Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Diversity Politics

The Limits of Historiography

  • Wann 21.07.2015 von 18:00 bis 20:00
  • Wo Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
  • Teilnehmer Prof. Sanjay Seth (Goldsmiths, London)
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Prof. Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths, London

The Limits of Historiography
21. Juli 2015, 18 Uhr
Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Raum 002
Plakat


This paper argues that history-writing is not the recreation of a past that is always-already there, lying mute and waiting for the historian to give it voice, but is instead a code or genre or technology, one which constructs the past in ways that make it amenable to representation through the code of history. Enquiring into the elements which constitute the code of history, the paper concludes by considering whether this code is adequate to representing non-Western pasts.

Sanjay Seth is Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies. He has written extensively on post-colonial theory, social and political theory, and modern Indian history. He is the author of Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India (Sage 1995), Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Duke UP 2007 and OUP India 2008) and editor of Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2013).