History of Humanities, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2024
THEME: SHARED PASTS FOR SHARED FUTURES; PROTOTYPING A COMPARATIVE GLOBAL HUMANITIES
This volume argues for a comparative and global reimagination of the humanities in their intellectual, disciplinary, and larger institutional forms. We seek to expand the geographical scope and temporal depth of inquiry while challenging Eurocentric biases through the promotion of neglected traditions and their conceptual vocabularies. Crucial to the success of our “comparative global humanities” is scholarship that fully embraces the complexities and diversities of human pasts.
TEASER: Read the introduction by the co-editors Wiebke Denecke, Alexander Forte, and Tristan Brown HERE.
From the introduction: From Crisis to New Adjectives
We cannot not hear that the humanities are in crisis. Retrenched. Out-STEMed. Demoralized. But we are also hearing: the humanities are resurrecting. Blossoming in unexpected corners. Becoming seriously public. Critical to this critical moment. Until a decade ago, for decades, the outcry was: Crisis!
Now we have the luxury to ask, Which humanities? Adjectives abound. Public, applied, old, new, medical, environmental, digital, positive, planetary, global, even “blue” (maritime)!1 This proliferation of qualifiers signals vitality, but also a frantic quest for new semantic framings of an old European protean noun. Right in the moment when we keep probing what the “humanities” are, what they could or should be, adjectives come in as “fixers”: they make a slippery and currently slipping concept legible to our new frameworks. The adjectives are also carriers of our postdisciplinary desires, attempts to rally around topics and causes rather than, as conventionally, around divergent sources, methods, and disciplinary lingo. There is a futuristic, utopian thrust animating this growing procession of adjectives and related missions.