SUMMARY:

Alessandro Stanziani begins his reflections on the interrelationship between the personal experience of diversity and the vision of its scholarly exploration with a vignette of early modern Naples as a vantage point for a worldwide perspective. He illuminates the power and cultural hierarchies and entanglements, economic networks, and multilingualism that contributed to the role of Naples in transregional trade, and he notes the startling selectivity of primary sources used to write the histories of global phenomena, such as in the history of Naples. “How many scholars writing the history of Naples make use of Spanish and Arabic sources?” – Stanziani asks. He posits the need to recognize the hermeneutics of entangled disconnections between people and societies as one of the main goals of history writing, and claims that biographical self-reflection is not an answer to this challenge. The point is illustrated in Stanziani’s own story of growing up in Naples, in a working-class family that spoke the Neapolitan language together with a mixture of Italian. While far from a typical non-European “subaltern” biography, his life was full of the same experiences of multilingualism, social asymmetries, and cultural and spatial dislocations. Assessing the development of global history, Stanziani suggests that we should model solutions for global history on the reality of the world we are living in now. This means not only relativizing Western political, economic, and epistemological hegemony, but shifting the focus toward genealogies of local meanings and models, and real multilingualism. Stanziani calls for a critical approach that cannot be reduced to deconstruction or to superficial references to postmodernism or postcolonial theory. Instead, we need a dialogue between social sciences and humanities (and possibly their synthesis), and a decompartmentalization of “area studies.”