Power and Time

Reviews / Votes

"As the editors argue, the temporal landscape of history is always replete with conflict and conflict potential. And, as the essays amply demonstrate, this provides rich pickings for the attentive historian. 'Chronocenosis' not only attunes us to the complex temporal frequencies of power conflicts but also enables us to locate new conflicts that may otherwise lie hidden from the historian's eye. . . . There are seemingly few domains of historical research that could not benefit from this approach. The dazzling diversity of these essays is testament to this. . . . A genuinely productive foundation on which to expand the historical study of time in a very practical-and global-sense. . . . The book's subject matter is expansive, its temporal registers vast. [It] is difficult to imagine a historian who could not benefit in some way from consulting it." * Contemporary European History * "What a gift this magnificent edited volume will be for those of us who have long sought to identify the implicit and violent ways in which power is garnered in battles over timing and time. With conceptual and empirical acuity, this is a volume that 'harasses' disciplinary strictures as it explodes the most revered canons. Moving from 'multiple temporalities' to conflictual ones is at the heart of this collective agenda, each author showing why such a conceptual and methodological move disrupts the seamlessness of linear histories and are critical moves we need to make. Here is a volume of depth, creativity, and inspiration for those long obsessed with thinking time and temporalities and for those who have not broached how profoundly such thinking recalibrates our collective futures-both their dark diagnostics and enabling horizons." * Ann Stoler, The New School * "This exciting and wide-ranging collection explores a crucial nexus of modern life: how social-political visions and conceptions of time shape each other. Its dazzling collection of case studies brings to life political leaders, scientists, economists, activists, and jurists as the authors chart how the interaction between temporality and authority transformed life across the globe. With original research and fresh methodological insights, Power and Time is a vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary history." * Udi Greenberg, Dartmouth College * "In Power and Time, Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley have curated a constellation of essays that take up the fascinating and vexed relation between the history of time and the times of history. The essays provide incredible range but maintain a tight thematic focus through the analytical pairing of power and time. In doing so, they offer an original and comprehensive survey of temporal regimes and the reciprocal feedback loop between the nodes of power that create them and the means by which that power is maintained. Power and Time is impressive in scope and depth and an important contribution to the new metaphysics of time." * Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University * "Despite its sheen, the study of time can sometimes feel like fool's gold. It seems to hold something ineffable-and therefore intellectually alluring-but often reverts to an overly familiar ping-ponging analytic of circularity or linearity, reaction or revolution, rupture or continuity. Enter the recent volume Power and Time. . . edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, which, from its deliriously fractal cover featuring a drawing by the German
artist Jorinde Voigt onward seeks to explode any sense of predictability or narrowness in the subfield and to restore some of the antic diversity and unpredictable versions of the possible that the field always promises but infrequently delivers." * G.L. Mosse Program in History Blog * "An impressive collection of essays. . . Edelstein, Geroulanos and Wheatley argue for a new mission for historians, to accept the multiplicity of times as a starting point for our study of the experience of time." * Histoire Politique * "Brilliant. . . Taking competing 'temporal regimes' as an object of study, this collective work foregrounds how diverse and divergent models of time structure relations of power. Rather than seeking to unify (or reconcile) history, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley ramify it. . . . The array of case studies in the volume is fittingly wide-ranging: touching on the temporal imaginaries of law from America to Australia; histories of brain science to frozen indigenous blood samples; narratives of prehistory to the geological past and future of plastic; the periodization of imperial China to that of the Muslim Golden Age; the temporal rupture of the French Revolution to the millenarian 'helter skelter' of the Manson family; fascist ideas of 'the new man' to postcolonial visions of futurity. Resisting narrative synthesis, the assembled chapters supplement the bold analytic intervention of the introduction, drawing it out in multiple directions." * H-Diplo *