Despite human geography's sophisticated analyses and overwhelming focus on space, time in its various guises has certainly not been absent in the literature. The same cannot be said for historical geography, which is particularly interesting as its main concern is purportedly with space and place in and across other times. In response, this paper examines the ontology and epistemology of time in “modern” historical geography since the early 2000s and does so in discussion with recent developments in theory and philosophy of history, specifically the notion of ‘new presentism’. An idea which broadly posits that the past and the future do not exist as separate categories but are always projections of specific presents, they exist as the present's own immanent modes. This is achieved by adopting Robert Dodgshon's concept of the ‘specious present’ in order to (1) affirm, albeit on different epistemological grounds, the partiality, situatedness and contingency of historical geographies as well as the embodied and performative nature of archival labour; (2) offer an accessible conceptual tool in thinking about the role of time in the practice of future historical geography research; and finally (3) suggest that thinking historical geography as a practice in and through the ‘specious present’ makes questions of ethics, accountability, and politics of knowledge production both central and inevitable, as opposed to just being examples of “good practice” or worse still, being completely sidestepped by virtue of an imagined spatio-temporal distance between the bygone past and the present moment of research.

中文翻译：

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过去在哪里？历史地理学中的时间


尽管人文地理学有复杂的分析和对空间的极大关注，但各种形式的时间在文献中肯定不缺席。对于历史地理学来说却并非如此，历史地理学特别有趣，因为据称它的主要关注点是其他时间和跨其他时间的空间和地点。作为回应，本文审视了 2000 年代初以来“现代”历史地理学中的时间本体论和认识论，并讨论了历史理论和哲学的最新发展，特别是“新现在主义”的概念。这一观点广泛地认为，过去和未来并不作为单独的类别存在，而是始终是特定现在的投射，它们作为现在自身的内在模式而存在。这是通过采用罗伯特·道奇森的“似是而非的现在”概念来实现的，目的是：（1）尽管认识论基础不同，但肯定历史地理的偏向性、情境性和偶然性以及档案劳动的体现性和表演性； （2）为思考时间在未来历史地理学研究实践中的作用提供一个易于理解的概念工具；最后（3）建议，将历史地理学视为一种在“似是而非的现在”中并通过“似是而非的现在”进行实践的做法，使得道德、责任和知识生产的政治问题成为中心和不可避免的问题，而不仅仅是“良好实践”的例子或更糟糕的是，由于过去和当前研究时刻之间想象的时空距离而被完全回避。