Historiography and apocalypse, an intimate relationship?

Abstract

The concept of “apocalypse”, often evoking images of fiery, final judgments and cataclysmic endings, seems firmly situated within theological, indeed Christian, tradition. Recent historiographical literature analyzing the ways in which apocalyptic narratives have been leveraged within religious contexts, especially stories of conquest, has emphasized facets of this role, both rhetorically and logically, in their construction and framing. I investigate several of these, canvassing both long past and more recent examples, in order to unpack the ways in which they highlight the centrality of apocalyptic “technologies” in order to be recognized as historical narratives. Specifically, the discursive and aesthetic constituents of these narratives appear importantly connected to certain teleologies, and their requisite ontologies, emplotted within a framework of prophecy-cum-apocalypse. In this paper, I argue that this relationship is instrumental in order to give meaning to these narratives, as histories. This is a result of an inherent mechanism within that history’s interpretive telos functioning prophetically in support of their methodological and theoretical vantage points. As a result, historical analysis is quite often normatively constrained by the range of possible teli permitted within the boundaries of the discursive spaces inscribed by both the historian and the historical actors in play.