In light of ongoing discussions about the need to rethink the dominant categories of past, present and future in historiography, Fareld argues for the epistemic gains to be made by framing the historical present as polychronic. Such a framing would, she proposes, help us to understand how time is produced socially and materially, and how we can account for several ongoing pasts in the present. It would give us a theoretical framework that would direct our attention to the changing presences of historical objects, rather than to their specific location within an already chronologically determined past. In such a framing, ’historical understanding’ would include also con-temporary histories, that is, histories of the many times present in the objects and phenomena we study.

Portrait of Victoria Fareld. Photo: Sören Andersson / Stockholm University.

The title of the article is ”Framing the polychronic present” and is included in a book called Historical understanding: Past, present, and future, published by Bloomsbury this year: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/historical-understanding-9781350168794/