AHR Forum

Historiographic Turns in Critical Perspective

Introduction

How should we now understand the various turns that have marked the recent
history of the writing and theorizing of history? One way might be to think of them
as merely historiographical markers, denoting definable moves or shifts in how some
in our profession have understood, approached, and explained their work. In an
academic environment where a premium is increasingly placed on novelty and in-
novation, and where an interest in theory has long marked the humanities, it is per-
haps not surprising that many have been eager to characterize their scholarship in
ways that call attention to precisely these qualities. In history, especially in the wake
of the enormousand intellectually transformativeimpact of social history in the
1960s and 1970s, there was clearly a powerful pull to see subsequent shifts in schol-
arly approaches in similarly decisive terms. Hence the cultural and linguistic turns
taken by many historians who came of professional age in the late 1980sa devel-
opment whose relationship to social history was dramatically depicted in Geoff
Eleys 2005 study A Crooked Line, itself the subject of an AHR Forum in April 2008.
Without the tsunami effects of social history, would the proclamations of turns
have even been conceivable?
While the contributors to this forum present different views on this intellectual
trajectory, for the most part they refuse to see turning as a simple or unproblematic
feature in the recent past of our profession. Rather, they both analyze the turns and
historicize themsubjecting them to a searching and wide-ranging critique that at
once reminds us of what can be gained by such historiographical retrospection and
also what might be lost in thinking of them in both definitive and categorical terms.
This is especially true with the first two essays here. In When Was the Linguistic
Turn? A Genealogy, Judith Surkis casts a skeptical light on the very notion of a
single turn, suggesting that such a formulation not only is wrong but also has the
regrettable effect of foreclosing possibilities and blocking from view the variety of
approaches and intellectual trends that were in play at the time. The sense of fore-
closure is explicit in Gary Wilders From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect
of Historiographic Turns. For Wilder, the balance sheet for the cultural and lin-
guistic turns is negative indeed, especially insofar as their critique of supposedly
positivistic social history also meant the abandonment of the structural analysis of
long-term social developments.
In The Kids Are All Right: On the Turning of Cultural History, James W.
Cook takes a similarly critical look at turn talk, but his intent is less to criticize

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the cultural or linguistic turns than to interrogate what they mean for the practice
of history both in recent times and today. He too historicizes the turns, reminding
us that speaking of the cultural turn ignores the considerable work in cultural history
that preceded the proclaiming of its advent in the 1990s as well as more recent work
that continues to explore its possibilities. With Durba Ghoshs Another Set of Im-
perial Turns?, the forum shifts to a historiography that is both older and newer than
the cultural and linguistic turns. Focusing on the history of British imperialism,
Ghosh points to several turns that have marked the recent historiography of this
field: the global, the postcolonial, and the archival. Whatever the relationship be-
tween these different approaches and the study of imperialism may be, she argues
that the most revealing work has always been infused with a critical understanding
of the historical experiences of imperialism and colonialism.
The two comments offer arguments in their own right. In Not Yet Far Enough,
Julia Adeney Thomas vigorously critiques each of the four essays, pushing back es-
pecially against some of Surkiss and Wilders claims and conclusions regarding the
nature and status of the cultural turn. But she also suggests that none of the essays
are broad and bracing enough. Calling attention to the phenomenon of long-term
climate change, she argues, in essence, for another turna historically grounded
but scientifically informed new materialism that addresses the precarious state of
our world. In Generational Turns, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal takes a very different
approach. Underscoring the generational aspect of the discussion of historiograph-
ical turns, he surveys the scholarship of twenty or so younger historians, mostly dis-
sertations, and shows that their work in the history of communication, transporta-
tion, and material culture reflects an enduring interest in culture, now enriched by
the language of practice and process.
There is undoubtedly more to say about historiographic turns, and more insights
will surely be generated as we gain greater perspective on this fertile period of his-
torical innovation and critique. One also suspects that with time, we will develop a
greater appreciation for the deep history that generated these turns, rendering some
of their claims to novelty and turning less convincing and some of the fears of
foreclosure expressed in this forum less well-founded.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2012

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