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Rethinking History: The Journal

of Theory and Practice
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Hayden White and liberation

historiography
a
Ewa Domanska
a
Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University,
ul. sw. Marcin 78, 61-809 Poznan, Poland
Published online: 25 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Ewa Domanska (2014): Hayden White and liberation
historiography, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, DOI:
10.1080/13642529.2014.959361

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 Rethinking History, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2014.959361

Hayden White and liberation historiography

Ewa Domanska*

Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University, ul. sw. Marcin 78,

61-809 Poznan, Poland
Downloaded by [Tulane University] at 19:14 29 September 2014

This text deals with issues which for the past decade preoccupied Hayden
White’s reflection. These are issues such as the practical past, the social role of
history, global capitalism, the modern state, anarchism, utopia and the
emancipatory role of the humanities. White has repeatedly stressed the
ambivalent connections between utopia and history, the reductive and
disciplinary character of science, as well as the oppressive nature of the state.
This, among other things, constitutes the reason why the cutting edge of his
critical thought is aimed at professionalized, academic history which is marked
and burdened by those topoi. While calling White’s approach ‘liberation
historiography’ does not seem adequate, the author reflects on the liberating
role of historiography (one that leads to an ultimate emancipation from the very
discipline of history) which is desirable in the contemporary world.
Keywords: liberation historiography; Hayden White; progressive history;
utopia; global capitalism

One cannot be a prophet with footnotes.

– Hayden White
On 20 October 2011 Hayden White was awarded an Honorary Doctorate
from the University of Gdansk in Poland. The degree was recommended by the
Department of Philology and confirmed by a resolution of the University’s Senate
of 30 June 2011 in ‘recognition of his outstanding contribution to an
understanding of how language and literary heritage shape the record of historical
experience.’1 It is symptomatic that among the Polish universities, it was the
University of Gdansk – a city recognized as a symbol of freedom – decided to
bestow this distinction on White. In his Doctorate recommendation, Marek
Wilczyński evoked a little-known fact from the Professor’s life. In 1973
(publishing year of the monumental Metahistory), White who, at the time, was
professor of history at the University of California in Los Angeles lodged a

*Email: ewa.domanska@amu.edu.pl

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

 2 E. Domanska
complaint against Chief of Police Edward Davis (White v. Davis case) in defense
of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. He also complained about
Chief Davis’s authorization of police officers, posing as students, to enroll in a
university, take part in class discussions in order to gather evidence of anti-war
sentiments and to identify pacifist movements’ activists. In 1975, White won the
case in the California Supreme Court which set limits to surveillance activities
undertaken by the police on California campuses.2 Wilczyński (2011, 55)
commented on this event as follows:
Even if we read [the process] in context of a well-known American story about a
lonely hero fighting and winning over the System in the name of Declaration of
Independence and the Founding Fathers, the case does not lose its bitter truthfulness
that we know far too well, at those universities that were once under “care” of semi-
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official “residents” from Security Services. In Gdansk, White’s action is perfectly

understandable. At the University of Gdansk we have always cherished the same
values as those that prompted White to stand up [ . . . ] in front of the Supreme Court
and win.
It is not without good cause that I follow Marek Wilczyński in my wish to throw
light on this particular episode in the American scholar’s life. There is simply no
way to separate his academic work from his standing as an engaged intellectual.
One cannot ignore the fact that White’s reception, both in Central-Eastern Europe
and in Latin America or Asia, has been linked with emancipatory potential
inherent in his ideas as well as in the effort to educate young intellectuals
(Domanska 2009). White’s approach can be defined through a conception of
history as being progressive in the sense of modernist utopias and in terms of a
specific philosophy of subjectivity and human agency that stems from a Camus-
style existentialism focusing on the question of human choices.
The purpose of this article is not to propose an innovative interpretation of
Hayden White’s texts or ideas but rather to shift the attention of the readers from
topics related to discourse, figures, narrative, text, tropology, and representation
to issues which, for the past decade, preoccupy White’s reflection. These are
issues such as the practical past, the social role of history, global capitalism, the
modern state, anarchism, utopia and the emancipatory role of the humanities.
Thus, like Spiegel (2013, 502ff), I am interested in White’s ‘practical turn’ (or a
turn to a practical past). I am going to engage the above problems in the context of
recent discussions of the ‘post-critical’ condition (Foster 2012) and, especially in
the current political situation of acceleration of violence and conflicts, stress the
ongoing importance of critical thinking, the role of engaged intellectuals and the
building of alternative scenarios of the future based on a belief in progressive and
potential history (Azoulay 2013). In such an interpretative frame, liberation
historiography (and liberation humanities) is still a valuable and desirable
approach especially in those parts of the world experiencing mass killings,
oppression, and various forms of imperialism.
From his master – William J. Bossenbrook – White inherited a certain
skepticism regarding abstractions fundamental to the western way of thinking,
 Rethinking History 3
such as utopia, science, and the state. This skepticism continuously manifests
itself in his writings. White has repeatedly stressed ambivalent connections
between utopia and history, the reductive and disciplinary character of science, as
well as the oppressive nature of the state. This, among other things constitutes the
reason why the cutting edge of his critical thought is aimed at professionalized,
academic history which is marked and burdened by those topoi.
When commenting on Hayden White’s work, Herman Paul described his
approach as ‘liberation historiography,’ underlining a connection particular for
the author of Metahistory, one that was commonly recognized and often pointed
out in interpretations of White’s works as ‘an existentialist fascination for
freedom with a Marxist inspired political vision’ (Paul 2011, 36).3 This diagnosis
is obviously right. On the other hand, however, the expression ‘liberation
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historiography’, catchy as it is, is also misleading. When Volodymyr Sklokin

asked Hayden White in an interview whether he agrees with the diagnosis
presented by Paul, the Professor answered:
Well, I suppose it is meant to link me with something like “liberation theology” or a
general kind of anarchism. I do not myself practice a new historiography. I am less
interested in the fate of historical studies (since I regard it as a dogmatic system)
than in the social role of studies of the past. ( . . . ) As for liberation, it would be
presumptuous of me to lay claim to that title. I am against dogmatism in any form.
I know that a number of young scholars in a number of fields have found my writing
to be “liberating” in a number of ways. ( . . . ) I am pleased that the response to my
work has not been to view it as a method or theory of how to study history, but rather
as a way of demystifying or showing the context-relative value of all inquiries into
the past. (Sklokin 2012)
White is right to argue that since he ‘does not himself practice historiography’
(i.e., he does not do any empirical research, except on historiography) but rather
he is ‘interested in the social role of studies of the past’, describing his work as
‘liberation historiography’ is not adequate.4 Nevertheless, I have decided to use
this expression as the title of this article because one could understand that the
liberating role of historiography (one that leads to an ultimate emancipation from
the very discipline of history) is desirable in the contemporary world. Having
claimed that (professional) historical research remains dogmatic and serves more
to conserve the status quo than to liberate, White seeks for a way of dissolving
dogma and so he turns first to modernist literature and art, and second towards the
question of a practical past. In his particular style, he declares the following:
What we postmodernists are against is a professional historiography, in service to
state apparatuses that have turned against their own citizens, with its epistemically
pinched, ideologically sterile, and superannuated notions of objectivity – a
historiography which, in cutting itself off from the resources of poiesis (invention)
and artistic writing, also severed its ties to what was most creative in the real
sciences it sought halfheartedly to emulate. (White 2005, 152)
As White agrees that history is not meant to forecast the future, he also points out
that history can co-constitute the ‘horizon of expectations’ of a given collectivity
(to use Reinhardt Koselleck’s expression) and reshape it. Hence, it is best for
 4 E. Domanska
history when it is written in the present tense, always facing the future. A task
often imposed on it, one of rewriting history and restoring the past (especially in
regard to groups once omitted or excluded from History), turns out to be too
narrow – for what is necessary is to activate the emancipatory potential of
historical reflection. But how can this be done? One way is to tie historical
reflection closer to literature and art (which White does since the beginning of his
academic work). Another way is to cultivate ethical and educational aspects of
this reflection. As White often stresses when he borrows Michael Oakeshott’s
term ‘practical past’, practicality means that one uses knowledge of the past to
build responses to Kant’s ‘practical’ question ‘what shall I do?’ Reading White’s
works, we should therefore remember that he is (and he describes himself as),
first and foremost, an academic teacher whose goal is the formation of critical
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intellectuals and morally responsible human beings. Therefore, one can say that
the question of the mobilization of the emancipatory potential of historical
reflection can be solved through activating and strengthening capacities inherent
not exactly to history itself, but to its scholars.
For White who remains persuaded, we must combat the destructive power of
global capitalism which is the only hope left. Global capitalism often figures in
White’s reflection as the ‘creeping evil’ of modernity. Since – according to
him – the best diagnosis and analysis of capitalism one finds in Marxism, White
constantly evokes it as a useful tool of historical research. He also invariably calls
himself a Marxist ‘because Marxism can explain capitalism’ (Sierakowski 2005,
230).
I view history or rather the course of socio-political development in the West from
Rome to the present from a Marxist perspective, and my criticism of the historical
profession in modern times stems from my conviction that it is part of the
Superstructure of a Base dominated by the Capitalist mode of production and the
social relations of production deriving therefrom. The effects of capitalism on those
parts of the world that serve as its resources (natural, human, market) have been
disastrous, not to speak of the effects of modern industrial-technical-capitalist
practices on the wellbeing of the Earth itself. Capitalism, it turns out, is expert at
producing waste. ( . . . ) It is destructive and self-destructive, based as it is on the
principle of infinite growth of (the rate of) profit within the context of finite
resources. (Sklokin 2012)
Facing the unbridled development of global capitalism as a fulfillment of modern
dystopia, White proposes and projects a ‘progressive vision of history’ with a
utopian vision of the future as the goal.
By progressive history, I mean a history that is born of a concern for the future, the
future of one’s own family, of one’s own community, of the human species, of the
earth and nature, a history that goes to the past in order to find intimations of
resources, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, that might be useful for dealing
with these concerns. ( . . . ) We study the past not in order to find out what really
happened there or to provide a genealogy of and thereby a legitimacy for the
present, but find out what it takes to face a future we should like to inherit rather
than one that we have been forced to endure. ( . . . ) Progressive historiography
would be “utopian”, to be sure, but modernist rather than simply modern inasmuch
 Rethinking History 5
as it uses the past to imagine a future rather than to distract us from facing it. I set
progressive history over against antiquarian history. Progressive history
corresponds to what Nietzsche called “critical” history in Thoughts out of
Season. (Domanska 2008, 18 – 19)5
Modernists (whose thinking White takes on and over) realized difficulties with
which one constructs his or her visions of the future with what little legacy they
(we) get bestowed by that history. This is why a modernist utopia does not allow
itself to imagine some idyllic non-places (ou-topoi) but rather ‘stands to face the
past’, in order to rationally assess the reality around and to infer, out of those
diagnoses, dark visions of future ahead (dystopia).
“Modernist utopias” – writes White, come into being contemporaneously with
modernity itself, by which I mean “our modernity”, the modernity caused by a fully-
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developed, global capitalism which expropriates and absorbs every tradition from
our own past and, where the market requires it, the pasts of others. (White 2007, 15)
In light of those reflections, the project of ‘liberation historiography’ (or, broader,
of ‘liberation humanities’) and of ground-breaking ‘progressive history/
historiography’ constitute a sort of intellectual utopia inserted in the dystopian
world of global capitalism. Such historiography should be reformist. It should
support alternative scenarios for the future (alternative to marching development
of global capitalism).
Now the most important issue is the survival of the species, especially of our
species. People tend to ignore that man is the only species capable of committing
suicide, something that was acknowledged for the first time by Camus.
Environmental destruction, global risk going far beyond the imagination of the
one who caused it, climate changes . . . The most interesting question of all: why
does it interest but only a few? (Sierakowski 2005, 233)
In such a project, rhetorics become very important, as it teaches us how to forge
again radical ideas into words of persuasion. Such a history, drawing from the art
of persuasion and performative in regard to the future, enables individuals and
groups to choose their own ancestry (White 2010b).6 Drawing attention to the
possibility of such a choice, a possibility to recreate a genealogy and an ancestry
that suit leaders and their supporting groups (a trait particularly visible in times
of revolution), is in fact identical to choosing the future-driven present.
Historians give order to the past and then try to convince their society that its
decisions and choices inevitably arise from this ordered past and not some other.
On one hand, then, they point out that the ‘burden of the past’ is both compelling
and delimits the scope of possibilities to act. On the other hand, those very same
historians provide people with tools to (at least partially) emancipate themselves
from its past in the process of building its future. In this regard, White’s thought
seems to follow a renowned credo expressed by Marx (1975, 15) in his The
Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that ‘Men make their own history, but
they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past’.
 6 E. Domanska
When thematizing relationships between history and utopia (traditionally
perceived in opposition one to the other), White (2007, 13) mentions that ‘history
[i]s utopia’s Other’ or ‘utopia is history’s Other’.7 White claims that utopia is
contemporary history inasmuch the current situation in the world fulfills a well-
known saying of Stephen Dedalus, hero of James Joyce’s novel, that history is a
‘nightmare’ from which the Western man should be trying to awake. Then again,
utopians are those who believe today that the fundamental social change (i.e.,
change of the capitalist system) is possible. According to White (2007, 18),
utopian thinking must be viewed as characterised by a resistance to accepting
“history” as defining a specifically human kind of being in the world and historical
knowledge or a knowledge of history as the criterion for determining what can
count as the criterion for deciding what is realistic and what is unrealistic in any
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given proposal for a utopian alternative to the lived reality of a specific time and
place in human being. If “history” is “reality”, if historical knowledge tells us what
is real and how this reality came to be what it is and in telling this also establishes its
necessity and sets limits on what it is possible to do in and against this reality, then it
follows that any utopian project seeking to liberate us from this reality will be
adjudged to be “unrealistic”, precisely in the degree to which it is “unhistorical”.
What follows – White continues – is that enlarging our historical knowledge will
not cure us from the illness of historicity; just as history will never set us free
from utopia. It is a paradox: history is essential for utopia to come into existence
(there is no utopia without history and vice versa), and yet, on the other hand,
history remains a cultural brake set for utopia, a sort of ‘speed moderator’ to hold
in check the rapidity of changes leading in its direction.
Jakub Muchowski has recently pointed out that realism, being specific to
historical narration, serves as a security system. Moreover, ‘the conviction that
historical representations are realist pictures of the reality and show us limitations
in how it can be transformed makes history a probability criterion for any projects
of social change’ (Muchowski 2013, 126).8 One could even point out that history
predetermines possibilities of change. Furthermore, that modifying the forms in
which we represent the past will broaden the potentiality for possible social
transformations. Traditional representation forms (realist narration as in
nineteenth century novels) will not serve to develop an individual ‘moral
imagination’ (John Dewey’s concept used by White) that is essential for
constructing a responsible utopia (that is, for collectively conceiving a social
‘horizon of expectations’). This is why the testing and practicing of
unconventional ways to represent the past, especially anarchist ones, ways that
break traditional rules of researching and picturing the past, are so important.
Whence White’s interest in anarchism as both animosity against all forms of
dogmatism, canons, centralized power, or institutions and as radical critique of
imperialism (global capitalism), exploitation and social inequalities. The
following statement illustrates the views of the author of Metahistory:
I’ve always been attracted to anarchists because I believe that in the modern state
the law itself is not a protector of the individual but the enemy of the individual.
 Rethinking History 7
I think Kafka’s insight is the right one here. There is no sin before the law, says
Saint Paul, it’s the law that creates the sin. The modern state, we’ve seen in the
twentieth century, turns against its own citizens. All states, I believe, turn against
their own citizens ultimately. They are set up to protect the citizens; they end up
destroying them, locking them up, treating them, medicalising them, education
them. One the most interesting things that has happened in the humanities in the last
two hundred years is the way that humanistic thinking has become detached from
any interest in the legal system within which they are practiced. ( . . . ) By and large
the law is the problem, not the enforcement of law; that’s my belief. To disorientate
that law is the thing criticism in our field should be doing, and this is what Roland
Barthes does. He always questions authority, but by examples rather than by strong
theory. ( . . . ) Barthes recognises that the authority of the law is created by discourse,
that’s its only authority. And this is one of the reasons that he, along with Foucault,
attacks the notion of the author. ( . . . ) [W]hat he wants to do, and he thinks that
modernist writing does, is undermine the idea of the strong authoritative voice, and
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puts in its place a hesitant, a neutral, a lazy, and indolent voice, of the kind of Proust.
( . . . ) The pleasure of the text is the release from law. The pleasure of thinking is
thinking away from the law. This is anarchist to be sure, and so it appeals to me and
my sense that freedom can only be anarchic.
So, what does it mean for scholarship? Scholarship officially started out as rule-
breaking, among the Sophists for example. Rhetoric was invented by the Sophists as
a way of teaching the citizens how to defend themselves against the state. That’s the
origin of rhetoric in Syracuse, under Corax, the legendary founder of rhetoric: how
to defend themselves from the tyrant. And everyone should be trained to represent
themselves in court, because you are going to end up there at some point, especially
under modern totalitarian political conditions. But we’re not doing that to students.
We are teaching them to be sincere and to be authentic and to be strong readers.
(Mavor 2009, 107–108)
What then, in light of our consideration, would mean ‘liberation historiography’?
It would denote an anarchist attitude towards researching and representing the
past, unbound by any rules of study nor by any style. It would not be, therefore,
a reflection of the past as practiced within frames of history as a scientific
discipline. Would that be a problem, according to White? I do not suppose so.
As a scholar who has devoted his whole life to the task of demystifying history’s
pretensions to constitute scientific knowledge, to unmask ideological dimensions
of historical writing as well as ambiguity governing the relations between facts
and fiction, and as a scholar who has undermined both the status of the historical
fact and the authority of historical sources, who insists that historical discourse
neither explains nor describes but interprets and holds that historical narrations
are, in fact, moral allegories, he evidently showed that he cared less about the
historical past (as in academic history) than a practical past which helps both
individuals and collectivities to orientate themselves in reality and to make
right decisions. One could say that, in accordance with his pragmatism, White
always claimed proximity to the need for a past that should be measured by its
utility.
Let us try and draw up the foundations on which White’s conceptions repose:
first, since his doctoral thesis, White does not do historical research in the proper
 8 E. Domanska
sense of the expression, however, he still researches historiography (or,
generally, questions of representing the past) which results in reflections on
visual history, history in novels, history in comic strips, and, most recently, on
historiography of the Holocaust. Such tendencies often count as unconventional
since traditional academic history remains far from the interest range of the
American scholar. White claims that academic historiography is supported by the
state institutions, is conservative, dogmatic, full of clichés and bound to honor
untenable principles of scientificity and objectivity. As such, academic history is
but an obsolete domain of academic research that suffocates imagination and
creativity. White views his task not as creating methods of researching the past
but rather as demystifying the grounds on which traditional methods of historical
research are based and on which the traditional understanding of history is built.
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He focuses on setting young intellectuals free from imposed conceptual frames of

thinking, researching and representing the past. White who writes mostly for the
young generation seeks to convince that more than a history created by historians,
we need a history that is progressive (the practical past). Hence, his interest in the
social utility of history that stems from caring about the future and as such holds
traits of utopia but not in a sense of creating some non-places but in one that
involves the collective creation of ‘horizons of expectations.’ The problem is,
however, that historical knowledge generally imposes certain limitations on the
kind of inventions possible at a given place and time. Moreover, claims White,
there is a strict dependence relation between what is historical and what is
realistic – the higher degree of historicity, the higher degree of realism of
alternative scenarios of the future. It would be therefore best for progressive
history or any (projected) liberation historiography to set us free from this
specific attitude towards the past that constitutes history (as constructed within
western academia). Meanwhile, given the current socio-political situation, the
humanities should take on the task of ‘distracting’ the law as the latter is the main
problem here (also because it does not work or creates values).
White, being interested in individual emancipation, as well as in creating a
consciousness of resistance, more often uses persuasive rhetorics than just logical
argumentation. It is his peculiarity to build certain ‘ideal types’ such as traditional
historian or academic historiography, with little reference to reality. He presents
us with a black-and-white lay of the land where on one side we find a source of
all evil, i.e., global capitalism, and on the other side individuals and groups
determined to combat it. However, in White’s own works, we will not find any
other vision of the future than one that involves a destructive march of capitalism.
Today’s history is itself a dystopia and offers no hope for better future
whatsoever. The only piece of a positive utopia present in White’s activities is his
pedagogical mission as a teacher, a person capable of instructing new generations
to think differently.
[T]he question might be how – White reflects, without denigrating a scientific
approach, to return our thought about the past to the mercies of poesis and poetic
thinking, associative thinking, and artistic prose, that would allow, that would
 Rethinking History 9
promote invention as well as discovery. But not is the mode of control, but in mode
of care. (Mavor 2009, 114)
Looking into the future requires that we step out of science. As Hayden White
says: ‘One cannot be a prophet with footnotes’ (translated by Agata Czarnacka).

Funding
This work was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science under ‘Master Programme’
and project entitled ‘Rescue History.’

Notes
1. By this Hayden White has joined an esteemed group of holders of the said honorary
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degree among whom one finds political leaders (Lech Wałe˛sa, 1990; Richard von
Weizsäcker, 1992; Franc
ois Mitterrand, 1993; Madeleine K. Albright, 2000) as well
as historians, philosophers, writers, and literary scholars (Gerard Labuda, 1985;
Günter Grass, 1993; Maria Janion, 1994; Norman Davies, 2000; Andrzej Wajda,
2005; Maria Bogucka, 2006; Tadeusz Różewicz, 2006). See: University of Gdansk
homepage: http://en.ug.edu.pl/en/honorary_doctorates/ (accessed on 16 May 2014).
2. White v. Davis, 13 Cal.3d 757, L.A. No. 30348. Supreme Court of California. 24
March 1975. In the court ruling, we read:
The inherent legitimacy of the police “intelligence gathering” function does not
grant the police the unbridled power to pursue that function by any and all means.
In this realm, as in all others, the permissible limits of governmental action are
circumscribed by the federal Bill of Rights and the comparable protections of our
state Constitution.
See California Supreme Court Papers online: http://law.justia.com/cases/california/
cal3d/13/757.html (accessed on 23 February 2014).
3. The concept of ‘liberation historiography’ occurs earlier, in John Ernest’s book title
Liberation Historiography. African American Writers and the Challenge of History,
1794– 1861. Ernest suggested an analogy with liberation theology. According to this
author, a liberation historiography constructed in response to needs of Afro-American
individuals and collectivities was meant to help understanding the historical
conditioning of oppression and reinforce their sense of historical agency through
building their proper vision of the past.
Like liberation theology – Ernest writes, what I am terming liberation
historiography is a mode of historical investigation devoted to praxis, a dynamic
process of action and reflection, of historical discovery in the service of ongoing
and concrete systemic reform. (Ernest 2004, 18)
In this as well as in his other books, Ernest makes references to White’s works.
4. It is different with analogous terms such as “militant historiography” which is used in
reference to Indian postcolonial historians (Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Shahid Amin and David Hardiman among others) who rewrite India
colonial-era history in order to reclaim the repressed past of subaltern groups, and to
include it in structuring the social consciousness of resistance and as a basis for
emancipatory politics (Singh 2002, 91).
5. In another place, White points out at Adam Mickiewicz, Jules Michelet or Victor
Cousin as those who proposed progressive visions of history (Sierakowski 2005,
227– 229).
 10 E. Domanska
6. The act of choosing one’s ideal ancestry, mostly specific to periods just after historical
break-throughs, is described by White (2010b) as ‘retroactive ancestral constitution’.
7. It is a paraphrase of an expression White (2010a, 10) ascribes to Michel de Certeau,
that ‘Fiction is the repressed other of history’. Such an expression is not to be found in
de Certeau’s (1986, 219) work, although White agrees with the French scholar’s
intentions when the latter writes: ‘In order to grant legitimacy to the fiction that haunts
the field of historiography, we must “first” recognize the repressed, which takes the
form of “literature”, within the discourse that is legitimated as scientific’.
8. Muchowski claims drawing inspiration from Roland Barthes’s essay ‘Writing and the
Novel’ in which Barthes reflects upon using the simple past tense or third person as
characteristics of novel writing. Such representational strategy is also proper to
history. It creates an effect of familiarity and credibility of represented events and at
the same time it gives readers a sense of security as it shows the past as somehow
closed and well defined. ‘The narrative past is therefore a part of a security system for
Belles-Lettres’ – Barthes (1981, 32) writes.
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Notes on contributor
Ewa Domanska is Associate Professor of theory and history of historiography in the
Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poznan, Poland and
Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. Her
teaching and research interests include contemporary theory and history of historiography
and comparative theory of the humanities and social sciences. She is the author of four
books: her recent publications include Existential History. Critical Approach to
Narrativism and Emancipatory Humanities (in Polish, 2012) and History and the
Contemporary Humanities (in Ukrainian, 2012), and she is the editor and co-editor of
many books including: Re-Figuring Hayden White (ed. with Frank Ankersmit and Hans
Kellner, 2009); French Theory in Poland (ed. with Miroslaw Loba, 2010, in Polish);
Theory of Knowledge of the Past and the Contemporary Humanities and Social Sciences
(in Polish, 2010); and History – Today (ed. with Rafal Stobiecki and Tomasz Wislicz,
2014, in Polish).

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