Comment: Generational Turns

One generation goes, another comes, But the earth remains the same forever The turn is dead; long live the turn. Just as early modern Europeans hailed a new king and in the same breath mourned his predecessor, the essays in this forum announce the turn's rebirth as they pronounce its epitaph. The authors offer compelling arguments for rejecting turn talk and the idea of scholarly generations on which it is based. As they observe, turns are often described in an almost religious language of conversion experiences and about-faces. This language reifies what came before and suggests that it has been decisively supplanted by another way of writing and thinking. The authors rightly reject this practice as more apt to foreclose thinking than to stimulate it.1 At the same time, in somewhat contradictory fashion, they suggest that there are troubling developments occurring now in their respective areas of specialization. Wilder observes the formation of a “disciplinary consensus” that aims to blunt the force of innovative work on French imperialism. Cook and Surkis record the declarations by senior scholars that the cultural and linguistic turns are over. Ghosh notes a strand within the new imperial history that seems to ignore postcolonial historiography.