stemming from this encounter between Brazil's history and world history. Although it was only in the last couple of decades that the term became popular in Brazilian Portuguese, it is possible to identify semasiological uses of a global-oriented metahistória  among Brazilian scholars since the first half of the nineteenth century. Since the country's independence, Brazilian historians have had to adopt critical regard concerning the sui generis elements of Brazil's past vis-à-vis the Eurocentric features of the modern concept of history. Likewise, 'metahistory' has been used increasingly regularly in the last several decades by numerous international historians whose objective is to validate the reach of historical knowledge beyond the geospatial and temporal limitations that prevent the grounding of their analysis on a Universalist theoretical position. Thus, while shedding new light on the trajectory of the concept in Brazil, the paper offers a more complex picture of the history of metahistória and highlights potential Brazilian contributions to the present-day metahistorical debates of global historiography. 

 

Mikołaj Smykowski
Deprovincialization of Polish Holocaust Studies

In the thematic issue of the prestigious Journal of Genocide Research (vol. 22, no. 2, 2020), Ewa Domańska, Jacek Małczyński, Mikołaj Smykowski, and Agnieszka Kłos presented a collective program article alongside individual research articles that conceptualize a new subdiscipline: “the environmental history of the Holocaust”. The program article has had over 4600 views, while the editor has asked well-known scholars working on the Holocaust (O. Bartov, E. Katz, J. Rapson) to comment on our articles. Some of the invited commentators argued that focusing on the environmental aspects of the Holocaust intentionally draws attention away from the contemporary discussions about the engagement of Polish people in crimes perpetrated during the Holocaust. That remark not only diminishes the broad spectrum of detailed and critical publications dealing with the problem of Polish involvement in the Holocaust crimes, but also describes the authors as ‘provincial intellectuals’ from East-Central Europe who are apparently incapable of dealing with their own past and – by introducing EHH as a new research direction - try to avoid difficult topics. In the article, “The Legacies of the Holocaust” which is part of a special section of JGR “Forum: The Environmental History and the Holocaust,” we developed, clarified and defended the ideas we presented in the original articles. This current text demonstrates that Polish scholars are capable of participating in international discussion and of proposing original approaches that are changing the field of Holocaust studies. The above-mentioned example is a point of departure for the discussion of how East-Central Europe offers grounds for acquiring interesting source material for Western scholars but rarely becomes a partner in theoretical discussions.

Monika Stobiecka
Critical heritage geographies: Polish museums as alternatives to the authorized heritage discourse

The authorized heritage discourse (AHD) is defined as a set of legal, theoretical and practical guidelines and expectations that international institutions such as UNESCO introduced globally in the twentieth century. The authorized heritage discourse, although heavily criticized in the last twenty years by the representatives of critical heritage studies, remains valid while promoting a particular and uncritical "geography of heritage”. Within AHD’s official framework, Europe is perceived as the continent of culture, whereas countries outside Europe are valued as the custodians of natural heritage sites. AHD favors sites such as castles, palaces, old towns and temples, leaving almost no space for commemorating sites of “negative” and “dissonant” character.
Poland holds an interesting position in UNESCO’s geography of heritage. In my speech I will confront UNESCO’s idea of World Heritage sites in Poland with the specific type of heritage that is practiced in Polish museums. I will claim that the authorized heritage discourse does not acknowledge histories, memories and events that bear value for the Polish people. Further on, I will argue that UNESCO’s vision of Polish heritage is rather oblique in comparison with the most attended Polish museums and sites.
The Polish case study will serve as an example of decolonial heritage practice that goes against the expectations and ideas of Polishness accepted and promoted by UNESCO. I will prove that national and local museums can be more effective in promoting heritage that matters socially than external technocratic institutions that impose their own visions of heritage.