2025/05/22 by Brieg Powel · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies #Japanese History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198854708.013.16
Abstract This chapter challenges the preoccupation (“chronofetishism”) of international–political–sociological scholarship with the present. The rare studies of the global, political, and social in the deeper past are often hamstrung by tempo-centrism, Eurocentrism, and state-centrism. Scholarship’s fixation on the state and an “international” dependent on it has established the state as a temporal-disciplinary barrier to investigation, blinding research to relations and polities that constitute the global–political–social throughout history. A historicized understanding of the global therefore needs to be temporally, spatially, and actor decentered. The chapter explores interdisciplinary approaches that stress the combination of multiple timespans at work during any given moment, event, or process and also the possibilities that openness to more distant pasts might hold for scholarship. Recognizing the multiplicities of time and the subjective experience of it across polities becomes a decentering act that stretches disciplinary boundaries by making visible the histories of others.