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WiSe 17/18: Time and temporality in Global History

Michael Facius

Kommentar

That the "compression of time and space" was one of the key transformative effects of modernization and globalization since the nineteenth century is common knowledge even beyond history departments: from trains and steam ships to the satellites and optical fiber networks of the 21st century, technological advances in transportation and communication have shrunk the globe and continue to do so. In this seminar, we will explore the causes, agents and effects of this tectonic shift of time regimes with a focus on the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. A global historical approach to the topic has to navigate at least three different levels. The material level - the technological integration of the world under the auspices of Greenwich mean time - is just one of them. Depending on your individual research interests, there will also be room to explore case studies of non-modern, non-European approaches to time and temporality such as macro studies of the functions of the Islamic calendar or anthropological approaches to the temporal rhythms of the pleasure quarters in Early modern Japan. Crucially, on a third level, we will also have to consider how our own discipline was and is implicated in this process. The rise of academic History in the nineteenth century was deeply entangled with the emergence of a new understanding of the relationship of past, present and future, and particularly of the notions of progress and modernity. It also contributed to colonial ideologies that transformed spatial distance into temporal difference, imagining Europe as the vanguard of progress and colonized societies as being stuck in medieval times or even the stone age. And what about (global) history today? What are the temporal narratives undergirding our own practice? Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950, Cambridge 2015. Russell West-Pavlov, Temporalities, London 2013.

16 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Mo, 16:00 - 18:00 16 Termine

Mo, 16.10.2017 16:00 - 18:00

Dozenten:
Michael Facius