ABSTRACT
A marked gap in modern European historiography is still women’s history, or gendered historiography. On the other hand, historiography is the least popular and slowest expanding discipline in the otherwise booming European gender studies. Unacceptable today, traditional historiography was based on the concept of self-sufficient, unquestioned universality; the latter masked the lack of “othering” subjects of history. This “lack” is, in fact, the result of various types of manipulation and occlusion of othering subjects, including the commodity of turning a blind eye. Even today, there are a number of serious and comprehensive historical studies that simply do not take account of the largest othering subject—women. Yet, in the time-spaces of entangled histories (histoire croisée), 1 the outcome and the very argumentation of historiographic research do not work epistemologically if gendered history is not engaged. How it is still possible nowadays to write history without taking into account women’s history is not the real topic of this chapter; however, I cannot but notice in passing that the practices of recording and disseminating knowledge about history have not improved greatly since the writing of the first version of this chapter, more than seven years ago: much unashamed androcentric historical/situational passion has been deployed during this year of remembering the beginning of the First World War (2014). In a rather elliptical way—which is also a way to shorten an extensive introduction—my aim in the present chapter, though, is inscribing back. This action is multi-leveled: inscribing back in the blank spots of historical maps, left there as the traces of a clumsy passage of self-centered cultural colonialism, mainly Anglo-American, but also, as the tensions and the lack of knowledge grow, the Russian cultural colonialism; inscribing back on the wrinkled, almost petrified pages of national historiographies; and, inscribing back into the actual scenarios of re-arranging histories according to power-directed demands.
