What Is Global History? by Conrad Sebastian;

Author:Conrad, Sebastian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Positionality and centered approaches

What is the location of the world? Where do historians stand when they write its history? Can global historians rise above the parochialism of national perspectives to arrive at some form of disinterested objectivity? Some programmatic statements indeed ascribe to the global approach the promise of achieving such an Archimedean vantage point. They foresee arriving at “a transcultural version of history that may become acceptable all around the globe.”1

These stands are, however, illusory. Global histories are not written in a vacuum. Historians may cover the history of the whole world, but they do so from a specific location, and they write at a particular time, embedded in their own life-worlds. It is misleading to suggest that simply shifting our attention from national history to world history would remove us from the conflicts of the present. Today, national and institutional contexts remain crucial in shaping both the theoretical interpretations and the narratives of historical development.2 Most accounts of the history of the world are framed by axiomatic assumptions and are based on value judgments and a hierarchy of meaning. They are thus in some fundamental way locally “centered,” even when they purport to speak on behalf of the world or of “humanity.” This chapter will explore what such inherent positionality implies for the practice of global history.

Among the various centrisms that shape historical interpretation, Eurocentrism has been dominant over the past two centuries. And as global history is generally associated with the ambition to move beyond a Eurocentric vision of the world, this will be our point of departure. Global history, then, promises to transcend the narrative typical of the older genre of world history, which narrowly focuses on the “rise of the West.” But what exactly does that imply? Is it Eurocentric to emphasize Euro-American hegemony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Conversely, is it automatically Sinocentric to underline the sophistication of Song China? Do we need to discard the terminology of the social sciences because it was originally coined in Europe?

At our present conjuncture, the challenge is this: How can we overcome Eurocentrism and take account of the multiple positions from which history can be written, without falling into the trap of nativism and without positing alternative forms of centrism? This chapter will tackle the inherent tension between positionality and centered approaches. On the one hand, it points to the undeniable positionality of any interpretation of the past—unless we want to reduce history to a single narrative, we need to take a multiplicity of perspectives into account. On the other hand, a strong emphasis on particularity and uniqueness can easily yield claims to incommensurability and to the assertion that the cultural resources that underlie different societies are so radically diverse as to render the societies mutually incomprehensible. Indeed, as we will see below, the desire to discard Eurocentrism has in recent years led to a proliferation of centrisms in various parts of the world. We will close the chapter with an appeal for a move beyond a culturalist understanding of positionality.

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