The Contours of the Political

Abstract

The advent of the ‘new political history’ has witnessed a significant attempt to absorb and to respond to the opportunities and challenges afforded by the emergence of a range of sub-disciplines and the pluralization of the discipline, its methods and its objects of study. Clearly, politics is no longer ‘high politics’ alone. Nor is it confined to a recognizable set of institutions, practices and processes that are located within a limited domain, a domain in which a reified type of ‘Politics’ is ‘done’ solely and self-consciously by actors labelled as politicians—be they local, national or something between or beyond the two. A moment’s consideration of the impulses generated by feminism reminds us that conversations concerning the definition of the political have a very long archaeology. Yet, as more recent debates concerning the ‘new political history’ have shown, definitions of the political remain as contested as ever. Moreover, as the geographical metaphor which we are using to entitle this forum reminds us, discussing morphologies of the political is not simply a question of assessing the historical evolution of power’s presentation, contestation and effects from the vantage point of a stable present: it demands that we acknowledge the contingency of our own positions and perspectives too. Thinking in terms of contours affords an opportunity to describe equally terrains whose features modulate gently and those that shift abruptly; in terms of temporal change it serves to describe those that evolve very slowly and those that are dramatically reconfigured during moments of profound impact. Yet invoking the vocabularies of mapping also demands that we acknowledge, crucially, that landscapes are not objective terrains but rather reflections of what one chooses, is able or is trained to see. Considering the contours of the political therefore requires us to interrogate our own positionality and subjectivities, as well …