ABSTRACT The colonial pasts, as in other European contexts, are part of an intense social debate focused on their modes of representation and narration. Over the past decade, a profound memorial conflict has surfaced, disrupting the conventional modes of historically interpreting colonialism. This upheaval has coincided with the resurgence of arguments and practices steeped in imperial nostalgia. This text addresses the different positions in these debates, exploring their genealogies and agents, the role of history and their conflicting relationship with memory. In addition to dissecting the ideological battleground, this exploration sheds light on the tangible manifestations of these debates, analysing different legislative initiatives that have taken place in recent years concerning the use of chemical weapons in the Rif War and the recognition of Afro-descendant communities. The text critically evaluates the challenges inherent in navigating this complex terrain, offering valuable insights into the evolving landscape of historical discourse and the pursuit of justice.

ABSTRACT In recent years, a number of artists have used digital and other means to forensically reconstruct experiences of the past (or of a fictional scenario in that past) in order to not only understand that past but to extrapolate towards desired, or feared, futures. In this text, I focus mainly on three bodies of work that exemplify this approach in ways that test the limits of filmmaking, visual arts, and architectural or topographical practice: starting with Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary series of 2021; through Isaac Julien’s video and photo installations Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass of 2019 and Lessons of the Hour, 1983 (Who Killed Colin Roach?) of 1983; to numerous works, focusing on events from to Germany to Gaza, by multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture. Along the way, I will also make glancing references to works including Orson Welles’ film noir Touch of Evil and Justine Triet’s court room drama thriller Anatomy of a Fall, in an attempt to understand better what effects forensic reconstructions actually have in regard to two contradicting desires: the desire for discovering and publicizing hitherto unknown truths, and the desire for confirming and promoting prior beliefs.

ABSTRACT This essay concerns how certain moments in works of art, and also in history, are characterised by a heightened awareness of time. To explain this, I introduce the idea of ‘intertemporality’, describing moments in art when the multiplicity of time is foregrounded. Through an intertemporal analysis of Spencer (2021), I show how time’s multiplicity is an inevitable but overlooked way of creating shared meanings. It does not necessitate the poetic difficulties of art cinema and may apply as much to the costume drama or scifi, retro or the multiverse, the thriller, the comic, the romantic or the biopic. I seek to demonstrate how intertemporality achieves this heightened consciousness of time’s multiplicity in three main ways: the aesthetic organisation of a film; its location within a wider cultural memory; and the vision of social relations it relies on. In each, contrasting temporalities are foregrounded in ways that create coherent, popularly recognisable meanings and that increase drama and emotion. After showing how an intertemporal analysis might work, I conclude by speculating what this means for our understanding of time, history and the contemporary.

ABSTRACT This essay sees fin de siècle as a focus for the various time-dimensions in human experience and the apprehensiveness induced by a world growing ever older, thereby historicizing itself and its history. It exposes (after Freud) the psychopathology of historicized life, a performative inadequacy: the failure to achieve the self-repression advanced technocratic civilization requires. The conclusion: fin de siècle reveals in this pathogenic inadequacy engrained existential tropisms.

ABSTRACT Caring for the dead, remembering and showing respect are essential to any community. Those who do not know where their relatives and ancestors are buried, often feel disoriented and erased from history. This article discusses the impact of the (broken) relationship between the living and the dead on current conflicts over public colonial monuments. To understand the protests, this article examines the significance of the so-called ‘necropolitical space’ (Ruin 2018): the ongoing connection between the living and the dead that holds a community together. Monuments play an important role in this space. In the first section, I explain the meaning of necropolitical space by referring to the iconoclastic French revolutionaries in 1793 and the reburial of Civil War victims in present-day Spain. Then, using this concept, I focus on the controversy surrounding the colonial statue of J.P. Coen in the Netherlands. Its prominent location and visual language ignore the 1621 massacre on the Banda Islands by the Dutch, much to the dismay of the descendants who are demanding recognition for their culture. I conclude that the protests can also be interpreted as a call to restore the relationship with the ancestors.

ABSTRACT Vaccination is always political. That is why I explore voluntary and compulsory vaccination programs in German history from the nineteenth century to the present: Fundamental changes in German politics and society throughout this period provide the opportunity to gain a better understanding of voluntariness itself and of how it has unfolded in the relationship between bodies and social orders. From the introduction of compulsory vaccination in 1874 until today, the associated debate and politics oscillated between the demand for obedience to a paternalistic state and the self-image of a liberal society. Against this backdrop, it is surprising that the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, rejected voluntary vaccination, whereas National Socialist Germany was very much in favor of it. After World War II, West Germany adopted a principle of flanked voluntariness, interpreting the success of voluntary vaccination programs as ‘plebiscite by syringe’. East Germany, in contrast, initially operated through compulsion, but later introduced practices of ‘covert voluntariness’ to calm protest of East-Germans and the lack of resources. Finally, my article juxtaposes the liberal ideal type of the ‘preventive self’, which gained momentum from the 1970s onward, with the most recent debate on the return of mandatory vaccination programs, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, the history of vaccination reveals the ambivalences and dynamics of voluntariness. Voluntariness thus became a test of social cohesion and the population’s sense of responsibility.

ABSTRACT Martin L. Davies’s academic trajectory originates in German literary studies, focusing on Jean Paul (1763–1825), a prominent figure in early 19th-century German literature. While Jean Paul is often regarded as an ‘Idealist’ exploring intellectual and emotional realms, Davies examines his overlooked realism in economics, politics, and linguistic metaphors. His 1978 Oxford dissertation, ‘Jean Paul’s Realism: A Study in the Relationship between Literature and Reality’, challenges prevailing interpretations but faced rejection due to its departure from scholarly consensus. Drawing from unpublished archival materials, including preliminary works and correspondence, Davies’s study situates Jean Paul’s contributions within broader contexts of poetics, politics, and reception history.

ABSTRACT Martin Davies’s work offers a valuable dissident account of history and the humanities, critiquing orthodox and critical movements of recent decades. Movements such as postmodernism and multiculturalism, according to Davies, too often merely expand academic specialization whilst failing to tackle modernity’s central problematics. This article focuses on the psychological aspects of Davies’s work, exploring his argument that academic knowledge intensifies modernity’s innumerable interlocking crises by perpetuating the collective psychopathology which underpins them. For example, historical knowledge, in Davies’s view, provides an-aesthetic discourse, which numbs people’s capacities to feel moral horror when confronted by modernity’s most appalling failures and excesses. One way history does this is by passing off modernity’s failures as simply ‘inevitable’. At the same time, modernity’s technocratic knowledge regime ruthlessly prioritizes commodifiable knowledge over personal judgment, which further serves to undermine people’s innate capacities for ethical discernment. Higher education places ever-increasing value on technical skills over ethical and aesthetic discernment. But when a civilization becomes as imperiled as ours – ecologically, and otherwise – then ethics and aesthetics, conscience and imagination, may need to be re-prioritized more urgently than ever. Davies’s work provides important clues to how we might begin such a cognitive reversal and academic re-prioritization.

ABSTRACT This article is a collaborative commentary on the first volume of a two-part anthology of works by Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative, edited by Robert Doran. Informed by the collection and inspired by the co-authors, in this paper we discuss White’s writing. Herman Paul compares White’s constructivism with that of Berger and Luckmann, and discusses the extent to which the tools of historical narrative criticism developed by White are expeditious in analyzing stories about the climate crisis. Kalle Pihlainen captures White’s writing in a three-stage process of emancipatory politics of history, to further reconfigure it using the concept of fidelity. Jakub Muchowski writes about the relationship between the titular ethics and politics, asking to what extent White regarded them as separate spheres of practice, and whether in choosing the former White was apolitical. Ewa Domańska considers how White’s critical approach to history might help to explore possibilities of bridging Indigenous and Western approaches to the past as well as reflects on White’s attitude toward metaphysics. Finally, Miguel Valderrama considers the ways in which White uses the concept of event. The exchange closes with Robert Doran’s response to all the commentaries.

ABSTRACT How do we approach textual sources within cultural history? Do we ‘think’ about sources and ‘work’ with them in similar ways? Is it possible to identify a specific methodology among cultural historians? Cultural history is both a subfield and a discipline in its own right. In this domain, scholars often equate methodology with the application of theories to a text. However, it is crucial to explore the gap between reading a textual source and applying theories to understand and interpret it. This need to address methodology in a didactic manner motivates this special issue. Rather than taking our interpretive methods for granted, the authors in this special issue advocate for a self-reflective consciousness, explaining what we do and why. Through investigations and discussions on how we define and categorize textual sources within cultural history, the reading strategies we apply when approaching texts, and the interpretive strategies we may employ, the articles in this issue illustrate the relationship between application and result: how our methodology impacts our findings.