Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History

by Dan Edelstein (Editor), Stefanos Geroulanos (Editor), Natasha Wheatley (Editor)

Overview

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226481623
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/11/2020
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right, The Enlightenment, and On the Spirit of Rights, all published by the University of Chicago Press.


Stefanos Geroulanos is professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Transparency in Postwar France and coauthor of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, published by the University of Chicago Press.


Natasha Wheatley is assistant professor of history at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

Chronocenosis: An Introduction to Power and Time Dan Edelstein Stefanos Geroulanos Natasha Wheatley 1

Part I Temporal Pluralities in Conflict

1 Legal Pluralism as Temporal Pluralism: Historical Rights, Legal Vitalism, and Non-Synchronous Sovereignty Natasha Wheatley 53

2 The Invention of the Muslim Golden Age: Universal History, the Arabs, Science, and Islam Marwa Elshakry 80

3 Rise and Fall of the Sattelzeit: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Temporality of Totalitarianism and Genocide Anson Rabinbach 103

4 A Technofossil of the Anthropocene: Sliding Up tend Down Temporal Scales with Plastic Andrea Westermann 122

Part II Loops, Layers, Assemblages

5 Long Divided Must Unite, Long United Must Divide: Dynasty, Histories, and the Orders of Time in China Zvi Ben-Dor Benite 147

6 The Temporal Assemblage of the Nazi New Man: The "Empty" Present, the Incipient Ruin, and the Apocalyptic Time of Lebensraum Stefanos Geroulanos 173

7 Prehistory and Posthistory: Apes, Caves, Bombs, and Time in Georges Bataille Maria Stavrinaki 201

Part III The Splintered Present

8 Brain-Time Experiments: Acute Acceleration, Intensified Synchronization, and the Belatedness of the Modern Subject Henning Schmidgen 223

9 Cryopower and the Temporality of Frozen Indigenous Blood Samples Emma Kowal Joanna Radin 249

10 "Now Is the Time for Helter Skelter": Terror, Temporality, and the Manson Family Claudia Verhoeven 270

Part IV Speed(s)

11 Legal Panics, Fast and Slow: Slavery and the Constitution of Empire Lauren Benton Lisa Ford 295

12 Time and the Economics of the Business Cycle in Modern Capitalism Jamie Martin 317

13 History and Temporal Sovereignty in the Thought of Jawaharlal Nehru Sunil Purushotham 335

Part V "Already Here…Just Not Evenly Distributed": Heterochronies of the Future

14 Future Perfect: Political and Emotional Economies of Revolutionary Time Dan Edelstein 357

15 The Future in the US Supreme Court Kristen Loveland 379

16 Commemorating the End of History: Timelessness and Power in Contemporary Russia Kevin M. F. Platt 400

Acknowledgments 421

Contributors 423

Index of Temporal Terms 425

Editorial Reviews

In Power and Time, Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley have curated a constellation of essays that take up the fascinating and vexed relation between the history of time and the times of history. The essays provide incredible range but maintain a tight thematic focus through the analytical pairing of power and time. In doing so, they offer an original and comprehensive survey of temporal regimes and the reciprocal feedback loop between the nodes of power that create them and the means by which that power is maintained. Power and Time is impressive in scope and depth and an important contribution to the new metaphysics of time.

Wesleyan University Ethan Kleinberg

"Despite its sheen, the study of time can sometimes feel like fool’s gold. It seems to hold something ineffable—and therefore intellectually alluring—but often reverts to an overly familiar ping-ponging analytic of circularity or linearity, reaction or revolution, rupture or continuity. Enter the recent volume Power and Time. . . edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, which, from its deliriously fractal cover featuring a drawing by the German
artist Jorinde Voigt onward seeks to explode any sense of predictability or narrowness in the subfield and to restore some of the antic diversity and unpredictable versions of the possible that the field always promises but infrequently delivers."

G.L. Mosse Program in History Blog

What a gift this magnificent edited volume will be for those of us who have long sought to identify the implicit and violent ways in which power is garnered in battles over timing and time. With conceptual and empirical acuity, this is a volume that ‘harasses’ disciplinary strictures as it explodes the most revered canons. Moving from ‘multiple temporalities’ to conflictual ones is at the heart of this collective agenda, each author showing why such a conceptual and methodological move disrupts the seamlessness of linear histories and are critical moves we need to make. Here is a volume of depth, creativity, and inspiration for those long obsessed with thinking time and temporalities and for those who have not broached how profoundly such thinking recalibrates our collective futures—both their dark diagnostics and enabling horizons.

The New School Ann Stoler

As the editors argue, the temporal landscape of history is always replete with conflict and conflict potential. And, as the essays amply demonstrate, this provides rich pickings for the attentive historian. ‘Chronocenosis’ not only attunes us to the complex temporal frequencies of power conflicts but also enables us to locate new conflicts that may otherwise lie hidden from the historian's eye. . . . There are seemingly few domains of historical research that could not benefit from this approach. The dazzling diversity of these essays is testament to this. . . . A genuinely productive foundation on which to expand the historical study of time in a very practical-and global-sense. . . . The book’s subject matter is expansive, its temporal registers vast. [It] is difficult to imagine a historian who could not benefit in some way from consulting it.”

Contemporary European History

"An impressive collection of essays. . . Edelstein, Geroulanos and Wheatley argue for a new mission for historians, to accept the multiplicity of times as a starting point for our study of the experience of time."

Histoire Politique

This exciting and wide-ranging collection explores a crucial nexus of modern life: how social-political visions and conceptions of time shape each other. Its dazzling collection of case studies brings to life political leaders, scientists, economists, activists, and jurists as the authors chart how the interaction between temporality and authority transformed life across the globe. With original research and fresh methodological insights, Power and Time is a vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary history.

Dartmouth College Udi Greenberg

"Brilliant. . . Taking competing 'temporal regimes' as an object of study, this collective work foregrounds how diverse and divergent models of time structure relations of power. Rather than seeking to unify (or reconcile) history, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley ramify it. . . . The array of case studies in the volume is fittingly wide-ranging: touching on the temporal imaginaries of law from America to Australia; histories of brain science to frozen indigenous blood samples; narratives of prehistory to the geological past and future of plastic; the periodization of imperial China to that of the Muslim Golden Age; the temporal rupture of the French Revolution to the millenarian 'helter skelter' of the Manson family; fascist ideas of 'the new man' to postcolonial visions of futurity. Resisting narrative synthesis, the assembled chapters supplement the bold analytic intervention of the introduction, drawing it out in multiple directions."

H-Diplo