070043 GR Guided Reading (2017W)

The historians and the public sphere. The political uses of the past.
(Stilyan Deyanov)

This course is centered on the relation between the historians and power, on the role of historians in the public sphere (Habermas). Covering texts from the period of the Enlightenment (for instance classical Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung?) till the present days, the guiding thread of the seminar is to track the different positions of the historians in relation to the field of power: from the historians “serving” the national state to the contemporary global, think tank or free-lance historians operating in the situation of questioned national states borders and confliting private interests.
How the historian does he take part in the building of the national lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora), how is he involved in the rewritings of the national history influenced by the events in the political public sphere? What are the problems that the institution and the profession of the historian faces in contemporary “regime of historicity” (Hartog), in the time when appeared the postmodern “applied history”? To what debates historians have taken part in key moments of the European history?
For this purpose, I consider that some of the texts anthology “Political uses of the past” (Jacques Revel, Giovannni Levi) could be of great help.
The possible topics also include: Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the imagined communities; the position of the committed historian during the Dreyfus affair; the Bulgarian memory battles concerning the “salvation of Bulgarian Jews”; a comparison between the contradictory histories that could be find in different national school text books (the case of Romania and Bulgaria).
The tensions between the historical narratives of the center and the periphery will be discussed through Maria Todorova’s „Imagining the Balkans”, a book inspired by Edward Said’s the classical research on orientalism (Eduard Said).
To continue the examination of the previous question, the attention can be turned towards the so called Subaltern studies: a postcolonial periphery perspective, writing history “from the below” and focusing on the non-elites as agent for political change.
In the frame of the proposed topic, the recent debate about the need of memory laws can also be introduced. On this point, the examples go from the laws on the Holocaust to the post 1989 laws convicting communism.