Book description
Despite all recent challenges to stage-oriented histories, the idea
of a division between a "medieval" and a "modern"
period has survived, even flourished, in academia. Periodization
and Sovereignty demonstrates that this survival is no innocent
affair. By examining periodization together with the two controversial
categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the
relationship between the constitution of "the Middle Ages"
and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism.
This book's groundbreaking investigation of feudal
historiography finds that the historical formation of
"feudalism" mediated the theorization of sovereignty and a
social contract, even as it provided a rationale for colonialism and
facilitated the disavowal of slavery. Sovereignty is also at the heart
of today's often violent struggles over secular and religious
politics, and Davis traces the relationship between these struggles
and the narrative of "secularization," which grounds itself
in a period divide between a "modern" historical
consciousness and a theologically entrapped "Middle Ages"
incapable of history. This alignment of sovereignty, the secular, and
the conceptualization of historical time, which relies essentially
upon a medieval/modern divide, both underlies and regulates today's
volatile debates over world politics.
The problem of defining the limits of our most fundamental
political concepts cannot be extricated, Davis argues, from the
periodizing operations that constituted them, and that continue today
to obscure the process by which "feudalism" and
"secularization" govern the politics of time.
"An outstanding achievement that shows why medievalists and
postcolonial scholars would benefit from working together. The point
has been made before but Davis's is the most rigorous demonstration so
far of this proposition. She is able to point out where postcolonial
analysis has been seriously impaired by ignorance of European debates
about the medieval (and debates in the so-called medieval period). The
book leaves the reader with an overall impression not only of the
solid and imaginative scholarship on display here but also of an
author who wants to think big and think creatively without sacrificing
any of the rigor or meticulousness of her scholarly
equipment."-Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
Kathleen Davisis the author of Deconstruction and Translation. She
has taught in the Department of English at Princeton University and is
currently on the faculty of the University of Rhode Island.
