Parahistory and the Popular Past Acts of Historical Production

1 Introduction: The Challenge of Changing Histories   2 Historical Consciousness and the Popular Past   3 Realism and the Demands of Historical Representation   4 Literary Knowledge in Historical Study   5 Historical Representation Unchained   6 The Surrender of Representation   7 The Insularity of the Historical Past   8 The Rules of Past Writing   9 History Culture and the Continuing Crisis of History   Bibliography

Biography

Kalle Pihlainen is associate professor of theory and philosophy of history at the University of Turku. His research examines historical representation and the uses of history across academic and popular contexts. He is the editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. His previous books include The Work of History (2017) and Historia Fallida (2023).

Parahistory and the Popular Past is a much-needed critical engagement with the relationship of academic history to its larger publics. With clear philosophical precision, it challenges the disciplinary orthodoxies that limit experiments with history-writing. It is a must read for those of us eager to address the current crisis that confronts the field.

Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey

 

Parahistory and the Popular Past thoughtfully explores alternative forms for thinking and writing history. Pihlainen persuasively argues that a focus on the form of historical articulation enables a diversification of understanding. The book is challenging, bracing, and thoroughly enjoyable in its rethinking of the modes and types of historical experimentation and their consequence.

Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester

 

Parahistory and the Popular Past asks us to grapple in a serious way with what Pihlainen calls “history culture,” a broad category encompassing both academic history and more popular and parahistorical engagements with the past. To make this case, Pihlainen moves with great agility between careful readings of the major theorists of history and close readings of parahistorical texts from Josef Škvorecký’s The Engineer of Human Souls to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. In this bold and powerful text, Pihlainen argues for freeing parahistory from disciplinary and disciplined history, making space for its imaginative and creative engagements with the past, engagements that might foster critical dialogue outside the walls of academic history. Parahistory and the Popular Past is a must read for scholars and students contemplating what history is and why it matters.

Alison Landsberg, George Mason University, Virginia