Tema 7

Willem Erauw,

Univ.of Ghent, Belgium

ABSTRACT

Writing global history is often perceived as a precarious task or as unscholarly vulgarisation. Reflections on the (im)possibility of writing global history lead us to the theoretical debate on the representation of the past. I want to show that both modernist and postmodernist assumptions in this debate are often based on a naive and mimetic conception of representation. With a more relevant conception of representation, based on aesthetic theory and better fitting historiographical praxis, we could change the attitudes towards the conditions of writing global history in a positive sense, thus leaving epistemological doubts for insights about the aesthetics of narrative representation.