The 'contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous'. The discourse of non-contemporaneity and chronopolitics during industrial modernity, 1860-1960.

• Applicant: Dr. Fernando Esposito
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290762410

During industrial modernity the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous was a decisive concept of temporal order. It is the object of inquiry of this transnational study. The topos of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous served Western societies to locate themselves and foreign societies in History and it helped them conceive of dynamic change as progress. Even though it was not until Pinder (1926) and Bloch (1935) that the topos was precisely phrased, the concept itself was founded on the scientific discourse of non-contemporaneity that was forming in ethnology and anthropology around the 1860s. The peoples that were scattered around the world, their social, economic, political and religious institutions were temporalized and ranked in an evolutionary model of cultural stages. Henceforth they were seen as either progressive and civilized or as backward, barbarian or primitive. This discourse of non-contemporaneity and the resulting temporal taxonomy were the basis for a chronopolitical praxis that was typical of industrial modernity: By civilizing, developing and modernizing, Western societies tried to abolish non-contemporaneity and to produce progress. The semantic changes that the concept of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous underwent stand at the centre of my attention. Yet the project also asks how this knowledge of the non-contemporaneous was implemented. To clarify the semantic change I analyse two paradigmatic formations of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous that ethnology/anthropology brought forth: a classical one that was established in the last third of the nineteenth century, and an alternative formation that crystallized in the 1950s. Moreover, the project scrutinizes an exemplary implementation of the classical formation , i.e. the development of the Italian south that was promoted by the Italian state during the fin de siècle. By taking a closer look at the UNESCO's fight against racism the study also illustrates the breach that opened up after the Second World War between the theorists of non-contemporaneity and the chronopolitcal practitioners. While the modernization of the global south that the practitioners were executing was based on the classical formation of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, the anthropologists at the UNESCO started challenging the underlying notions of progress. They replaced diachronic dissonance by a synchronic plurality of sociocultural times and brought forth a new formation of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, whose structures the study illustrates. The project aims at making a fundamental contribution to the history of time during industrial modernity. Furthermore, the added value of the project lies in the attempt to establish the chronopolitical perspective in historiography and to contribute to a systematization of pluritemporality.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants