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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
5
accentuates the experiences of the “life-world” before they are
totalized and reified into univocal, abstract narrative of national
history. The emphasis on the present seeks to expand the writing
of history to incorporate multiple temporalities, including national
history and the everyday, “where the former . . . [secured] the
identity of each moment (periodization and stages in a trajectory),
while the latter saw in the present a break with all antecedents and
thus a new way to envision the relationship between the present
and the past” (183).
Harootunian accentuates the present and the everyday as a
site of disruptive potential not only to challenge postcolonial
national narrative, but also to resist historiography energized by
capitalist expansion (2004).
3
Drawing upon Harootunian and
Marxist cultural theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek,
cultural critic Lauren Berlant roots her examination of historical
novels in the concept of anachronism
—
“the overdetermi- nation of
any historical moment by forces that each have their own histories
and histories of relation to each other” (2008: 847). Accordingly,
she pronounces a new mode of historical analysis focusing on
people’s embeddedness in the events and their affective response to
the crisis in everyday life. As Berlant maintains: “Affect works in
the present, and so the ongoing historical present, rather than
being matter for retroactive substantialization, stands here as a
thing being made, lived through, and apprehended” (848). For
Berlant, the historical novel, instead of resorting to linear plotline
and homogeneous temporality, mobilizes anachronism to open up
“a past historical moment,” and “a moment in transition,” to
explore its affective life before it is coded into fixed meaning (847).
Specifically, Berlant pays attention to the crisis in the everyday as
the site of the present in history:
3
In “Shadowing History” and “Remembering the Historical Present,”
Harootunian pronounces the present of history as a kind of anachronism
capable of breaking the historiography sustained by capitalist expansion.