Historical Crisis and Paranoid Emplotment: The Discursive Structure of Racial Panics in Interwar Year Europe

Annual ECS Faber Lecture with Donna V. Jones (University of California, Berkeley)

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This event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow the lecture.

Can paranoia be a mode of historical emplotment? The catastrophe of the First World War produced a genre of pessimistic writing. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was among the most widely read. Still, the era produced dozens similar: Francesco Nitti’s The Decadence of Europe: The Path To Reconstruction (1923), Albert Demangeon’s Le Déclin de l’ Europe (1923), Wythe Williams’ Dusk of Empire: The Decline of Europe And The Rise Of The United States (1937), and Arturo Labriola’s Le Crépuscule de la Civilisation: L’Occident et les peoples de couleur (1936). In all, the coming historical consciousness of the colonized world figures significantly. Drawing on Hayden White’s notion of historical emplotment, this presentation will examine the paranoid structure of such writing.

Funding provided by the Eberhard L. Faber 1915 Memorial Fund in the Humanities Council.

Donna V. Jones is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, Berkeley’s  Department of English. She is the author of The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Vitalism, Négritude, and Modernity, which won the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literature. She works in the fields of critical theory, vitalism, and history and literature. Her current project is The Ambiguous Promise of European Decline: Race and Historical Pessimism in the Interwar Years, an intellectual history of the reactions to the war catastrophe from Europe and the colonized world.