After the Last Post : : The Lives of Indian Historiography / / Benjamin Zachariah.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Contemporary Collection eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Zachariah, Benjamin ,
• Place / Publishing House: München ;, Wien : : De Gruyter Oldenbourg, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: The Politics of Historical Thinking , 1
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XVI, 178 p.)

This book is about the production and consumption of history, themes that have gained in importance since the discipline's attempts to disavow its own authority with the ascendancy of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. Several parallel themes crosscut the book’s central focus on the discipline of history: its intellectual history, its historiography, and its connection to memory, particularly in relation to the need to establish the collective identity of ‘nation’, ‘community’ or state through a memorialisation process that has much to do with history, or at least with claiming a historicity for collective memory. None of this can be undertaken without an understanding of the roles that history-writing and history-reading have been made to perform in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes. The book addresses a discomfort with postcolonial theories in and as history. Following are essays that examine the state of the discipline, the art of reading and using archives, practices of tracking the history of ideas, and the themes of history, memory and identity.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- The Politics of Historical Thinking -- Contents -- Preface: Reflections on Reflexivity -- Introduction: The Instrumentalisation of Historiography and the Production of Victimhood -- Part One. Marking the Posts -- 1. Identifying the Beast Within: Postcolonial Theory and History -- 2. Manifesto on Indirections: Histories, Collective Victimhood and Postcolonialism -- Part Two. Instrumentalisations -- 3. The Revolt of Memory: 1857 in the Nationalist Imagination -- 4. Histories of Empire, Imperial Legitimation and the Wartime Career of Penderel Moon -- 5. History, Cinema and the Politics of Cultural Sensitivity in Interwar India -- Part Three. Postdiscursive Possibilities -- 6. Moving Ideas and How to Catch Them -- 7. Travellers in Archives, or the Possibilities of a Post-Post-Archival Historiography -- 8. Afterword: Is There a Discipline to This? -- Acknowledgements -- Index