Demands for reparation for historical wrongdoing hail scholars in multiple disciplines. Whether our analyses look backward, with Benjamin's imagined angel of history or look forward, to demand  the crafting of a different future, the questions will be wide-ranging.

Who can ask for reparative justice? Does reparation require a trans-historical and trans-cultural notion of abstract justice?  Are some wrongs irreparable?

 

The demand to correct a wrong done in the past can become a license for wrongs done in the present or future, as in common-sense understandings of revenge. The problem of revenge, in turn, connects to debates over how to understand human agency—how one determines who perpetrated an injustice and who was the victim may have implications for our understandings of who makes history, for example.

 

Grounding the discussion in specific histories will raise other inter-disciplinary questions—both particular and theoretical. Not least of these is that of "pastness" itself.  Do claims for redress require a conception of time that is linear or might they sketch the possibility of non-linear understandings of history? In convening the Ethnohistory Seminar in 2008-2009 we aim for a broadly multi-disciplinary conversation that is alert to the urgency of ethical,  political, cultural and historical discussions within and across our various disciplines.

 

 

Dr. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear

Dr. Anne Norton