Manifestations of History (Review)

The book under review addresses two interrelated issues: what constitutes history and how references to the past enable the present to acquire new meanings and legitimacy. Challenging the dominant trend of the rationalist, post-Enlightenment linear conceptualization of history, the two editors, Frank Heidemann and Philipp Zehmisch, aim at presenting alternate understandings by highlighting complex, entangled, and contested counter-narratives. Arguing that history can be space-bound as well as time-bound, the editors make a bid for the recognition of spatiality as a framework of history.