This chapter explores the wider context of Salman Rushdie’s engagement with the process of writing history and how his novels respond to specific cultural and historical moments to reveal the complex public debates around the status of history into which Rushdie intervenes. Because Rushdie studied history at university, it is not surprising that his work is deeply embedded in discussing historical thinking and historiography. This is especially related to the history of colonialism and India’s struggle for independence, as well as notions and experiences of migration. In addition he challenges western conceptions of historiography and revisits the Mughal and medieval Islamicate world in ways that explicitly emphasize connections from Persian texts to European intellectual thought. And in many of his novels, including Midnight’s Children, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence, he consciously plays with how history is produced.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

The chapter argues that the main character in US and European ‘democracy promotion’ in Jordan is neither Jordan nor democracy, nor an imagined Jordanian democracy, but instead desired self-understandings among ‘democracy promoters’ as ‘modern’, ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’, which are juxtaposed in opposition to the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’. Through the examples of external civil society support and youth education initiatives, the chapter demonstrates that the continuous functioning of civil society support (understood as its perpetuation rather than the achievement of its desired objectives) depends on a disregard for the specific context in which it operates and the associated ability to maintain the dominance of an often idealised narrative of supposedly universally valid processes of democratisation over everything considered Jordanian. In contrast to what a common understanding of ‘democracy promotion’ would suggest, it is therefore not the overcoming of differences that is central to its functioning, but largely the exact opposite: that is, their maintenance. In particular, the chapter looks at a USAID-funded and NDI-implemented youth education and participation programme, which the NDI itself considers to be one of its largest and most successful programmes in the region.