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This book situates historical scholarship within a plurihistoricity of contemporary historical culture, exploring conflicting conceptions of historical change in technological utopias of human enhancement, in prospects of human extinction, in societal responses to the Anthropocene, and in the imperative of bringing colonial patterns of historical injustice to justice.
Contemporary societies increasingly reclaim history from the academic pursuit of historiography. On the one hand, societal engagement in history is growing palpably. History is literally everywhere: in the fallen statues of past political regimes, in trajectories of environmental degradation, and in technological prospects of space expansion. On the other hand, societal demand for history seems to diminish rather than strengthen the authority of professionalized historical studies. What do these societal historicities stand for? How do they create pasts that matter? What futures do they desire or attempt to avoid? How do they view the historical transitions into those futures? And what is the societal role of historical scholarship and scholarly conceptions of history in the plurihistoricity of contemporary historical culture?
By addressing these questions, Simon's book is essential reading for everyone interested in the present and future of viewing the world historically.
List of contents
On Plurihistoricity: An Introduction Part 1: Transitioning to Futures 1. History After the End of the World 2. Utopias of Extinction 3. Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future Part 2: Creating Pasts 4. Making Pasts Matter 5. Modes of Historicization: Historicism and Constructionism 6. Bringing History to Justice Part 3: Inhabiting Presents 7. Historicities in Conflict: The Desynchronization of Political and Technological Change 8. The Historical Cultures of the Anthropocene 9. Unfathomable Futures and Cognitive Control On the Societal Function of Historiography: A Postscript in Five Theses
About the author
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is a historian and historical theorist at Bielefeld University, Germany. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He authored the books
History in Times of Unprecedented Change (2019) and
The Epochal Event (2020) and co-authored
The Fabric of Historical Time (2023).
