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

edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley

University of Chicago Press, 2020
Cloth: 978-0-226-48162-3 | eISBN: 978-0-226-70601-6
Library of Congress Classification D210.P76 2020
Dewey Decimal Classification 909.08

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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.

REVIEWS

“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.”

— Ann Stoler, The New School

“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.”

— Udi Greenberg, Dartmouth College

“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.”

— Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chronocenosis: An Introduction to Power and Time

Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley

Temporal Pluralities in Conflict

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

Natasha Wheatley

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

Marwa Elshakry

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

Anson Rabinbach

4 A Technofossil of the Anthropocene: Sliding Up and Down Temporal Scales with Plastic

Andrea Westermann

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

6 The Temporal Assemblage of the Nazi New Man: The “Empty” Present, the Incipient Ruin, and the Apocalyptic Time of Lebensraum

Stefanos Geroulanos

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

Maria Stavrinaki

The Splintered Present

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

Henning Schmidgen

9 Cryopower and the Temporality of Frozen Indigenous Blood Samples

Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin

10 “Now Is the Time for Helter Skelter”: Terror, Temporality, and the Manson Family

Claudia Verhoeven

Speed(s)

11 Legal Panics, Fast and Slow: Slavery and the Constitution of Empire

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford

12 Time and the Economics of the Business Cycle in Modern Capitalism

Jamie Martin

13 History and Temporal Sovereignty in the Thought of Jawaharlal Nehru

Sunil Purushotham

“Already Here . . . Just Not Evenly Distributed”: Heterochronies of the Future

14 Future Perfect: Political and Emotional Economies of Revolutionary Time

Dan Edelstein

15 The Future in the US Supreme Court

Kristen Loveland

16 Commemorating the End of History: Timelessness and Power in Contemporary Russia

Kevin M. F. Platt

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index of Temporal Terms

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