Creat membership Creat membership
Sign in

Forgot password?

Confirm
  • Forgot password?
    Sign Up
  • Confirm
    Sign In
Creat membership Creat membership
Sign in

Forgot password?

Confirm
  • Forgot password?
    Sign Up
  • Confirm
    Sign In
Collection

toTop

If you have any feedback, Please follow the official account to submit feedback.

Turn on your phone and scan

home > search >

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

Author:
Burguera   Mónica  


Journal:
Social History


Issue Date:
2015


Abstract(summary):

I remember the first time I heard about Chris Schmidt-Nowara. It was 1998, probably September. I had just met Geoff Eley, one of my thesis advisors. As we talked about my interest as a new graduate student in a rejuvenated social history, in cultural approaches, and in the analytical framework of the public sphere, he suggested that I read Chris’s thesis. Chris was also one of Geoff’s students and his thesis, which he had defended a few years earlier, became his first book, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874 (1999). Our focus was different. I was interested in women’s history and gender, he had been exploring the complexities of an abolitionist discourse which was produced in the midst of re-elaborated imperial languages and the changing economic and political dynamics of the colonial situation. However, we shared a similar intellectual challenge, the questioning of traditional historical narratives of modern Spain from within the Anglo-American intellectual tradition, which at the turn of the century was facing its own epistemological uncertainties. In 2004 Chris and I explored these questions more fully in a special issue of Social History on Spain (Vol. 29, No. 3), which we co-edited. We proposed a dialogue between traditionally dissociated historiographies of Spain, work produced in Spanish universities and mainly anglophone scholarship, while showing the ways in which rethinking modern Europe from the margins could be a particularly fruitful way of engaging with history’s larger theoretical and methodological debates. Two key themes informed our collection of essays. First, they questioned the explanatory potential of the still deeply and pervasive interrelated ideas around the so-called Black Legend and its modern version, recently coined as the ‘paradigm of backwardness’. It was not—as some critics have pointed out—about neglecting the comparative lagging behind of the Spanish economy, but rather arguing that stagnation alone could not explain the processes of sociopolitical transformation and cultural difference. Second, whether we want to understand the transition to a liberal society, the making of modern nation-states, the diverse sociopolitical nature of dictatorship, or the ways in which gender, race, and national identity cut across modern historical processes, modern Spain as a field of study could best be approached as an unstable crossroads of traditional and more recent research interests. Over time I came to appreciate even more the ways in which Chris enriched our project from the very beginning. In addition to his knowledge and postcolonial sensitivities, he was calm, amiable, and firm in his convictions. As his later work has shown, beginning with The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (2006) , up to his latest co-edited collection of essays, Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (2013), he was always committed to destabilizing old narratives of Spain by bringing the empire to the core of historiographical interests, pointing to truly transnational conceptions of national narratives, while placing race at the heart of that mutual historical interconnectedness between the metropole and its Antillean colonies. He approached the making of modern Spain from within and from without, and in doing so became an important and influential voice not only in Spanish and Latin American studies but in Atlantic studies, more generally. Chris reframed Spanish Atlantic modern history in profound and lasting ways. This task was particularly difficult for an overly self-absorbed Spanish historiography shaped by a Eurocentric complex of backwardness, and incapable of questioning and decentering its own historical narratives until comparatively recently. As a member of the Social History Board, Chris was a helpful, supportive and committed colleague. We worked together, often across great distances, over many years and in this time Chris also edited a special issue of Social History, Caribbean Emancipations (Vol. 36 No. 3), which was published in 2011. Chris was always straightforward, firm, and friendly. I like to think we somehow shared some of the commitments that have shaped Social History from its conception - probably both somewhat indebted to our already blurred Michigan past – welcoming the challenge and debate about social history’s practices, while keeping alive its ideal for a democratic, all-inclusive way of writing it. With Chris's death many of us have lost a friend, a valued colleague and an important voice helping us to make sense of the modern world. He will be very much missed.


Page:
425-426


Similar Literature

Submit Feedback

This function is a member function, members do not limit the number of downloads