PoMo on the Decline

Sez Gabrielle Spiegel, president of the AHA:

“The whole influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist historiography is receding,” she said. “What is worth saving?”

Where it came from:

By the late 1980s, Ms. Spiegel noted, many historians were calling the impact of postmodernism “an epistemological crisis” that undermined traditional ideas of causation and action in history.

Where it’s going:

That is gone, Ms. Spiegel said. But she was suspicious of what she called “the triumphalist tone” of much of the current trend for transnational history. The focus on the mixture of cultures, and on the movement of peoples, contains an implicit emphasis on the strength of hybrid cultures: how they have brought people together in new identities. But the transnational moment also has its burdens, Ms. Spiegel warned. The common thread in much of the history of transnational movements today is on how culture has been “deterritorialized,” she said. “We need to attend to the sense of loss of culture, too.”

Hard to see where this goes in polisci, except for the whole globalization thing. Migration studies are rare. REP is different.