Review Article: Schama on Obama and American Renewal: Futuring Pre-existing Problem Sets

摘要

Since the transformation of the Soviet Union in 1989, America has been the focus of re-assessments of its national capacities for refolding and renewal. Also, there have been many searching enquiries into the issue of hegemonic decline in its market empire.rnExcavating American history and inscribing key themes in diverse media reveals the commodification of history and its covert role in marketing the nation to its citizens and to the global constituency of its market empire. Simon Schama's marshalling of the lived duration of Americans resonates with contemporary uses of narrative in marketing, but contrasts with the situation at the start of Cold War when geo-historical research programs such as those of Braudel were the possible templates. One common element is the attempt to identify, anticipate and explain transformations. Another element is the post-1945 skepticism in the social sciences about the detachment and utility of historians and their histories. Economists became the new strategic timekeepers in the North Atlantic economies. Now, in the twenty-first century, historians have reformulated their role as strategic timekeepers of the nation's performative capacities and moral order. Economists are being upstaged. Moreover, the historian's notion of agency interrogates the low contextu-alily and rather a-historical research program proposed by Emirbayer and Mische.