Recent Articles
Aesthetics of Catastrophe
A key issue in the interaction between visual culture and the practice of democracy is the ways and the means by which our popular aesthetic forms frame, address, and resolve the expectations of the audience. It is a highly political exchange.Editor’s Letter
Politics takes surprising shapes, while history in preserving gives them a ghostly aura.The Public Life of History: An Argument out of India
I should explain at the outset that by the expression “public life of history,” I do not refer to the role that historians can and do sometimes play as specialists or experts appointed by governments or to the particular questions that have been raised…History as Confession: The Case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
This essay considers how the shifting expectations of the public life and power of history have both enabled and constrained the genre of the truth commission. I am particularly interested in the questions of truth and its relationship to suffering and…Making History Public: Indigenous Claims to Settler States
Different ways of rendering the past also reveal different pasts — pasts that have not always been included in the dominant national historiographies of settler societies. In this article, I argue that disputes about what counts as history, and how…