THE ANTECHAMBER Toward a History of Waiting

HELMUT PUFF

From the 1850s until the midtwentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of political turmoil and war, China nevertheless is the only nation to successfully navigate the twentieth century with its imperial territorial expanse largely intact. In Birth of the Geopolitical Age, Shellen Xiao Wu demonstrates how global examples of frontier settlements refracted through China’s unique history and informed the making of the modern Chinese state. Wu weaves a narrative that moves through time and space, the lives of individuals, and empires’ rise and fall and rebirth, to show how the subsequent reshaping of Chinese geopolitical ambitions in the twentieth century, and the global transformation of frontiers into colonial laboratories, continues to reorder global power dynamics in East Asia and the wider world to this day.

Helmut Puff invites readers to visit societies and spaces of the past through the lens of a particular temporal modality: waiting. From literature, memoirs, manuals, chronicles, visuals, and other documents, Puff presents a history of waiting anchored in antechambers—interior rooms designated and designed for people to linger.

In early modern continental Western Europe, antechambers became standard in the residences of the elites. As a time-space infrastructure these rooms shaped encounters between unequals. By imposing spatial distance and temporal delays, antechambers constituted authority, rank, and power. Puff explores both the logic and the experience of waiting in such formative spaces, showing that time divides as much as it unites, and that far from what people have said about early moderns, they approached living in time with apprehensiveness. Unlike how contemporary society primarily views the temporal dimension, to early modern Europeans time was not an objective force external to the self but something that was tied to acting in time. Divided only by walls and doors, waiters sought out occasions to improve their lot. At other times, they disrupted the scripts accorded them. Situated at the intersection of history, literature, and the history of art and architecture, this wide-ranging study demonstrates that waiting has much to tell us about social and power relations in the past and present.

Helmut Puff is Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages at the University of Michigan. His other books include Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland (2003) as well as Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (2014).

SEPTEMBER 2023 320 pages | 6 x 9

16 halftones, 1 map

Paper $32.00 (£27.99) SDT 9781503636842

Cloth $95.00 (£82.00) SDT 9781503636415 eBook 9781503636859

History

Cultural Memory In The Present

OCTOBER 2023 264 pages | 6 x 9

22 halftones, 1 map

Paper $30.00 (£25.99) SDT 9781503637023

Cloth $90.00 (£78.00) SDT 9781503635418 eBook 9781503637030

History