In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.

中文翻译：

---

被遗忘的历史梦想


沃尔特·约翰逊 (Walter Johnson) 在 2003 年的文章《论代理》(On Agency) 中，批评学者们对代理的关注假定了“过去与现在之间的单向贸易”，并将“历史写作视为一种补救模式”。它边缘化了“生活在“自由主义自我观念”的惯例之外的人性。恢复被奴役者的代理权让学者自我感觉更好，但并没有让世界变得更好：“治疗而不是政治”。从二十年的角度回顾这一对社会历史的关键评估，它的批评似乎与当时（和我们这个时代）对代理的使用相关，而不是与二战后非殖民化时代这一概念的最初发明相关。当时，借鉴反殖民思想，自下而上的历史的出现正是为了挑战自由主义的自我观念，并改革过去和现在之间现有的、辉格党的双向贸易。重新审视这一转变提醒我们，“代理”类别所提出的问题在其产生时就已经存在，并且如果不进行重塑学术和大众政治的附属斗争，学术奖学金不可能实现的不仅仅是治疗功能。本文提醒我们，自下而上的历史对建立“过去的现在生活”和挑战个体的自我理想的基本承诺，指出在我们面临由人类主导地位造成的地球危机时，恢复替代性主体性的持续紧迫性。历史和自我的启蒙观念。尽管学院的学术可能无法达到约翰逊想象的政治影响，但它仍然推动了历史内部变革的实际终结。