What Are We Doing? From History to Research

Abstract

This is a proposal for a genealogical project that takes up the more than thirty years of this journal’s print life. I start, then, with Michel Foucault’s explanation of genealogy, or, at least, with his account of what it is not: “Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present [. . .]. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people” (Bouchard 146). So it is with these precepts in mind that I want to argue for a particular kind of critical stocktakingnot just of the journal, but also of the field and of “us.