Globalizing Hayden White

ABSTRACT

This conversation originated in a plenary session organized by Ewa Domańska and María Inés La Greca under the same title of ‘Globalizing Hayden White’ at the III International Network for Theory of History Conference ‘Place and Displacement: The Spacing of History’ held at Södertörn University, Stockholm, in August 2018. In order to pay homage to Hayden White’s life work 5 months after his passing we knew that what was needed – and what he himself would have wanted – was a vibrant intellectual exchange. Our ‘celebration by discussion’ contains elaborated and revised versions of the presentations by scholars from China (Xin Chen), Latin America (María Inés La Greca, Veronica Tozzi Thompson), United States (Paul Roth), Western (Kalle Pihlainen) and East-Central Europe (Ewa Domańska). We took this opportunity of gathering scholars who represent different parts of the world, different cultures and approaches to reflect on White’s ideas in a global context. Our interest was in discussing how his work has been read and used (or even misread and misused) and how it has influenced theoretical discussions in different parts of the globe. Rather than just offering an account as experts, we mainly wanted to reflect on the current state of our field and the ways that White’s inheritance might and should be carried forward in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Hayden White
• reception
• theory of history
• narrativism
• political transformation
• academia

Acknowledgments

Ewa Domańska and Maria Ines La Greca are thankful to the organizers of the third INTH conference, especially to Berber Bevernage and Hans Ruin, for accepting their proposal and allowing the panel to be included, given the significance of White’s passing in March last year, after the conference program was already organized. They also want to thank all the contributors for their wonderful work and commitment with the panel and this publication. They especially thank Kalle Pihlainen for his help in preparing this section. Ewa Domańska expresses her gratitude to Veronika Čapská, Tamás Kisantal, Diana Mishkova, Iryna Odrekhivska, Lucian Popescu, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Volodymyr Sklokin, Bogdan Ștefănescu, Aurimas Švedas, Juraj Šuch, Rafał Stobiecki and Eugen Zeleňák for their comments and help in collecting the references presented in this contribution. The translation of her contribution was enabled by financial support from the Division of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Kalle Pihlainen, in turn, wants to thank the editors of this conversation as well as Keith Jenkins for their suggestions toward improving his contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. I would add to Tozzi’s narration the work in Chile by Luis Gueneau de Mussy (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez) and Miguel Valderrama (Universidad de Chile); see especially de Mussy and Valderrama (2010), which includes a Spanish translation of White’s ‘Manifesto Time,’ along with texts by Frank Ankersmit, Walter Mignolo and the Subaltern Studies Group.

2. Readers in China did not have the opportunity to read Yang (1987, English version) until Yang (1989, Chinese version).

3. Yang (2016) is the full version and was finished before Yang died in 1989. It has been first published in Yang’s collections.

4. This book includes articles from Veeser’s The New Historicism and White’s Tropics of Discourse. One result was that many Chinese readers initially saw White as a participant in the Western literary-critical movement known as ‘new historicism,’ although this was simply not the case. Greenblatt’s main concern was with showing how literary works are permeated by traces of the historical time and place in which they were written; this was only marginally, if at all, White’s concern.

5. This collection includes eight articles from The Tropics of Discourse and five others from White’s Metahistory (the Introduction), The Content of the Form and Figural Realism.

6. Already in Kellner (1989) was the first to appreciate Hayden White’s contributions in terms of a revaluation of rhetoric.

7. See http://metahistorias.com.ar/. Lavagnino’s, La Greca’s and Murad’s PhD dissertations focused on Hayden White’s philosophy of history. See Lavagnino (2018, 2014, 2013, 2011); Lavagnino and Tozzi (2014); La Greca (2016, 2014, 2013, 2010); Murad (2014); Tozzi (2009b, 2017, 2018).

8. María Inés La Greca, Nicolás Lavagnino, Cecilia Macón, Omar Murad, Moira Pérez, Natalia Taccetta, Mariela Solana, Santiago Silverio, Verónica Tozzi and Mariela Zeitler from the University of Buenos Aires.

9. Mariana Castillo Merlo and María Inés Mudrovcic from the National University of Comahue and Esteban Lythgoe and Francisco Naishtat from the University of Buenos Aires.

10. Cecilia Hidalgo, María Martini from the University of Buenos Aires.

11. Gustavo Castagnola and Jaime Peire from the National University of Tres de Febrero and Marcelo Levinas from the University of Buenos Aires.

12. Leonor Arfurch, Valeria Castelló Joubert, Ariel Idez and Alejandro Kaufman from the University of Buenos Aires.

13. See https://www.lanacion.com.ar/1363767-la-nueva-imaginacion-historica.

14. Mariana, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

15. http://www.sbthh.org.br/pb/.

16. http://www.historiadahistoriografia.com.br/revista.

17. http://www.seer.ufu.br/index.php/artcultura.

18. The Portuguese version also includes articles by Marcelo Durão Rodrigues da Cunha (Instituto Federal do Espírito Santo), Leonardo Grão Velloso Damato Oliveira (Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Stanford University), Clóvis Gruner (Universidade Federal do Paraná) and Fábio Franzini, who wrote specifically about the Brazilian reception of Hayden White: ‘Mr. White chega aos trópicos: Notas sobre Metahistória e a recepção de Hayden White no Brasil’ [Mr. White arrives at the tropics: Notes on Metahistory and the reception of Hayden White in Brazil]. It is also important to mention here the important work of Jurandir Malerba (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), who has long studied Hayden White’s theory of history.

19. These three articles are ‘Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism’ (Colloquium 1966), White’s review of Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought by George A. Kelly (History and Theory 1970) and a work in progress entitled ‘Hegel’s Logic as a Theory of Figurative Consciousness’ (dated 1970).

20. Historian Miguel Valderrama (University of Chile) has paid special attention to White’s work by establishing a dialogue with his own critical left and postmodern perspective. See Valderrama 2019.

21. Most of Metahistorias’ researchers and students have paid attention to the consequences that White’s notion of figural causality has for cultural analysis in our contemporary situation. See Martini 2013; Taccetta 2013; Tozzi 2008, 2012a.

22. The distinction drawn in his last work (White 2018) between the ‘historical past’ (the past with which disciplinary history is concerned) and the ‘practical past’ (of interest to anyone in everyday life, politics and literature) could have been considered as an attempt at conciliation and recovery of the difference between scientific history and uses of the past. However, disciplinary historians soon reacted by claiming the crucial relevance of historiographic research for the practical past.

23. For an intriguing exposition of White’s reception in France, see Carrard 2018; for a brief, originally 1993 outline of the missed connections there, see Chartier 1997.

24. In great part, responsibility for articulating this parallel can be attributed to Chris Lorenz (most obviously, Lorenz 1998) but he is not alone in drawing it. See also, for example, Kuukkanen 2015 and Peter Icke (2012, 1), who presents Ankersmit as ‘the European Hayden White.’

25. This is not to say that White was not a postmodernist in some sense at least, but only that his idea of ‘postmodernism’ contained so much more than the idea of complete linguistic opacity quite visibly defended by Ankersmit early on (see Ankersmit 1989; cf. Kansteiner 1993 critique of Ankersmit’s extreme rendition of postmodernism). Disagreement abounds about White as a postmodernist among ‘Whiteans,’ however (and indeed Ankersmit 1998 also denies White’s postmodernism when addressing Marwick’s critique, instead here claiming White to be a structuralist). Further – and substantially ‘European’ – perspectives on White can be found in, for example, the special issue of Storia della Storiografia entitled ‘Hayden White’s Metahistory twenty years after’ (see especially the essay by Jonathan Gorman 1993) as well as in Korhonen 2006.

26. In contrast with this unfounded belief, White has been eminently clear about his position: ‘The reality of the past is a given, it is an enabling presupposition of historical enquiry’ (White 2005b, 148).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ewa Domańska

Ewa Domańska is professor of human sciences in the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research interests include the methodology of history, contemporary theory and history of historiography, and comparative theory of the humanities and social sciences.

María Inés La Greca

María Inés La Greca holds a PhD in philosophy from University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she teaches philosophy of history at the Philosophy Department. She is an associate professor of gender epistemology in Tres de Febrero National University, where she is also the director of the Gender Studies Interdisciplinary Network (CIEA-UNTREF). She is an assistant researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET).

Paul A. Roth

Paul A. Roth is distinguished professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published extensively on topics in epistemology, philosophy of history, philosophy of social science, and the history of analytic philosophy. His book, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press (January 2020).

Xin Chen

Xin Chen is professor of theory of history in the History Department, Zhejiang University. He is Chinese translator of Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) and co-translator of Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1993). Chen studies Western history of historiography and theory of history. His works include Western Historical Narratology (2005) and Historical Knowing: From Modern to Postmodern (2010). His is also a co-editor of the Series of Ideas of History (Peking University Press, 2006–present), which has translated and published over 20 volumes on philosophy of history and theory of history.

Veronica Tozzi Thompson

Veronica Tozzi Thompson is professor of philosophy of history at the University of Buenos Aires and of epistemology of social sciences in Tres de Febrero National University. She is principal researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). Her main issues of interest are philosophy of history and social sciences, epistemology of testimony, and politics of memory in the Argentine recent past.

Kalle Pihlainen

Kalle Pihlainen is currently a senior research fellow in Cultural Theory at the School of Humanities at Tallinn University, funded by the Estonian Research Council (PUT1150). His recent publications in theory and philosophy of history include The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (Routledge, 2017).