Asian World Podcast: Exploring History and Culture with Dr. Michael Hawkins · Professor Michael Hawkins, Ph.D

A Reading: "Our Present Concern: Historicism, Teleology, and Contingent Histories of a More Democratic Past"

·49 min·3 clips

Postmodern historians, Keith Jenkins writes, are “partners with uncertainty” and treat history as discourse.

1. Asian World Podcast with Dr. Michael Hawkins reads “Our Present Concern: Historicism, Teleology, and Contingent Histories of a More Democratic Global Past,” from Rethinking History, Volume 15, No. 3, September 2011. 2. Dr. Hawkins is the reader and host, and the essay’s author is read aloud as the speaker whose arguments structure the episode. 3. The episode asks whether historians should begin with the present or with the past when they study non-Western histories. 4. The opening argues that many historians use contemporary reality as an empirical base and then fit historical processes to that base. 5. The essay warns that this approach gives scholars “teleological omniscience,” because they know the end of a bounded historical segment before they start. 6. It says that such a method blunts historical distance and keeps historians from seeing subjects in their own contemporaneity. 7. The first major section links this problem to historicism, describing it as an analytical tool that turns history into developmental progress toward the present. 8. The essay also uses Joram Blix to argue that modernity is better understood as transition than as a final historical endpoint. 9. The reading then turns to Southeast Asian studies and names Benedict Anderson, John Smail, Paul Cohen, Laura Stoler, Frederick Cooper, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Tony Day, and Craig Reynolds. 10. The Southeast Asia section describes how postwar U.S. universities, decolonization, and the Second Indochina War shaped the academic construction of the region. 11. The essay’s examples include Robert Marx’s The Origins of the Modern World, which is presented as a counter to the “rise of the West” narrative. 12. It also mentions Anthony Reid, M.A.P. Melnick-Rolofs, and Kenneth Pomerantz as scholars who rely on contingency to rethink global development. 13. The reading asks whether counterfactual history really explains the past or whether it can end up reaffirming Western dominance in a different form. 14. Later, the essay cites Edward Said, Robert J. C. Young, and Tor Eagle Forland as examples of scholars who emphasize present meaning over historical actors’ own worlds. 15. The Popper section defines historicism as the belief that history contains patterns or laws that can predict the future. 16. That section connects Popper to Hegel, Marx, and David Barrows, and it uses “empty, homogenous time” to describe a universal chronology in Chakrabarty’s terms. 17. The tone is analytical and lecture-like, with long stretches of dense reading and repeated emphasis on abstract concepts. 18. The format is a straight reading rather than a conversation, with the argument unfolding in numbered sections and named scholarly references. 19. Listeners interested in historical theory, Southeast Asia, or postcolonial studies would fit this episode. 20. Listeners wanting light discussion or a short narrative arc would probably skip it.

As heard by us

A careful defense of judging history in its own contemporaneity.

This episode tracks a careful argument for reading non-Western history on its own terms rather than making the present the default starting point.

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You want history argued from the inside out, not from modern assumptions.

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