Historical Imagination Research Articles

Political Iconography vs Potestary Imagology: Research Centers, Heuristic Potential and Methodological Frameworks

The purpose of the article is to study the heuristic potential, methodological framework and research direction of two (sub)disciplines – political iconography and post-war imagology.
 The scientific novelty consists in revealing aspects of the development of political iconography and post-modern imagology that have not been sufficiently studied by historical science, in particular on the example of Ukrainian historiography at the current stage (1991–2022).
 The research methodology involves adherence to the principles of scientificity, development, systematicity, historicism, and historiographical tradition. Research methods are general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, generalization, and deduction, as well as historical methods, in particular historical-genetic, historical-systemic, and the method of source criticism.
 The source base of the research consists of the texts of Martin Warnke, Abi Warburg, Alois Riegl, Mikhail Boytsov, in which the terminological apparatus of art history, visual history, political iconography, and post-historical imagology is partially or fully substantiated.
 It has been found that there are almost no studies in the framework of political iconography in Ukraine, but studies using the methods of imagology, post-historical imagology, and historical imagology have gained active development. Post-test imagology, proposed by M. Boytsov, continues research in philology, comparative linguistics, and political history. The problems of post-war imagology cover, first of all, the problems of alienation, the mechanisms of creating and functioning of stereotypes, images of power, and the effects of images on society. Political iconography proposed by M. Warnke at the beginning 1990s, is a logical continuation of Warburg iconography, art history and visual studies. Recognizing that the main political center is not narrative, but visual sources, researchers of political iconography analyze the communicative space in which the image (German: bild) is an independent actor that implements its own policies. Thanks to the images, the space is semiologized and transformed into a political space.

After rupture: Visions of history, African spirituality and theological repair in Nigerian Pentecostalism

AbstractHow do Pentecostal Christians seek repair and renewal in their lives, after their efforts to rupture with the past and become born again? In this article, I wish to consider the ways that a group of Nigerian Pentecostals who belong to a deliverance church re‐narrativise their lives by constructing and entering into new timelines of history after their attempts to break with the past. This discursive project works to insert a notion of ‘Black Africa’ into an authentically Christian historical chronology that stretches far back into the biblical past and forward to the eschaton. In this way, Africa's unique spiritual character is seen as reflected not only in its reasserted claim to Christian history, but also in its eschatologically driven destiny to re‐evangelise the world. This tells us something about the theological way these Christians reframe their role in history, including how their understanding of a collective past shapes their vision of who they are in the present and will be in the future. In this article, I argue that more attention needs to be given to processes of repair, repositioning and realignment in discussions about how conversion to Pentecostalism can generate efforts to break away from what becomes conceptualised as ‘the past’.

Beyond Needle and Thread

Beyond Needle and Thread

A Visual History of a Sacrifice: Cristero Photography and the José de León Toral Commemorative Album

This paper sets out to examine the interpretative differenda arising over photographs promoted by the Mexican government and those distributed by the rebels after the conflict known as the Guerra cristera [Cristero War] (1926–1929). While Federal photography was characterised by its dissemination of punitive acts, the Cristeros (as the anti-government Catholic rebels were known) lent their photographs an emotive aura out of a desire to imbue them with a devotional meaning. This analysis focuses accordingly on a photograph album dedicated to José de León Toral, who assassinated General Álvaro Obregón in July 1928. The album reframes the figure of José de León Toral to establish images of a model life by emphasising the supposed sacrifice implied in the Potosino assassin’s execution by firing squad. Through its emphasis on emotivity, the album sets up an interpretation of José de León Toral as a kind of sacred figure.

“A Different Kind of Meaning Is Exposed”

“A Different Kind of Meaning Is Exposed”

Abolitionist Pedagogies, Pedagogical Labor

Abolitionist Pedagogies, Pedagogical Labor

Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic by Lukas Engelmann

Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic by Lukas Engelmann

20. Yüzyıl Anıtlarının Devrilmesiyle Yıkılmaya Çalışılan Görsel Tarih

Her dönemin ve rejimin heykellerle ilişkisi, iktidarın toplumla, toplumun da bireyle ilişkisini açıkça ortaya koymaktadır. Modern insan, en yoğun biçimde 20. yüzyılda lider tasvirleri ve kahramanlık hikâyelerinden oluşan şehir heykellerini görmeye ve algılamaya başlamıştır. Bu araştırmanın inceleme alanı, özellikle yirminci yüzyıl sonrası döneme denk gelen aynı zamanda çoğunlukla tek partili yönetimlerin tek adam rejiminden hareketle yaptırıldıkları anlaşılan büyük boyutlu heykellere, değişen konjonktür ve iktidarı ele geçiren yeni rejimler sonrasında yapılan saldırıları ve tahribatları kapsamaktadır. Çalışma kapsamında ele alınan, yıkılan ve tahrip edilen anıtsal heykel örneklerinde tarihsel gerçekliğin, geçmişin izlerinin ve görsel tarihin yok edilmesi kaygısı açıkça gözlenmektedir. Araştırma nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden birisi olan doküman analizine uygun bir biçimde yapılmıştır. İlgili dijital arşiv kayıtlarından ve dokümanlardan ulaşılan eserler metaforik anlamlarıyla birlikte ideolojik özellikleri açısından ele alınıp değerlendirilmiş, araştırma sonucunda elde edilen veriler betimsel olarak yorumlanmıştır. Çalışmada, yıkılan anıtların mevcut gücü nasıl yansıttığı ve ideolojik bir araç olarak nasıl kullanıldığı göstergelere dayalı olarak incelenmiş ve mevcut durum değerlendirmesi yapılmıştır.

Tim William Machan and Jón Karl Helgason, eds. From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and historical imagination.

Tim William Machan and Jón Karl Helgason, eds. 2020. From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and historical imagination. Manchester: Manchester University Press. xv + 288 pages. ISBN: 978-1-5261-2871-1.

A visual history of First World War women and humour identified in contemporary cartoons

ABSTRACT This article discusses the use of cartoon visual depictions of women during the First World War and the humour within them for the viewing public. Extensive historiography of women and war recognizes female contributions to the war effort, and the underlying integrity of motherhood throughout. Nonetheless, how audiences perceive visual representations of women during war do not feature within this literature to the same degree. Evaluation of cartoon humour alongside context of images of women historicizes the content and its impact on respective contemporary audiences. News publications throughout the war provide appropriate visual sources, and most for this study come from the British Cartoon Archive (BCA) at the University of Kent. The article considers three predominant tropes of female cartoon illustration during the war: the young and flighty, the elderly matron and the allegory of combatant nations. Cartoons of these womenvisibly take on new positions in war: helping the war effort or misunderstanding new situations whilst maintaining traditional positions from before the war. Humorous alterations to anticipated stereotypes provide didactic purpose showing the public how to behave, or more specifically how not to with the younger and older depictions. The final group of allegorical personas revisit older national and abstract icons to aid public morale providing relief and hilarity through enemydenegration or support and strength when visualizing home nations. This article argues how humorous cartooning of women in wartime preserved the pre-war status quo of female positions in society to provide comfort and relief to the public despite acknowledged female involvement in the war effort overall.

European History in the Shadows of Crisis

AbstractThis article situates the practice of history in the commemoration and experience of contemporary crises. It argues that the current preoccupation with crisis reflects a failure of historical imagination produced by short‐term thinking that increasingly also governs higher education. The concept of crisis often falls short as a tool for understanding both the past and the contemporary world. Histories and accounts that emphasise sudden crisis or triumphal narratives of resolution fail to account for the deep structures and long‐term struggles that can be illuminated by historical research.

A Reflection on Love Between Women and the Importance of Embodied Thinking in Research, the Academy, Politics, and Life

A Reflection on Love Between Women and The Importance of Embodied Thinking in Research, the Academy, Politics, and Life Mónica I. Rey (bio) So much has happened since Love Between Women was published in 1996. In some ways, the environment in which Love Between Women was published is an entirely different world. I was nine at the time.1 It is easy for me to take for granted how radical Love Between Women truly was in its focus solely on love and sex between women at a time when same-sex marriage was still illegal. Maybe not surprisingly, Love Between Women is important to my own research primarily because of its approach to historiography and method in a field where the historical record is extremely fraught. As a student reading Love Between Women, I was fascinated by its ability to cover questions that center issues related to gender, sexuality, and difference simultaneously. As a PhD candidate, I am now struck by the rich theory it demonstrates, a map that guides me down a path still less traveled in academic inquiry. In my own research I have found true Brooten's observation that "the lack of sources on women is part of the history of women."2 I will admit that at times I am bitter about both the difficulties this presents and the unwillingness of malestream scholarship to embrace or take seriously different methods to deal with this fact. Yet these difficulties create the opportunity to do something fruitful, creative, and innovative in the historiographical arena. What Love Between Women does so beautifully is to demonstrate how women's histories challenge the discipline of biblical studies and its deeply held beliefs about itself. Case in point, much of Brooten's groundbreaking work is really centered around letting the evidence and [End Page 155] texts speak for themselves, something that is (apparently) difficult for scholars to do. The subject matter the evidence presents led to what Sara Parks describes as "acrobatic antics performed in order for interpreters to maintain . . . assumptions in the face of clear evidence to the contrary."3 How is it that a discipline that claims to so deeply value objective analysis is actually so beset by phallocentric bias? This continues to be a mystery to me. Already in 1985 Brooten had concluded that "no amount of historical-critical work, no amount of taking the Tendenz into account will make woman emerge as a subject of history."4 Recognizing this, Brooten challenged the discipline's readiness to abandon half of humanity in the historical record by instead engaging a methodological insight she calls historical imagination.5 Similarly, one can appreciate how Brooten's critical comments actually also impact the historicizing of women loving women in ways that challenge even Michel Foucault.6 What Brooten accomplishes in Love Between Women is no easy task. Underappreciated in this field is the sort of labor of theorizing seen and produced in a work like Love Between Women. Hennie J. Marsman, who develops a feminist approach heavily influenced by Brooten, laments that "it is remarkable that those writing on biblical historiography generally give little attention to the theoretical requirements of writing women's history."7 On top of grappling with sparse or missing sources in the historical record, historians like Brooten who do this work also must contend with the fact that the available evidence is also fraught with distortions both in the telling of "history" and quite frankly in the source's own detestable views. Brooten is aware of this paradox, acknowledging that Love Between Women "contributes to the history of male ideas about lesbians far more than to women's history."8 In that history of male ideas, Love Between Women reminds me that we are not really very far from some of these ancient patriarchal views of female homoeroticism. In recovering the sexual lives and relationships of and between women, Brooten had to contend with ancient attitudes toward female homoeroticism, which (spoiler alert) are often extremely negative. In my mind, many of the parallels between ancient and modern views of female homoeroticism are striking. For example, Brooten notes that tribades, women who pursue women, were viewed as mentally ill...

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale W. Tomich et al.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale W. Tomich et al.

Editor’s Overview

Editor’s Overview Jim Downs, Editor Volume 68, no. 3 continues with the journal’s commitment to study the Civil War from an interdisciplinary perspective. Among the many outcomes of the Civil War are various narratives that have come to define it. At times, these narratives have taken the shape of explosive debates from the 1990s polemic of “Who Freed the Slaves” to more current debates on the geography of the Civil War—how much did the West matter? There have also been more subtle narrative shifts that have defined the field without announcing their entrance; these narratives no longer appear as ideas in need of interpretation but rather as uncontested facts or uncontrivable frameworks. This issue aims to expose the interpretative ruts that have fostered these narratives. In his deeply insightful essay, “Prisoners with Undaunted Patriotism: Incarcerated Black Soldiers and Battles of Citizenship in Military Prisons during the Civil War,” Jonathan Lande explores the taboo history of incarcerated Black Union soldiers. While the history of Black soldiers’ heroic contributions to the Union’s war effort has been widely documented, Lande turns attention to the Black soldiers who deserted the Union army and were then incarcerated. Refusing to portray these men as cowards, Lande examines their political activism within prisons, adding a new dimension to not only the history of Black soldiers in the military but also the larger narrative of Black political mobilization during the Civil War. Turning attention to Southern regiments, Josh Waddell interrogates the religious narratives that have defined the Civil War era. Waddell expertly uncovers the “spiritual warfare” that was fought “in the hearts and minds of Southern troops.” By excavating many tracts, delivered to Southern regiments, Waddell reveals how Southern ministers argued that “God controlled events on the battlefield.” Since the rise of social history in the middle of the twentieth century—when historians moved away from just studying the “great men” of the past and turned to the lives of ordinary people—the subject of why soldiers enlisted and how they understood the war has been a subject of fascination among generations of scholars. Josh Wad-dell implores us to reckon with how religion played a fundamental, critical role in how so many Southern men understood the war and its discontents. While the aforementioned articles address narratives that are seemingly familiar to Civil War readers, Andrew Donnelly powerfully breaks new ground by exploring the often-neglected history of same-sex sexuality during the Civil War. He shows how “postbellum novelists, sexual scientists, and Civil War historians made meaning of the war by reference to homosexuality and made meaning of [End Page 227] the evolution of homosexuality by reference to the war.” Drawing on a range of sources, Donnelly identifies how narratives of same-sex intimacy and identity unfolded. “Two versions of homosexuality operated together to make meaning of Civil War history,” Donnelly explains: “old, innocent, sentimentalized male– male intimacy and the modern problem of deviant sexuality.” This article is a mind-blowing analysis of how people from the past used sexuality to create narratives about the Civil War. Similar to our previous issues, this one includes an excellent book review section. Khal Schneider reviews Megan Kate Nelson’s Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and pushes the study of the Civil War to the West. Christopher Hager reviews Deborah Willis’s deeply evocative book, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, which will actually be the focus of a roundtable discussion to be published in the next issue. The reviews also include many other notable books that enrich our understanding of the Civil War era. [End Page 228] Jim Downs, Editor Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Studies and History Gettysburg College Copyright © 2022 The Kent State University Press

The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis

Reviewed by: The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis Christopher Hager (bio) The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. Deborah Willis. New York: New York University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1479809004, 256 pp., cloth, $35.00. In the visual culture of the Civil War era, images of Black men most often evoke slavery. The figure of a kneeling, half-naked slave persisted from Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist icon of the 1780s—Am I Not a Man and a Brother?— to the 1876 Emancipation Memorial in Washington DC, in which Abraham Lincoln extends his hand over Archer Alexander’s barely lifted head. At the height of the Civil War, in 1863, a fugitive named Gordon was photographed in multiple poses, but only the shot of the whipping scars on his back became a widely circulated carte de visite. The image of him in a new private’s army uniform appeared, smaller, to one side of the picture of his bared back, near the end of an issue of Harper’s Weekly. (See Bruce Laurie’s “Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image, reviewed by Anne Strachan Cross, pages 323–325 of this issue, for an investigation of this image.) On a Black man’s body, a soldier’s uniform not only signified freedom rather than enslavement. It also suggested equality—it was, after all, the same [End Page 327] one white soldiers wore (even if Black soldiers alone got their pay docked for it)—and citizenship. The eagerness with which newly enlisted men had their photographs taken in uniform suggests they understood very well what Frederick Douglass expressed: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., . . . and there is no power on the earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” The Black Civil War Soldier presents an unmatched array of such photographs—enough to ensure their place in any canon of wartime imagery and to make Black citizens, more than Black slaves, an essential part of the visual record of the Civil War. The quality of the physical book is no small part of this project. Generous in size, on glossy paper, it features scores of high-resolution images, mostly in color, to capture what a visitor to an archive would see: sepia tones, hand-coloring, gilt bindings on carte-de-visite albums, metal clasps on ornately decorated tintype frames. With production values that rival the kinds of commemorative and coffee-table books from which, for many years, young people in a certain class of American homes formed their initial impressions of the conflict (remember the companion volume to Ken Burns’s The Civil War?), Deborah Willis’s new book claims a place as a definitive reference—one that puts African Americans’ roles at the center of the story. The book’s text, organized into five chronological chapters, consists primarily of excerpts from primary sources. Civil War historians will be familiar with many of these, drawn from notable figures such as Charlotte Forten, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Robert Gould Shaw. Some of the richest material—letters by Black soldiers and their families—will likewise be familiar to scholars of “The Black Military Experience,” to borrow the title of a key volume of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s Freedom series, which is among several published anthologies Willis draws from. Connections between these sources and the images that accompany them can sometimes be gnomic or elusive. A photograph of Sojourner Truth appears without comment below a Massachusetts soldier’s letter about pay inequity; the images of the enslaved man Gordon are reproduced without discussion in the text; and Martha Glover’s letter to her husband dangles unremarked at the end of a chapter, despite being a widely cited source in scholarship on family structure (Amy Murrell Taylor), congressional abolition (Amy Dru Stanley), and Black women’s abuse by enslavers (Sharon Romeo). Readers of this journal may be frustrated by the book’s lack of historiography or its reticence about some complicated textual material, but its aim is not...

WHAT'S IN A NAME? PAST POSSIBILITIES AND THE CHALLENGES OF HISTORICIZING COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY

ABSTRACTAs wondering “what if?” about the past has become increasingly prominent in Western life, scholars have sought to historicize the phenomenon. The latest attempt to do so is Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou's A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. A stimulating, if somewhat meandering, book of essayistic reflections on historical speculation, A Past of Possibilities highlights the challenges of, and continuing opportunities for, historicizing the field that today is called “counterfactual history.” Ever since the mid‐nineteenth century, historians have recognized the presence of “what‐ifs” in historical scholarship, but they have disagreed about what to call them. For over a century, they have embraced a bewildering array of phrases, including “imaginary history,” “hypothetical history,” “subjunctive history,” “conjectural history,” “conditional history,” “probable history,” “iffy history,” “alternate history,” “allohistory,” “uchronia,” “historical might‐have‐beens,” and “historical ifs.” Deluermoz and Singaravélou continue this tradition by employing many different terms for historical counterfactuals in their effort to explain their increasing prominence. This conceptual pluralism, which is rooted in an interdisciplinary methodology, enables the authors to arrive at important insights about the field of counterfactual history. However, it also prevents them from generating a systematic argument that builds toward a larger conclusion. A Past of Possibilities is thus an important study that nevertheless highlights the need for further research.

영상콘텐츠에 나타난 정조 인물 재현 양상

This paper examines the reproduction of the character, Jeongjo, in movies and dramas. The narrative structure of the Jeongjo content contains the dramatic course of his unhappy childhood and the ordeal he had to undergo to become a king. What draws interest in the content here is that the meaning is interpreted differently by writers based on their imagination, value to the content. Until the 1990s, there was not much interest in Jeongjo. Rather, it was ‘Prince Sado(思悼世子),’ ‘Hong Gukyoung,’ ‘Hong Hyegyeonggung,’ and ‘Youngjo’ who were close to Jeongjo thar was the subject matter. Then, in 1993, when Lee Inhwa’s novel, Eternal Empire was published, he began to emerge anew as a ‘reform monarch.’ Since then, it has been converted into various contents highlighting the monarch’s zeal. This led to a craze for Jeongjo until the 2000s. Most of the content produced after the mid-1990s was influenced by this novel. In modern times, the content of Jeongjo’s life has aroused the public’s interest with the addition of the historical imagination rather than the simple historical story. With its dark atmosphere, it had a different charm from existing historical dramas, which had a familiar narrative structure. This can be seen as riding with the trend and representing the mood of the times. It means that cultural content cannot be created unless it provides a fun and emotional experience to the viewers. Therefore, when the historical figure, Jeongjo, is added together with the storytelling element and imagination, it is thought that there is a reconsideration of history together with an interest in the content itself.

Interdisciplinary Notes on the Dual Nature of Disability: Disrupting Ideology–Ontology Circuits in Racial Disparities Research

Research on racial and linguistic disparities in disability identification must be grounded on the dual nature of disability as an object of protection and a tool of stratification. This dual nature requires a situated research approach to understand the stratifying power of disability—Who is targeted? Where? How? By whom and to what consequences? I contrast this perspective with the traditional research approach that privileges a deficit and colorblind framing of racial disparities. The application of a colorblind ideology enables researchers to envision students of color as innately damaged and in need of remediation; thus, forming ideology–ontology circuits. I offer three strategies to disrupt these circuits in future learning disabilities research, namely the elimination of colorblind research strategies, the adoption of a historical imagination, and the discontinuation of Black and Brown abstractions.

Amor Fati: On ‘Crimes of Passion’ in Portuguese Law

The timelessness of the matters of love and heartbreak is evident from the place that these themes have historically held in the literature. Fictional representations of love and estrangement are frequently recovered within legal reasoning, because of the nature of the stories portrayed, or the ethical-normative judgements and frames of reference on which their literary enunciation is based. In the field of law, the formal structuring of these matters and its penal relevance draw on ‘crimes of passion’ as an example and a sign of the legal conditions, interpretative constructs, and sociological conceptions that organize and give meaning to subjects, facts, and norms. Whether it is the cause that justifies the fact, a mitigating factor that modifies the crime or punishment, or a particularly reprehensible and perverse circumstance, this ‘crazy little thing called love’ has provoked and shaped different levels of censure and comprehension throughout history. That very elasticity is the starting point for this article, which examines the legal frameworks and the legal, literary, and historical imaginations that circulate and connect diverse interpretative communities, as well as the discursive debates over authority and normativity, in the different fictions and functions linked by their aspiration to truth and justice.

The Rise of Islamic Society: Social Change, State Power, and Historical Imagination

AbstractThis article explores the history of “Islamic Society” (al-Mujtamaʿ al-Islāmī), a concept whose widespread usage is paralleled by shallow understandings of its origins. Scholars of premodern Islamic history often use this term to describe the ideas and practices of Muslim communities under Islamic political rule, while historians of the Muslim Brotherhood highlight this leading Islamist movement’s commitment to forming such a collective yet treat the concept as sui generis. This article, in turn, draws on a wide array of Islamic print media published by leading Islamic movements and state institutions in Egypt between 1898 and 1981 to tell a story of how this concept became intellectually viable and politically meaningful in the context of transition from colonial to postcolonial rule in the mid-twentieth century. Building on histories of religious nationalism which trace how religious nationalist visions produce novel understandings of religious identity rather than replicating prior models, the article explores the ways in which identity is linked to particular projects of religious practice. In doing so, it casts light on how religious nationalist projects seek to structure social life through calls to continuity with the past even as they adopt the core assumptions of the nation-state project. Specifically, it argues that, as Muslim thinkers, activists, and scholars navigated the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, they turned to this concept to articulate dueling conceptions of religious change through state power and social mobilization alike.