Concepts in the Postcolonial

Pernau has been deeply involved in developing a postcolonial history of concepts, which has drawn on her meticulous studies of the modern history of South Asia, and particularly the history of British Muslims in India. Koselleck's work was always limited to a history of modern German concepts generated through a larger European space represented by the dominant European languages. The editors of a first reflection on a conceptual history of this space pointed out that even if research projects had been launched to track transfers of concepts from former colonized regions and countries in Asia and South America, such as the monumental work on Iberoconceptos, the postcolonial had not been at the core of these projects.² In his famous text “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetrical Counterconcepts,” Koselleck outlined how certain concepts could function to deprive strangers of recognition and relegate them to inferior positions.³ Koselleck's examples of such counterconcepts were drawn solely from a European past. One of the first to use the analytical term of counterconcepts to analyze postcolonial relations was the political theorist João Feres Júnior, editor of our journal from 2005 to 2009 in a study of “Latin America” being used as negative counterconcept to America or the United States.⁴ Already from her earlier works, Margrit Pernau has constantly been investigating how primarily the colonized, in casu Indian Muslims, navigated entangled knowledges both of colonial and local provenance in a postcolonial context.⁵ Strongly inspired by Dipesh Chakrabarty's famous manifesto of provincializing Europe where he diagnosed the weight of European genealogies and core concepts of modernization in the former colonies and called for a critique of their limitation and for a renewal fitting to postcolonial contexts, Pernau moved conceptual history out of its former comfort zone.⁶ In line with Chakrabarty and several other postcolonial thinkers, she has consequently insisted that while former colonized actors borrow from a variety of conceptual reservoirs, the analytical concepts used to order the histories we write come with a legacy. As she keeps insisting, the concepts lingering in our social theories and historiographies are far from neutral and universal.⁷ On the contrary, they uphold an uncritical eurocentrism. As one of the leading pioneers of postcolonial conceptual history, she has subjected the main theoretical architecture of Koselleck's work to critical investigation. A case in point is her engagement with modernity, the weight-bearing pillar of Koselleck's history of basic concepts. For Koselleck, modernity is both the driver of historical change and the name of the resulting political and social forms of this change. From a postcolonial perspective, modernity becomes the straitjacket that keeps conceptual innovation and emancipatory strategies in check. It reduces politics of time to an imitation of or a comparison with the colonizing “model” societies. From the dominant perspective, progress and development turns into stages and one-way roads to modernization. On the other hand, neither the researcher nor the former colonized actors can simply discard modernity as an analytical category because it has become an instrument in their anticolonial struggles. In Margrit Pernau's words, these actors were “obsessed with this category and made it the anchor point for their hopes and fears and for their strategies to bring about a better future.”⁸ We seem to have a catch-22 situation here. If we—the observers—have a problem with the universal, how can we avoid misreading what is at play for the historical actors or if we stick to enforcing our own concepts on them. This question runs through postcolonial theory and find different answers from Homi Bhabha's eloquent analysis of mimicry as a resistance strategy that disturbs the conceptual differences and “that menaces the narcissistic demand of colonial authority”⁹ to Paul Gilroy's convivial, postcolonial world where daily intermixtures open for emancipation and subversion.¹⁰ In the same vein, Margrit Pernau warns that “what is at stake is keeping differences thinkable without positing incommensurabilities.”¹¹ A conscious or unconscious parading of knowledge risks erasing differences, and mutual closures of engagement across differences can easily leave the scene for essentialist strongholds. To escape these risks, we—conceptual historians among others—need to take the route proposed by Margrit Pernau and her fellow thinkers of decolonizing our knowledge. With this proposal, she aligns with the growing interest in recognizing knowledges previously excluded from academia spurred mainly by the Global South.¹²

Global and Intercultural Conceptual History

Early on, Margrit Pernau sounded the alarm against the methodological nationalism in historiography including conceptual history. Koselleck's tedious excavation of basic concepts in the formative period of modernity, the so-called Sattelzeit, followed semantic travel routes in the European space that were supposed to end in Germany. In her first article in our journal, she announced a change of course for conceptual history from national to entangled histories in the plural.¹³ Inspired by sociology and history, many conceptual historians of the post-Koselleck generation had turned to comparison to break out of the suffocating, predominantly national perspective. The warnings of methodological nationalism and the articulation of transnational relations must also be seen in the light of the absorbing force of the concept of globalization since the 1990s. Studies of how the same basic political concepts appeared in different countries and languages either simultaneously or with time delays.¹⁴ The efforts followed sophisticated reflections on how comparison entailed a risk of essentializing the entities to be compared. With her usual rigor, Margrit Pernau dove into a growing historiographic debate of histoire croisée that had become fashionable, but pointed out that the metaphor of crossing would need a deeper reflection on how transfers would lead to continuous entanglement. For a conceptual history, such entanglements, she stressed, however, required a mobilization on the linguistic paths that concepts would take into new semantic fields, new language practices, and new contexts when transferred. Since translations function as the vehicle of transfer, conceptual history should take inspiration from translation studies that focus on translation as social and political practices.¹⁵

In her mapping of new directions taken by the history of concepts from 2018, Margrit Pernau summarized the interest of comparisons and entanglements under the heading of global conceptual history.¹⁶ Together with the China historian and Sinologist Dominic Sachsenmeier, she compiled a reader of global conceptual history, which included several classic texts of the first guard of conceptual historian, and signaled the importance of conceptual history as much more than an ancillary science for global history. In fact, “conceptual history also has important elements to offer the rapid evolving landscapes of global, historical research.”¹⁷

With the international and global research project, civilizing emotions, led by Margrit Pernau from 2011 to 2014, a large group of conceptual historians from both Asia and Europe engaged with applied conceptual history to the specific semantic nets and concepts around civility in thirteen languages within regions, including South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The project was to be a first test case of a truly global conceptual history. I had the chance to be part of the project. The results that were published in a book-length series of studies clearly demonstrated the complex entanglements involving several regions, languages, varieties of crisscrossing semantic nets, many political and intellectual actors, comparable take off moments, and different time politics.¹⁸ The selected lead concept on civil/civility/civilization moved within multiple fields of emotions, sociability, politics, and temporalities. With her usual interdisciplinary skills and academic elegance, she assembled the threads in her progressing version of conceptual history. She combined her preoccupation of entanglement with postcolonial theory, temporality, community building, and emotions.

Emotions

Of all the threads in Margrit Pernau's multifaceted conceptual history, the study of emotions is no doubt the thickest. It weaves together concepts of emotions, practices of interpretations, and more general “experiences,” Koselleck's key term for entering the lifeworld of the past and the present. As she has demonstrated, the history of emotions had been a subfield of history at since at least the 1980s, developed by such notorious historians as William Reddy and Barbara Rosenwein and going even further back.¹⁹ While Margrit Pernau was not the first to link emotions with conceptual history, with her approach, she opened a new flank in the theoretical foundations of conceptual history.²⁰ The terms “emotion/s” and Gefühlle appear in more than twenty of her writings. When she joined the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in 2008, she became part of its center for the history emotions, which intends to explore the emotional orders of the past.²¹ In her most programmatic article on why the study of emotions extends to conceptual history, written with Imke Rajamani, she proposed to see emotions as linked to bodily practices beyond linguistic language use.²² The proposal was twofold. “Beyond” meant both investigating other semiotic systems than language through which we interpret the world and appreciating the role played by the entire range of senses human beings use to orient themselves. The core argument of this text is that our interpretations are dependent on the senses activated through the body. Therefore, “senses have an impact on the way that concepts are made conceivable.”²³ Though Margrit Pernau maintains that we must distinguish between experiencing emotions and expressing them in concepts (or in other sign systems), emotional experiences both influence conceptualizations and become formed by concepts. But whereas Koselleck relied on a universal anthropology to explain the basic tenets of human experience (living in time, living in communities, and living divided), Pernau strongly insists on experiences—meditated through the senses and the body—always being embedded in culture. In fact, just as language is, emotions “are profoundly shaped by culture.”²⁴ With an emotional approach, we will observe not only language practices but a range of actions, which involves the body in different ways from chanting and dancing to mass meetings and violent riots. It is far too simplistic to capture expressions of feelings simply through language. They are expressed in a variety of media whence studying them with a multimodal approach, which can include gestures, images, music, and more and draws on “multisensorial” experiences.²⁵ This is elegantly presented in an aesthetic format in a study on the monsoon expressed in a variety of media, including poetry and texts, visual art, film, and music.²⁶

The conceptual historian must add the study of different emotional regimes upheld in different cultural and temporal settings. Feelings in general follow rules and norms. This certainly also pertains to our feelings for each other. Like concepts, emotions can be analyzed for their political and social meaning. Today, it has become quite common in political science to highlight the political effects of emotions. Despite the fact at that the first generation of German conceptual historians had experienced a political regime fueled by the worst passions ever seen, processes of emotionalization were not given any precedence in the politization that for Koselleck and his colleagues characterized the breakthrough of modern concepts. Bringing emotions to the forefront of conceptual history is today where we again see the increasing growth of aggressive forms of politics more persistently than ever. Margrit Pernau constantly refuses more traditional views of relegating motions to pure atavistic irrationality or to “biological” instincts. Emotions are securely positioned within culture and on the inside of different signifying systems. The great achievement of her work is that despite broadening the scope of analysis by taking in bodily senses, cultural performances, and other semiotic systems, her approach is still reassuringly recognizable as a strand of conceptual history, because its main concern is still with signification. As I know from many exchanges with her over the years, she is, however, quite aware that the alliance between emotions and significations can be challenged from perspectives that both question the opposition between emotion and irrationality and investigate the limits of what can be perceived and said as a transgressive space.²⁷ Such a line of thinking has developed around human experiences of limits or breakdowns in understanding as profoundly shaking or emotional whether they have been desperately conceptualized as encounters with the sublime or with terror. Being an astute connoisseur of Koselleck, Margrit Pernau knows very well that he acknowledged moments where we as human beings are lacking concepts to grasp what is unfolding. As he repeatedly stated, semantics have a slower rate of change than events. For this reason, we experience situations where “at times, there may be no appropriate concept to designate a new situation, or else one has to grope in the dark to discover it.”²⁸ In some situations, we might be able to anticipate what will happen, and our anticipations (Vorgriffe) might turn into concepts. In other situations, we are left in the dark. Koselleck did not relate such moments to any specific emotional response. With usual rigor, Margrit Pernau visited theories such as so-called affect theory that attempts to capture dimensions of human emotional life that are not embedded in the signifying systems, culture, discourse, or conceptual structures. Authors such as Brian Massumi emphasize that emotions must be viewed as signifiers that attempt to control affect, whereas the latter belongs to a primary, non-conscious, pre-subjective field characterized by formless intensity beyond our language of emotions.²⁹ As she claims forcefully, there are reasons to be skeptical of the challenges—not least a methodological nature—of moving toward affects, but within conceptual history we still need to ponder more profoundly on limited experience that stay unconceptual to refer to Blumenberg's term.³⁰ With Margrit Pernau around, I am sure the debate will continue.

Temporalities: Lava and Ghosts

Whether Margrit Pernau discusses entanglements, postcoloniality, or emotions, we always come back to temporality. Everyone engaging with Koselleck's work experiences that the question of time is utterly complicated. He might depart from the anthropological constant that all humans organize their lives in sequences of before and after to go on to encapsulate modernity in a horizon of expectations taking leave from a space of experience. But then he continues to demonstrate that modernity is messy with several temporalities out of sync or with the famous Ernst Bloch dictum of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous. The historical actors dreamed of a teleological order that could end the progress they tried to fix. With conceptual frenzy, they dug out older concepts that carried the weight of time and invented new ones at great speed. Efforts were geared to get things under control from a wobbling present. Koselleck demonstrated with harsh critical nerve that the appointed managers of the past, the historians, had to resort to fiction to get ahold of the past, and the modern politicians equally had to rely on imaginaries in the form of ideologies to conquer the future. Seen in retrospective, we have lost our modern confidence long ago. As Koselleck eloquently claimed, conceptual history investigates pasts that constantly disturb presents and futures imagined in the past. Margrit Pernau has been present in the intense debates on temporalities and not least with another friend, the almost official temporologist of conceptual history Helge Jordheim. Everybody agrees that temporality is pluralized in different pasts and different presents located in different places. Of her many reflections on temporality and concepts, I am interested in two dimensions, both contained in two intriguing metaphors, lava and ghost. She borrows the lava metaphor from a short Koselleck text where he addresses a particular memory of his own about being informed of the Nazi extermination of Jews as a prisoner of war sent to Auschwitz. In this famous text, he refers to how this memory was “pour[ing] into the body like fiery lava and congeal[ed] there.”³¹ Margrit Pernau and her co-author, Sébastien Tremblay, use this quote to reflect on the impossibility of transmitting an intense experience of an event that stays meaningless.³² Due to his own wartime experiences, Koselleck had spent much thought on history that remains absurd. According to the authors, a lava moment characterizes an event of such intensity and absurdity that every rendering post eventu remains impossible. Lava becomes a term for emotions so intense that they come to resemble what I termed “affects” above. While our two authors engage with the concept of trauma fashionable in many memory studies, they, however, decline to venture into a psychologization of memory. By itself, lava is not simply an emotional response but a memory of the absurd. While Koselleck himself was opposed to the idea of turning lava into shared memory, he certainly insisted on returning to the absurdity of the past.

It makes sense to push the discussion on temporality from lava to ghosts. Lava congeals as frozen time and cannot be transmitted to others; ghosts are not there in reality. Following Jacques Derrida's masterpiece on specters, coping with their non-existence demands a hauntology.³³ In her perhaps most thrilling text, Margrit Pernau takes us on a ghost tour in the dense worlds of emotions from India to Europe.³⁴ A hauntological approach investigates porosity both between times and between selves and the world. Therefore, the term captures the problems of in-between zones raised in the discussion of emotions and affects. In Derrida's perspective, the specter is never present as such. It signals a moment “that no longer belongs to time,” but also comes from somewhere past.³⁵ The spectral brings with it an uncanny feeling to us in the present. As Ethan Kleinberg, the ghost writer (allow me the pun) who brought Derrida to those historians who thought they had finally exorcised postmodernism, summarizes: “History is the presence of absence.”³⁶ The hauntological emphasis on disturbing absences of the past sweeps away both the ontological realism of historians who do not believe in ghosts and thinkers who avidly embrace the present or lock cultures of time into regimes of historicity formed by presentism.

As a true conceptual historian, Margrit Pernau demonstrates that ghosts go much further than the other terms rehearsed to order regimes between the past, present and future. Spaces of experience denote the reservoirs from where the past feeds the present. Collective memory might work as a mechanism to keep the past alive in ways that differ from the narratives of the historians with their skills of scanning history in rhythmic events and periods. Memory can be tainted by strong emotions such as sacrifice, grief, pain, but also enthusiasm and solidarity. The feeling of nostalgia as a longing for a glorious past, for an order that seems to be about to dissolve with former privileges disappearing, functions to replace worries and fears in the present with fantasies of times when the country was great. With its imaginary force, nostalgia's sweeping turn to a former wonderland does not have to refer to memory. It can, however, be perceived as an effort to exorcise ghosts. The more vociferous demands for restoration of a present out of order are made, the more haunting it seems to be. Groups that from a nostalgic point of view are not supposed to make their presence felt or not articulate claims seem to emerge out of the shadows of the past. As Margrit Pernau says, “nostalgia is an emotion that invites in ghosts.”³⁷

Ghosts can, however, also bring hope. Derrida's specter of Marx is carrying the former hopes not only for a future coming to old Europe in the shape of the Communist Manifesto but also of something that cannot easily be exorcised by whichever political right-wing with reference to a nostalgic wonderland or a by a neoliberal center-right in the name of globalization. In Koselleck's thinking of time, the future is primarily linked to conceptual strategies of temporalization and control of the horizon of expectations with a dose of utopian imaginaries.³⁸ Utopia can be hopeful or take the form of terrifying dystopia, but the future can also take a ghostly form. Margrit Pernau offers a hauntological approach to the future. Based on the arch ghost story Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol where a partial ghost lets the poor Scrooge peep into a terrible future that dramatically changes his present. Of the two ghosts, the ghost of the past and the ghost of the future, the latter is what brings Scrooge to change the present. In this reading, the ghost of the future evokes “the desperate need for hope and human relations.”³⁹ In line with Derrida, Margrit goes postmodern and emphasizes that the virtual outdoes or “doubles up” the fictionality in a return of the past when posed in the gaze of the future.⁴⁰ In the virtual, we find ourself neither in the imaginary realm of utopia nor in a controlled sphere of anticipation where we can estimate what is to come. She insists that the ghostly gaze into the future influences our thinking, but she does not go as far as Derrida for whom spectrality takes us to “absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum.”⁴¹ For her, there are limits to the postmodern praise of virtuality. On the other hand, her cultural version of hauntology contains an interesting gallery of jinns, shapeshifters, goddesses, angels, and saints, which—to borrow a title from the bibliography—adds a jinnealogy to her investigations of ghosts. With the latter, we counter the general attack on beliefs launched by modernity and keep the door open to knowledge sacrificed on the European alter of modernization. Jinnealogy thus meets postcolonial critique. We have come full circle, and this circle has sent conceptual history on a vertiginous ride. With her courageous approach, Margrit Pernau has laid out several paths for future conceptual histories as documented in several of her overview articles. Even if she has brought conceptual history to many parts of the world, Koselleck has always been a trusted travel companion. As she asked recently in an article commemorating Koselleck's centenary, “Can Koselleck Travel?,” the answer was affirmative. Even in her latest piece for our journal (forthcoming), an introduction to a special issue on concepts from the Global South, she insisted on crediting one of the older nestors of conceptual history, Rolf Reichardt, for his methodological refinement of semantic nets.⁴² Her dialogue with conceptual history has certainly not only included elderly men. As demonstrated by her many scholarly publications co-written with many colleagues and very often younger ones. Margrit Pernau is an incredible networker and has engaged in conversations with scholars from many parts of the world, women and men, older and younger. She has invited many of them to be part of the community of conceptual history. In the beginning, conceptual history was a very German, a very masculine and rather old boys club as the list of authors contributing to the lexicon on basic concepts blatantly reveals. Many of her conversation partners and collaborators have become her friends. I can confirm that friendship is a basic concept for her. Some of us have seen it unfolded when visiting her salon—in the true French version of it—in the Berliner neighborhood, Schöneberg. Without her hard work, dedication, and friendship, there would not have been a journal. We will miss her, but we know that she is still around.