Overview

A daring reassessment of the critical method that reshaped the humanities—and an invitation to imagine new ways of doing history. The genealogical method—a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry. In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference. Provocative and timely, The Genealogy of Genealogy offers both a diagnosis and a vision, challenging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to rethink how we write history and whether our most trusted methods are fit for the futures we seek to build.

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9780226847269

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Reviews

“An evocative work of immanent critique, The Genealogy of Genealogy exposes the epistemic dangers, institutional hierarchies, racist filiation with eugenics, and moral hypocrisies embedded in ‘genealogy’ as critical method. Storm brilliantly foments ‘genealogical anxiety’ in this Foucauldian reader through a powerful call to meet critique with world-building, to recognize contingencies alongside continuities, and to displace genealogy’s hegemony with the urgent ethical and political needs of our present. Storm’s labyrinth is Foucauldian in ethos, fascinating in critical force, and disruptive of moralizing critique.” -- Niki Kasumi Clements, Rice University “Storm has confronted an evasive problem: What are we to do about genealogy once we understand it as a method of inquiry and a social worldview tied to racial hierarchies? His answer is historically and philosophically nuanced but clear about genealogy being used to advance the power of some while imperiling others. It is a book that will leave us talking about the genealogical method again—though this time not as a benign tool but as an orientation that disavows its own history.” -- Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Information

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of science and technology studies at Williams College. He is the author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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