Translating History:
Knowledges, Practices, Powers

Saturday, May 1 / 9AM - 5PM / Oakes Learning Center

Thirty years ago Hayden White published Metahistory, opening up profound debates that have since been developed by scholars in a wide range of disciplines. These debates, to which the evolving work of Hayden White has remained central, will be the horizon of discussions at this conference. How have "history," "historical discourse," "historical truth," "context and perspective" been problematized, decentered and redefined during the last three decades? Speakers will address topics in their current work that build on, extend, or interrogate issues of historical realism, narrative, teleology, and the poetics and politics of form—all issues that Tropics of Discourse, The Content of the Form, and Figural Realism have made inescapable. Each presentation will be followed by audience discussion with participation by UCSC faculty, guests from other universities, and some of Hayden White’s former students, including Andrew Baird, Susan Foster, Jennifer Gonzales, Carol Mavor, Kevin Parker, Marita Sturken, and Sharon Traweek.

This conference celebrates Hayden White on the occasion of his definitive retirement from more than four decades of inspirational teaching.

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY is Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of History, University of Chicago. His books include Rethinking
Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton, 1989); Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), and Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002). His current projects investigate cultural sites of contemporary democracies (museums, photography, street-politics, etc.) and "historical truth" in nineteenth and twentieth-century India.

CAROLYN STEEDMAN is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, U.K. Her books include Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (Rutgers, 1987), Childhood, Culture, and Class in Britain (Rutgers, 1990), Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (Harvard, 1995), and Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Rutgers, 2002). She is finishing a book called Pregnant Phoebe: Love and Labour in West Yorkshire, 1780-1820.

ANDREW BAIRD received his Ph.D. from History of Consciousness in 2003, writing a thesis on "Historicality and Narcissistic Closure."

JAMES CLIFFORD is Professor of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and the author of Predicament of Culture (Harvard, 1988) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Centurey (Harvard, 1997), and On the Edges of Anthropology: Interviews (Prickley Paradigm, 2003).

SUSAN FOSTER is Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. Her books include Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (California, 1986), Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire (Indiana, 1996), and Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull (Wesleyan, 2002).

DONNA HARAWAY is Professor of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Her books include Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (Routledge, 1997) and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm, 2003).

HAYDEN WHITE is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and Bonsall Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His pathbreaking books in the field of "metahistory" have been translated into more than ten languages. They include Metahistory: The Historical Imagination (Johns Hopkins, 1973), Tropics of Discourse (Johns Hopkins, 1985), The Content of the Form (Johns Hopkins, 1987), and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Johns Hopkins, 1999).

SCHEDULE
9 AM Welcome

9:3O–1O:45 AM
Dipesh Chakrabarty
The Third Voice of History: Some Contemporary Reflections

11–12:15 PM
Carolyn Steedman
What Clio Loves

1:45–3 PM
PANEL
Trope, Figure, Narrate: Colleagues & Students Reflect
Andrew Baird
James Clifford
Susan Foster
Donna Haraway

3:3O–5 PM
Hayden White
Figural Realism in Witness Literature

Cosponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research and the Center for Cultural Studies

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