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Critical Noise
Critical Noise is the website of History of the Present’s editorial collective. It offers rigorously argued critical historical and historiographical work that is engaged with politics and ethics. It is open access and the contributions will generally be shorter than those in the journal. The aim is to expand the critical historical network of the journal through a variety of fora, including “Archives of Dissent,” “Critical Nodes in a Discursive Landscape,” and an occasional symposia on new or classic books and articles. Critical Noise and History of the Present, which is published biannually by Duke University Press, are independent of one another but share theoretical and political commitments.
“It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information. Was the noise really a message? Wasn’t it, rather, static, a parasite? A parasite who always has the last word, who produces disorder and who generates a different order.”
— Michel Serres, Parasite
History of the present:
Context
The demand for ‘context’ remains axiomatic across the human sciences, especially since that call for context, as Roy Dilley writes, is “often invoked as part of an analytical strategy which stands in opposition to universalist, formalist or other generalizing tendencies” (6). From this perspective, context provides a needed specificity. Yet across the disciplines, the meaning […]
History of the present:
Truth
It is a truth universally acknowledged that truth is itself in crisis. Commentators and politicians who once bemoaned the rise of “alternative facts” and the proliferation of conspiracy theories now support narratives and news organizations that downplay the genocide unfolding in Gaza. Deepfakes and AI-generated videos—once feared for proliferating “misinformation”—have proven to be a form […]
History of the present:
Revolution
Revolution, which once named the interruption of an order, now designates almost every form of change. Semantically speaking, this is the result of a double movement. On the one hand, the concept of revolution has been reduced to the model of the French Revolution, as if every subsequent revolution, to be successful, had to follow […]
History of the present:
Geo/Epistemes: Dissent
How do we theorize, historicize and imagine dissent amidst the detritus of an extractive comprador-settler global order? How do we speak of geo/epistemes of dissent that rupture our refusals, and yet have that rupture be free and in the interest of freedom? An aleatory montage of the times and spaces of dissent, the cumulative force […]
History of the present:
Speaking Dissent: Palestine
A Conversation Between Sherene Seikaly and Anjali Arondekar Podcast SoundCloud Spotify Apple Podcasts Authors Anjali Arondekar Sherene Seikaly
History of the present:
Histories of the Left between Italy and Sri Lanka 1950–2026
The story—because it is has not yet fully cohered into a “History”—exists in fragments. It lives, thus far, in people; in Facebook posts scrawled in the twilight hours of the morning; in the built environment; and in secret libraries which migrated from Church to neighborhood stall. Nevertheless, select scattered clues from the last half-century are […]
History of the present:
Feminist Anti-Authoritarianism
On February 12, 1983, 43 years ago, under the military dictatorship of Zia ul Haq, women in the city of Lahore, Pakistan, held a nonviolent march and sit-in to protest a prejudicial law of evidence that made women’s testimony in courts worth only half that of men, proposed and eventually passed in a series of […]
History of the present:
A War Over Time
Palestinians and American Indians have been subjected to repeated ethnic cleansing and starvation campaigns, the disruption of their ability to reproduce their societies, and too many genocidal “self-defenses” and annihilating “protective measures” to account for in this short essay. They share the destruction of their archives and heritage sites, and the project to sequester and […]
History of the present:
Excerpt from Between Continents: A Wayfinding Memoir
Floating on my back in the middle of the ocean, I can barely make out the coastline—it looks a lot like scenic 1970s Muqdisho but I can’t be too sure. Here and now drifting so far away from the certainty of land doesn’t worry me in the least, because I am savoring feeling on my […]
History of the present:
Everyday Dissent and the Erotic Power of Queer-Trans Lives in Turkey
Queer-trans-feminist dissents, struggles, and coalitions are urgent and essential to any anti-fascist organizing and any revolutionary claims toward futures of freedom. For longer than a decade now, significant sociopolitical changes have taken place among queer and trans communities in Turkey and around the world. In response, the growing alliances between queer, trans, and feminist movements […]
Submit Your Work
Submissions from all thinkers engaged in critical history will be considered for “Critical Nodes in a Discursive Landscape,” (1000-3000 words); proposals for book symposia on a recently published work that would fit under the broad rubric of critical history are also welcome.
All inquiries and submissions should be directed to Brian Connolly (bconnolly@usf.edu). Material for the Archives of Dissent will be primarily invited; inquiries should be directed to Anjali Arondekar (arondek@ucsc.edu).
For submission of articles to History of the Present, see guidelines at https://read.dukeupress.edu/history-of-the-present/pages/Submission_Guidelines
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Submissions are reviewed by members of the editorial collective. Only selected pieces will be published.