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Ernst Müller and Falko Schmieder, Begriffsgeschichte: Zur Einführung [Conceptual history: An introduction] (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2020), 200 pp.

Hans Blumenberg, History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 609 pp.

Bettina Brandt and Britta Hochkirchen, eds., Reinhart Koselleck und das Bild [Koselleck and the image] (Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2021), 248 pp.

Abstract

The Korean concept of kyoyang (self-cultivation) conceives different layers of meaning corresponding to the enlightenment and reform project in the early modern and colonial periods of Korean society. This article traces the historical trajectory of kyoyang published in Korean vernacular magazines and newspapers by Korean reformists, the main media intellectuals who appropriated Japanese and Western ideas of enlightenment, nationalism, and culturalism. It reveals the way the reformist media intellectuals employed kyoyang to define the nature of modern print media while simultaneously transforming the concept, providing resources for enlightening the populace. Accordingly, kyoyang, once assumed by a few literary men under the influence of Neo-Confucianism, was shifted to encompass the commoners, envisioning the enlightened national subjects who embody contradictory qualities.

Abstract

Nationalism is an ism rarely used as self-description. This article suggests that nationalist discourses are on the move, meaning the concept may be used in novel ways. In Russia, for example, the president recently identified himself as a nationalist, claiming ownership of the concept in the long-standing struggle against manifestations of oppositional nationalism. The article asks who describes themselves as nationalists in contemporary Russia, how do they define the concept, and how did it change during the years 2008–2018 when nationalism as a political idea became increasingly important in Russian politics? Drawing from Russian newspaper sources, the article suggests that diverse, self-proclaimed nationalist actors rely on narrow ethnic understandings of the concept and do not embrace the president's interpretation of multinational nationalism.

Abstract

Conceptual history holds tremendous potential to address a central issue in Near Eastern Studies, namely the formation of modernity in the Near East, provisionally located between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The encounter with European powers, primarily Britain and France, was a decisive historical factor in this formation; and European hegemony is, in fact, inscribed into the very concept of “modernity,” which we take as an historical, rather than analytical, concept. The conceptual formation of modernity in Arabic and Turkish was, however, a multilayered process; involving both ruptures and continuities, intersecting various temporalities, and incorporating concepts from several languages. To interrogate this multilayered process, we suggest the metaphor of the Sattelzeit (Saddle Period) as a heuristic tool, precisely because of its being tied to modernity. Finally, the article will show what conceptual history of the Near East has to offer to conceptual history more broadly.

Abstract

This article studies the concept of buitenland (the foreign) in a broad sample of Dutch newspapers in the period between 1815 and 1914. Buitenland emerged as a key concept in the nineteenth century. It referred to an “outside word” that was marked by semantic properties such as instability and closeness. As such, this apparently mundane spatial indicator bolstered the emergent “spatial regime” of globality and globalization. The article thus shows how a computational analysis of concepts that could be easily overlooked reveals structural transformations in the way past and present societies conceptualize (global) space.

Abstract

This article is a history of postwar discourse on an unequal world. This discourse was profoundly shaped by new influences: quantitative data and an expanding inequality research infrastructure, the “birth of development,” decolonization, human rights, the global Cold War, and theories of the world as one integrated global system. Examining academic journal articles written in English, this article traces the emergence of global inequality in the aftermath of the World Food Crisis of 1972–1975. Originally, global inequality was as much about power as about income differentials, mainly referring to multiple inequalities between the so-called Third World and the First. However, even as the late 1960s and the 1970s saw an increased politicization of the discourse on an unequal world, global inequality did not become a key concept in the 1970s.